News from the Oklahoma Corporation Commission

Matt Skinner, Public Information Officer

August 9, 2000

(OKLAHOMA CITY) - Environmental analysts at the Oklahoma Corporation Commission are working to shed more light on Mother Earth’s seemingly mysterious ability to rid herself of some of the pollution caused by fuel spills.

After years of overseeing and monitoring clean-up efforts of sites where soil and groundwater has become polluted with gasoline or diesel fuel, the Technical Department of the Commission’s Petroleum Storage Tank Division has amassed a huge amount of data. Using a statistical formula refined in-house, analysts are hoping to come up with some answers to questions that have thus far been unanswerable. The initial phase of the process is expected to take at least two years.

"The earth’s ability to eventually render gasoline or diesel fuel into something harmless is called natural attenuation," said Project Environmental Analyst Supervisor Neil Garrett. "What we want to do is analyze the data in hopes of developing information that will tell us when we can walk away from a site knowing the natural process will do the remaining work, and that the site will not pose a future threat to, for example, a homeowner planning to dig a water well in the area."

Leonard Billingsley, Project Environmental Analyst, compares the process to a hungry teenager. "There are types of bacteria that form naturally in the presence of such things as a gasoline spill, and under the proper conditions, devour the fuel. It is rather like studying conditions in which a teenager is living in a house, and Twinkies are disappearing from the kitchen cabinet," he said. "We know who is doing the eating, but we want to know how fast he is eating them, and under what conditions. Does the type of cabinet they are stored in make a difference? Does it vary from house to house? If so, how and why?"

Project Environmental Analyst Frank Vernon said, "We hope the project will result in the development of an assessment tool which will give those responsible for the clean-up of a given site the means to know the site’s potential for natural attenuation, how long it will take, and if and how man should help the process along."

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