At The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) laboratory in central New Delhi, India, banks of hi-tech machines work around the clock churning out 20 tonnes of microbes every night.

The organisms, which are packaged in powder form, are wrapped in polyethylene bags to be shipped to Kuwait in temperature-controlled containers. Once in Kuwait, they are spread across large swathes of the desert, where they gorge themselves on spilled crude oil until they die, either from the toxicity of the oil or because they have consumed all of the nutrients they need to survive.

There isn’t a single company in the world that has ever attempted a remediation scheme such as this one

Krishna Vangala, Kuwait Oil Company

TERI is one of three firms currently testing out a variety of experimental oil cleaning techniques in Kuwait, in the hope of winning the confidence of state-owned Kuwait Oil Company (KOC), which is planning to spend $2bn over the coming 15 years to clean up land contaminated in the latter stages of the 1990 Gulf War.

Toxic wasteland

More than two decades after the war, much of Kuwait’s desert remains a toxic wasteland, still polluted by the uncontrolled flows of oil that were unleashed by Iraqi troops in the final stages of the conflict.

More than 600 oil wells were blown up by the retreating Iraqi army, with some of the fires continuing to burn for up to 10 months before being extinguished. The sabotage resulted in the contamination of more than 40 million tonnes of Kuwait’s soil, across an area of more than 3,000 hectares.

Soon after the war’s end, the UN ordered Baghdad to pay war reparations of $2.9bn to Kuwait for environmental damage, but due to the sheer scale of the crisis, coupled with the technical challenge posed by the clean-up, progress on the project to mop up the contamination has been slower than hoped for.

Kuwait has yet to define how the clean-up operation will be packaged and tendered, and it is also undecided on the cleaning technologies that should be employed. Originally, the government planned to landfill all of the soil with contamination levels above 18 per cent, but KOC studies found that the 26 million cubic metres of this highly contaminated material would have required the development of 16 large landfills to contain it all.

“Kuwait is a small country where land is at a premium,” says Graham Kenny of UK contractor Amec, which is working with KOC on its remediation plans. “KOC is worried a large number of toxic landfills could cause a legacy problem.”

KOC’s preferred solution is to deploy the latest biotechnologies to wash the highly contaminated soil, which the firm hopes will reduce the landfills required to only five or six sites. The plan to use technology to clean the soil is ambitious. There have been very little in the way of soil remediation schemes of this nature in the Middle East, and none on such a large scale.

“This isn’t like picking a contractor for a multibillion-dollar construction project, where there are several experienced firms to choose from,” says Krishna Vangala, part of KOC’s soil remediation team. “There isn’t a single company in the world that has ever attempted a remediation scheme such as this one.”

Making the soil-cleansing process even more challenging, this oil spill is unlike others that occur in normal commercial operations. The oil is more than 20 years old and varies in consistency. In some places, the spilled crude has combined with soot from the fires, forming a rock-hard layer over the surface of the desert that has been dubbed “tarcrete”. Elsewhere, there are lakes of sticky sludge and, because billions of gallons of seawater were used to put out the fires, concentrated salt deposits remain. 

There are also abandoned munitions on the beaches and unexploded ordnance in the oil lakes. “Although official minefields have been cleared, there are still munitions being found in areas that are allegedly clear,” says Kenny. “These are now old, decaying and unstable.”

Testing technology

Currently, the three firms demonstrating their technologies in test contracts are TERI, Spain’s Hera and South Korea’s GS Engineering & Construction. The three deals are worth a total of about $200m and involve tackling pits that were used to store effluent oil and water from before the Gulf war. As these pits were already polluted before the conflict, the contracts will not be financed by the war reparations fund.

Among the techniques the firms are employing are soil washing, a mechanical process that uses water to remove pollutants; thermal desorption, a technique that uses heat to separate the oil from the soil; and bioremediation, which deploys microbes to consume the pollutants.

Although the various cleaning processes promise to reduce the need for landfill, they also throw up new problems. Soil washing is a relatively low-cost treatment, but requires large quantities of water, a commodity that is in short supply in Kuwait’s deserts, and may require aquifers to be tapped if it is to be deployed on a large scale. It is also likely to create large quantities of contaminated wastewater.

Bioremediation needs little water or energy, but it too poses its own challenges. While specialist microbes have been used to clean up oil spills in the past, no one has ever used them in a climate as harsh as Kuwait’s deserts.

The high temperatures, the toxicity of the contaminants, the lack of nutrients and high salinity levels mean microbes taken from other environments cannot survive, according to Banwari Lal, the director of TERI’s environmental and industrial biotechnology division.

It took TERI four years, from 2001 until 2004, to create its cocktail of indigenous microbes. The institute used its 200 research and development employees to create a bank of microbes collected from contaminated soil in Kuwait. They then screened them to find organisms that could rapidly break down the oil and operate effectively in desert conditions, and these microbes were cultured in the laboratory. “Every week we send two containers,” says Lal. “Day and night we are producing these microbes, like a factory.”

In low doses, the microbes can clean soil with oil contamination of up to 2.5 per cent, and in high doses, they can be used to clean soil with 5 per cent contamination, but efficiency is dramatically decreased as the microbes die at an increased rate due to the toxicity of the contaminants. To treat higher levels of contamination, TERI is using thermal desorption, which has the advantage that the crude can be recovered from the soil and returned to KOC.

Although KOC has already seen the technologies used by TERI, GS Engineering, and Hera in action, other companies and technologies are also under consideration to support the project. In December last year, KOC invited more than 50 firms with a variety of different technologies to submit technical proposals for cleaning the desert.

Out of these 50 almost 30 have responded, according to the oil company, and as many as 15 could be given contracts to demonstrate their technology in soil remediation trials over the course of 2015.

KOC took over the clean-up project in 2012 and has made great progress since then. Priority areas have been identified and fast-tracked for clearance, and key studies have been carried out. While the clean-up operation has been given new momentum over the past two years, it is still uncertain on how and when the scheme will be delivered. A decision over which technologies to use has been delayed while consensus is sought on the best process.

Serious setbacks

Adding to concerns about further delays, the three companies currently carrying out the trial contracts have experienced serious setbacks. Problems removing unexploded ordnance from the viscous sludge in the test pits saw TERI take 14 months to clear all of the ordnance from its site, something that was originally slated to take two months.

Companies have also run into problems transporting the thick, sticky oil from the pits, which has proved impossible to pump.

“So far on the project, we have spent less than 2 per cent of the $2bn budget,” says KOC’s Vangala. “It’s very early days. Tremendous consultations are going on within the firm and we are considering a wide range of strategies when it comes to how to take this forward.”