Phytoremediation of Soil Contaminated with Petroleum Hydrocarbons: A Review of Recent Literature

Booming anthropogenic activities is the main reason of widespread contamination of soil by petroleum hydrocarbons, resulting in environmental, health and socio-economic concerns. Remediation of contaminated soil has received much attention including phytoremediation which has the advantages of being low cost and technologically uncomplicated. Numerous papers on phytoremediation have been published and this review aims to examine selected studies on phytoremediation in the past five years to deduce the study trend and make recommendations for the way forward. The review shows an increasing number of studies combining phytoremediation with other methods particularly the physical methods such as soil amendment, electrokinetic remediation and surfactant application, as well as bioremediation using fungi and bacteria. There is increasing interest to investigate the synergy of these methods which leads to co-applications of one or more remediation methods with phytoremediation. Such co-applications often yield higher petroleum hydrocarbons removal rates in shorter time. Future studies can also include chemical remediation in the synergistic studies of phytoremediation and other remediation methods. Keywords: Phytoremediation; Bioremediation; Crude oil; PAHs; Petroleum Hydrocarbons