Machine learning-aided causal inference for unraveling chemical dispersant and salinity effects on crude oil biodegradation

[Display omitted] •First time machine learning-aided causal inference is used in biodegradation field.•Dispersant can override oil biodegradation barriers under hyper salinities.•A weighted DAG revealing nine causal links to oil biodegradation.•Dispersant addition primarily enriched cell abundance f...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Bioresource technology 2022-02, Vol.345, p.126468-126468, Article 126468
Main Authors: Cao, Yiqi, Kang, Qiao, Zhang, Baiyu, Zhu, Zhiwen, Dong, Guihua, Cai, Qinhong, Lee, Kenneth, Chen, Bing
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Biodegradation, Environmental
Causal inference
Corexit
Lipids
Machine Learning
Oil biodegradation
Petroleum
Petroleum Pollution
Salinity
Surface-Active Agents
Water Pollutants, Chemical - analysis
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Summary:[Display omitted] •First time machine learning-aided causal inference is used in biodegradation field.•Dispersant can override oil biodegradation barriers under hyper salinities.•A weighted DAG revealing nine causal links to oil biodegradation.•Dispersant addition primarily enriched cell abundance for oil biodegradation.•Increasing salinity is overall beneficial for dispersant usage. Chemical dispersants have been widely applied to tackle oil spills, but their effects on oil biodegradation in global aquatic systems with different salinities are not well understood. Here, both experiments and advanced machine learning-aided causal inference analysis were applied to evaluate related processes. A halotolerant oil-degrading and biosurfactant-producing species was selected and characterized within the salinity of 0–70 g/L NaCl. Notably, dispersant addition can relieve the biodegradation barriers caused by high salinities. To navigate the causal relationships behind the experimental data, a structural causal model to quantitatively estimate the strength of causal links among salinity, dispersant addition, cell abundance, biosurfactant productivity and oil biodegradation was built. The estimated causal effects were integrated into a weighted directed acyclic graph, which showed that overall positive effects of dispersant addition on oil biodegradation was mainly through the enrichment of cell abundance. These findings can benefit decision-making prior dispersant application under different saline environments.
ISSN:0960-8524
1873-2976
DOI:10.1016/j.biortech.2021.126468