Abstract

The idea of using microbes to increase recovery from oil reservoirs is more than fifty years old. Proponents of microbial enhanced oil recovery (MEOR) have long championed its advantages, but field applications have never lived up to the promise implied by those claims. In the current era of sustained high oil prices and increasing demand for hydrocarbons, operators have renewed their interest in all forms of EOR. Meanwhile, techniques for genomic engineering, metabolic engineering and biotechnology in general have developed rapidly. Can the potential of MEOR – in essence, the possibility of implementing EOR for the same price as a waterflood – be realized this time around?

 

To answer that question, it is instructive to review the reasons for the failure of MEOR in the past. An important lesson from that review is that a multidisciplinary perspective is absolutely necessary for this application. We then consider an example of MEOR that works and has yielded an economic success in the field. Here the lesson is a common one in engineering: simpler processes are more robust. However, efforts to establish a mechanistic understanding of the successful process raise more questions than they answer. These questions turn out to relate to a much broader theme: how life forms have managed to adapt to an extraordinary range of conditions on this planet. Recognizing these issues provides insight into what is feasible and what is improbable for oilfield applications of biotechnology.