Аннотация:The article is devoted to the currently relevant issue of cleaning up bottom sediments of water bodies polluted with hydrocarbons as a result of accidental leakage of oil and oil products or oil spills during routine operations of oil production. One of the promising ways of their recovery is the geotube technology recently introduced in Russia, which involves removing bottom sediments from the site of pollution with their subsequent dehydration in geocontainers and cleaning up the soil quality to the established standards. Geocontainers are made of a special fabric, capable for transmitting water with the dissolved substances with safely retaining solid particles of various sizes. The results of a case study of using of geocontainer technology for remediation of bottom sediments of three lakes heavily contaminated with oil in Western Siberia, Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug - Ugra (Nizhnevartovsk) are presented. In 2013, forty-four geotubes were filled up with pulp from the bottom sediments of three lakes, then placed on an oil well platform and left for two years. After that, samples from 14 geotubes were randomly selected and tested for changes in physicochemical properties, biological activity, and phytotoxicity compared to the initial oil-polluted samples. A significant decrease was found in the concentration of total petroleum hydrocarbons, i.e. by 81–98%. Purified soils from geotubes contained a noticeable amount of oil-oxidizing bacteria, heterotrophic and autotrophic microorganisms, and exhibited high biological activity without acute phytotoxicity. The proposed technology is characterized by high efficiency, simplicity and environmental friendliness and can compete with the known cleaning procedures used for the same purposes.
