ABSTRACT
In spite of the great efforts related to the petroleum consumption reduction, our society remains depending on this resource as an energetic source besides raw material for the production of several commodities. In addition, petroleum is principally carried through long distances, increasing the chances of accidents, mainly on the aquatic environments, as those shown in Figure 1. These accidents involving oil spill produce devastating impacts on the environment, since the lipophilic hydrocarbons of the petroleum make a strong interaction with the similar tissue of the higher organisms. This assimilation produces intoxication and even death. Unfortunately, some of the traditional cleanup process, which involves the use of dispersants and surfactants-–see the reports about the Torrey Canyon (Bellamy et al., 1967) and the Alaska (Bragg et al., 1994) cases-–presents a greater impact to the environment than the spill, since the absorption of the dispersed oil by organisms, leads to a much greater time to the bio recovery of the degraded environment (Barry, 2007).
