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Microbial Enhanced Oil Recovery
Published in Wael Ahmed Ismail, Jonathan Van Hamme, Hydrocarbon Biotechnology, 2023
S. J. Geetha, Yahya Al-Wahaibi, Saif Al-Bahry, Abdulkadir Elshafie, Ali Al-Bemani, Sanket J. Joshi
With turbulent global economic markets, growing populations, and decreasing conventional oil supplies, MEOR has the potential to improve recovery of light and heavy crude oils. Gaps between understanding microbial growth and metabolism, and controlling these processes for the benefit of the oil industry, stand in the way of large-scale adoption of MEOR. Omics technologies, microfluidics, and mathematical simulations have recently yielded valuable datasets with the potential to begin filling these gaps, but much work remains before MEOR can be reliably implemented as a major oil industry practice. If intellectual property barriers can be reduced, and large multi-national studies can be deployed for building large, quality-controlled public datasets, there is no doubt that MEOR technologies would mature at a much faster rate for the benefit of all.
Bioremediation of Petroleum Hydrocarbons (PHC) using Biosurfactants
Published in R.Z. Sayyed, Microbial Surfactants, 2022
Veeranna Channashettar, Shaili Srivastava, Banwari Lal, Anoop Singh, Dheeraj Rathore
In the petroleum industry, biosurfactants are used for microbial enhanced oil recovery (MEOR). Both strategies viz., ex situ (production of biosurfactant in offsite fermenters and injection into the oil reservoir) and in situ (injected allochthonous microorganisms; and injection of nutrients to stimulate growth of indigenous bacteria) are used for MEOR (Perfumo et al. 2010). MEOR includes use of microorganisms and the exploitation of their metabolic processes to increase production of oil from marginally producing reservoirs. The mechanism responsible for oil release is acidification of the solid phase. Certain microorganisms, such as Bacillus subtilis, Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Torulopsis bombicola have been reported to utilize crude oil and hydrocarbons as sole carbon sources and can be used for oil spill cleanups (Das and Mukherjee 2007).
Microbial Surfactants
Published in Vivek Kumar, Rhizomicrobiome Dynamics in Bioremediation, 2021
Pooja Shivanand, Nur Bazilah Afifah Binti Matussin, Lee Hoon Lim
MEOR is a tertiary recovery process that involves microorganisms or their metabolic end products to recover residual oil entrapped in mature oil fields. The low permeability of some reservoirs and high viscosity of oil lead to poor oil recovery. Additionally, high capillary forces retaining the oil in the reservoir rock can lead to high interfacial tension between water and oil. According to a study, approximately 30% of oil can be recovered using current enhanced oil recovery processes, such as water flooding, pressurization and chemical surfactants, which are energy and cost intensive. As a result, biosurfactants are widely studied for recovering oil cost effectively because biosurfactants can function in a wide range of temperatures, unlike chemical surfactants (Banat 1995). The two different processes in MEOR include in situ and ex situ processes. In situ is where indigenous microorganisms producing biosurfactants are stimulated and injected into the reservoir. On the other hand, ex situ is when laboratory-produced biosurfactants are injected into the reservoir (El-Sheshtawy et al. 2015).
Analyzing the microbial factors affecting microbial enhanced oil recovery through numerical simulation study
Published in Energy Sources, Part A: Recovery, Utilization, and Environmental Effects, 2022
Floriane Youzan, Kyung Jae Lee
We observe that the cumulative aqueous production in the case with MEOR is higher than that of the case without MEOR from the beginning to the end of the simulation. The cumulative aqueous phase production for the case without MEOR approaches 2,960 STB, while the production for the case with MEOR approaches 4,802 STB. Furthermore, the cumulative oil production for the case with MEOR is higher than the case without MEOR. Overall, it approaches 41,648 STB for the case without MEOR, while the case with MEOR approaches 49,639 STB. Overall, the comparison study between the cases with and without MEOR shows that the MEOR case gives better results in terms of production rate and cumulative production of oil, as showing the 20% improvement of oil production, which is in accordance with multiple published data of MEOR application studies and demonstrates the reliability of our simulator and reservoir model (Ansah 2019; Lacerda, Priimenko, and Pires 2012; Portwood 1995; Shabani-Afrapoli et al. 2012; Zahner et al. 2012, 2011).
Developments in in-situ microbial enhanced oil recovery in Shengli oilfield
Published in Energy Sources, Part A: Recovery, Utilization, and Environmental Effects, 2022
Chun’An Du, Yongting Song, Zhi Yao, Weili Su, Ge Zhang, Xiaoling Wu
MEOR can be divided into ex-situ and in-situ methods according to the different sources of bacteria(Patel et al. 2015). In ex-situ methods, strains which are specific to reservoir conditions are screened and fermented outside the well to produce the desired metabolites that are injected into the reservoirs to enhance recovery(Zheng et al. 2012). The ex-situ method of MEOR confronts many hurdles, such as the high cost of bioproducts, the difficulties of acclimating laboratory microbial strains to harsh reservoir conditions, and out-competing indigenous species already in the reservoir(Patel et al. 2015). The in-situ method has developed rapidly in recent years. In in-situ MEOR operations, a specific nutrient activator is injected into reservoirs to selectively stimulate the desired microorganisms (Youssef et al. 2013). These microorganisms can produce a variety of bioproducts such as biosurfactants(Ibrahim et al. 2013), biopolymers(Sen 2008), emulsifiers, acids, gases and solvents which contribute to the enhancement of oil recovery(Harner et al. 2011).
Application of Bacillus subtilis strain for microbial-enhanced oil recovery
Published in International Journal of Green Energy, 2019
Haiyan Xu, Huanjiang Wang, Weihong Jia, Sili Ren, Jinqing Wang
Conventional oil production technologies, including the secondary and tertiary enhanced oil recovery (EOR), can only recover about one-third of the oil in the reservoir, and there is still much residual oil trapped in the rock pores (Kong, Bao, and Jiang 2009). Hence, various physical and chemical processes have been developed to improve the oil recovery (Bera and Belhaj 2016; Eftekhari, Farajzadeh, and Hajibeygi 2016; Li and Bi 2010; Manrique and Alvarado 2010; Moghaddam, Bahramian, and Fakhroueian 2015). Microbial-enhanced oil recovery (MEOR) is one of the tertiary EOR, which is a simple process of utilizing microorganisms and their bio-products to increase the oil production (Al-Sulaimani, Al-Wahaibi, and Al-Bahry 2011; Belyaev, Borzenkov, and Nazina 2004; Lazar, Petrisor, and Yen 2007; Mejía, Gaytán, and Hernández-Gama 2015; Zhao, Shi, and Cui 2017). Compared with the chemical or physical enhanced oil recovery, the MEOR offers a non-hazardous and economically viable strategy (Al-Sulaimani, Al-Wahaibi, and Al-Bahry 2011a; Zhang, She, and Banat 2014). In addition, the microorganisms can be produced from renewable raw materials and have equivalent emulsification properties (Gao and Zekri 2011; Zhao, Shi, and Cui 2017). Therefore, MEOR has been considered as a potential technology with advantages of low cost, low toxicity, biodegradability, and higher environmental compatibility.