ABSTRACT
Soil contamination by petroleum hydrocarbons (PHCs) is currently a major environmental concern due to the negative effects it exerts on quality services of soil ecosystems, groundwater quality, and human and animal lives. In the last few years, bioremediation-based approaches have been developed to recover PHC-contaminated soils as an alternative to physical, chemical, and thermal methods. However, what is known so far about the effectiveness and the mechanisms of action of this technology is mainly based on laboratory studies. Bioremediation experiments showing promising results in the laboratory are not always scaled up to the field scale due to a series of reasons. In this way, the scarce number of field trials using bioremediation to decontaminate PHC-contaminated soils are very useful to know the efficiency of this technology under real conditions. In the present chapter, an overview of the main characteristics of bioremediation technologies such as phytoremediation, bioaugmentation, and biostimulation is given and key studies using these methods to clean up PHC-contaminated soils at field scale are reviewed.
