re: #469 tradewind

I’ve been wondering about that, too. I know that microbes are actually on the market for munching garage floor oil and the like. All I could find from a quick search are these:

An Alaskan feast for oil-eating microbes.

Although treated beaches whitened more quickly than untreated ones, suggesting that microbial cleaning occurred faster there, researchers were unable to determine exactly how much oil had disappeared. Complicating the problem was the fact that all beaches experienced changes in oil composition, including natural weathering (loss of volatile constituents) and some microbial breakdown. Differences in the initial amount of oil present and the type of beach also made the standard technique of comparing weights of treated and untreated beach material all but useless here. Finally, researchers could not tell how well the bacteria had degraded the more complex and potentially toxic compounds within crude oil, such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs)

Gulf Oil Spill is Testing Ground for Future Cleanup Tech

But other long-touted measures, such as oil-eating microbes, however, are not yet ready to fight large spills.