A bench-scale investigation of land treatment of soil contaminated with diesel fuel

A bench-scale investigation (soil pan testing) was conducted with the objective of studying degradation rates of diesel contaminated soil (2500 and 10000 ppm by weight of total petroleum hydrocarbons (TPH) to dry weight of soil) under different treatment conditions over a 17 week testing period. The greatest degradation of the diesel contaminated soil was obtained with the addition of nutrients (Co = 10000 ppm of TPH; K=0.19 week−1). ‘k’ for soil not amended with nutrients was 0.07 week−1. The control cell (Co=2500 ppm TPH), with sodium azide (to suppress degradation) was compared with an experimental cell of 2500 ppm initial concentration of TPH without nutrient amendment. The control cell exhibited a relatively low uniform degradation (k = 0.08 week−1) of TPH over the duration of the experiment with reasonable first-order kinetic regression statistics.