Economics and Valuation Of Bioaugmentation

This chapter reviews the costs and benefits of bioaugmentation for treating chlorinated ethenes in groundwater. Detailed cost estimates are provided for a range of template site scenarios to provide practitioners a first estimate of the expected overall costs and the specific cost items involved. In most cases, bioaugmentation represents a small fraction of the total costs of an enhanced in situ bioremediation (EISB) remedy. The additional costs for bioaugmentation typically represent less than 3% of the total costs. The potential economic benefits of bioaugmentation include: (1) reduction in the time required to achieve complete dechlorination of chlorinated solvents (or complete degradation of other target compounds), thereby reducing both the monitoring costs and the overall costs for the electron donor (or capturing more of the value of the electron donor initially injected); (2) reduction in regulatory oversight by achieving treatment objectives sooner; (3) reduction in the time required to return the groundwater to beneficial use by achieving treatment goals in a shorter period of time; and (4) ability to apply EISB at sites where this approach would otherwise not be effective and where other more expensive approaches would be required.