Kinetic and thermodynamic behavior of the biodegradation of waxy crude oil using Bacillus subtilis

The present work investigates the reaction kinetics of biodegradation of waxy crude oil using Bacillus subtilis YB7, a thermophilic organism. Mathematical modeling of the reaction kinetics of microbial growth together with biosurfactant production and hydrocarbon substrate utilization have been attempted. Although various models, such as Monod's, Logistic, Tessier and Contois were investigated for substrate degradation and biomass production, and compared with the experimental studies, none of them could accurately predict the biosurfactant production in the presence of waxy crude oil. In this study, a new model, which is an extension of Monod's equation, has been developed to predict the observed values of biosurfactant production along with substrate degradation and biomass production in the presence of waxy crude oil satisfactorily. The proposed model has also been tested with various experimental studies carried out in the literature. The proposed model is observed to provide satisfactory model predictions when compared to other models available in literature. This shows that the proposed model can be used to study the reaction kinetics of all types of biodegradation studies to find the optimum parameters for maximum possible biodegradation of hydrocarbon substrates and production of biosurfactant. The positive values of activation energy observed in the study indicates that the process of biodegradation is an endothermic process. The negative values of entropy indicates that the reacting molecule underwent an internal rearrangement to give the activated complex, without a change in the number of molecules. It is believed that this study will be suitable for possible model development for biodegradation of hydrocarbons for oil recovery applications or bioremediation methods.