Gibbs calls oil-eating microbes ‘very good news’ for the Gulf

Hard-working bacteria could bolster controversial White House claims that most of the oil that spewed from BP’s ruptured well is no longer in the Gulf of Mexico.

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs, via Twitter, on Tuesday called a new scientific study on natural degradation of oil plumes “some very good news for the Gulf of Mexico.”

Gibbs linked to a Washington Post account of a study in the journal Science about bacteria that are devouring undersea oil.

An Obama administration report earlier in August concluded that 75 percent of the oil in the Gulf has been skimmed, burned, captured, dissolved or dispersed. But the conclusion has come under fire from some scientists and environmentalists, who called the finding too rosy.

Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.), a senior member of the Energy and Commerce Committee and generally a White House ally, said he was skeptical of the data last week and accused to the administration of taking too long to release technical documentation.

“I think that the government, when they released those numbers, should have released their work with it so there could be a fuller understanding of the formulas, the algorithms, of the assumptions which were used in coming to that conclusion,” he said on C-SPAN last Thursday, citing a need to “understand fully what assumptions they made and whether or not they may have been over-optimistic.”

Here’s the Post on Tuesday:

The Gulf of Mexico ecosystem was ready and waiting for something like the Deepwater Horizon blowout, and seems to have made the most of it, a new scientific study suggests.

Petroleum-eating bacteria — which had dined for eons on oil seeping naturally through the sea floor — proliferated in the cloud of oil that drifted underwater for months after the April 20 accident. They not only outcompeted fellow microbes, they each ramped up their own internal metabolic machinery to digest the oil as efficiently as possible.

The result was a nature-made cleanup crew capable of reducing the amount of oil in the undersea “plume” by half about every three days, according to research published online Tuesday by the journal Science.

The findings, by a team of scientists led by Terry C. Hazen of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, in California, help explain one of the biggest mysteries of the disaster — where has all the oil gone?