Microorganisms could help increase oil production

By Roger Highfield, Science Editor
Last Updated: 6:01pm GMT 12/12/2007

A way to harness microorganisms to wring up to 10 per cent more energy out of much of the world’s oil reserves is unveiled today by a British led team. The world has estimated oil reserves of about 3,000 billion (three trillion) barrels of which between one third and two thirds have been exploited and, given we consume around 30 billion barrels each year, there are worries that the planet’s supply of fossil fuel will be exhausted within decades.
Now oil companies are to test a proposal to use microbes to help extract methane from existing reserves and also from deposits of degraded, heavy oil deposits, some of which are in the form of “tar sands”, of which there are another six trillion barrels.
Although the team that reports the breakthrough is reluctant to speculate on how much more the world’s supply of fossil fuels can now be exploited, given the uncertainties over how well the process will work and the state of the world’s reserves, it believes that the implications are “highly significant.”
There are many known examples of these reserves, where the oil has been broken down into thick and sulphurous tar by bacteria, of which oil companies are only able to harness around 17 per cent using costly and polluting processes – such as injecting steam – to loosen the tar-like bitumen so it flows into wells and can be pumped to the surface.
But today, in the journal Nature, a team reports that it has found how oil is being broken down in these and traditional reservoirs.
If encouraged to accelerate, this naturally occurring mechanism could offer a route to economic production of up to ten per cent of this difficult-to-recover energy from heavy oil/oil sands in the form of clean-burning natural gas, leaving hard-to-handle bitumen and contaminants deep underground.
And they could, in theory at least, wring another ten per cent out of conventional reserves.
The advance comes because the team has found that crude oil in oil deposits around the world are naturally broken down by microbes in the reservoir, so long as it is not hotter than about 80ºC, a find that could revolutionise production and new ways to dispose of greenhouse gases.
Understanding how crude oil biodegrades into methane, or natural gas, opens the door to being able to stimulate them with fertiliser to produce more methane, and more quickly, and recover it directly from deeply buried oil sands deposits, says Prof Steve Larter, a Briton working at Calgary University, Canada. There may also be some hydrogen produced as well, depending on the conditions and bugs in the reservoir.
“The main thing is you’d be recovering a much cleaner fuel,” says Prof Larter, “Methane is, per energy unit, a much lower carbon dioxide emitter than bitumen. Also, you wouldn’t need all the upgrading facilities and piping on the surface.”
Working with Prof Ian Head and Martin Jones from University of Newcastle and Norsk Hydro Oil & Energy, Norway, the new understanding offers the potential of ‘feeding’ the microbes and rapidly accelerating the breaking down of the oil into methane. “It is likely there will be field tests by 2009,” said Prof Larter.
“Instead of 10 million years, we want to do it 10 years,” Prof Larter says. “We think it’s possible. We can do it in the laboratory. The question is: can we do it in a reservoir?” If it is possible, it would release “a very substantial amount of energy. It is a potential game changer.”
Prof Head said that the microbes are known as anaerobes – and those that inhabit subterranean environments, in total, weigh as much as the world’s plants and can survive and thrive in the absence of oxygen.
The degraded oils are denser ‘heavy oils’ often found in the form of tar sands. Well known examples include those in Athabasca, Canada, and the Orinoco tar sands in Venezuela. In UK waters, examples include the North Sea Alba field and the Clair field West of Shetland.

Advantages with this process:

Little or no water use

75% less carbon emission then the oil current oil sands production

No tailings

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2007/12/12/scioil112.xml

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1938751/posts

Getting usable fuel out of the heavy oil of Canada’s tar fields takes a lot of energy.

Ian M. Head

Researchers have worked out how natural bacteria deep within the Earth break down crude oil and produce methane. This knowledge could help with projects to encourage these bacteria to covert more oil, faster. And it could point towards a way to produce hydrogen – an even cleaner fuel – by using these natural fuel-processing plants.

Microbes living on the crude oil in petroleum reservoirs usually start by biodegrading the simpler oil fractions, leaving behind a sticky residue called ‘heavy oil’. They will then start breaking down this heavier substance too, all the while producing methane as a product.

There are around six trillion barrels of heavy oil across the globe, lurking beneath the Earth’s surface, and it causes headaches for oil companies. “To get heavy oil out you’ve basically got to melt it,” says Steve Larter, a petroleum geochemist at the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada. This means using energy to produce steam to extract the gunk, he says. “It’s like turning gold into lead.” Only 17% of the oil can usually be recovered.
Methane gas, on the other hand, simply rises to the surface. But it has been unclear how methane is produced by microbes in heavy-oil fields.

The first type of bacteria to attack crude oil can break down the long-chain hydrocarbons into acetic acid, carbon dioxide and hydrogen. In the second step of biodegradation, one set of microbes can turn acetic acid to methane, and another set acts on carbon dioxide and hydrogen to produce methane.

The bacterial way

To work out which process dominates in an oil field, Larter and his colleagues, recreated methanogenesis in the lab. They sealed different samples of oil from the Gullfaks field in the North Sea in glass jars, and watched them over a couple of years. They analysed the isotopic ratios of the methane produced and compared that to the methane produced by the actual oil field, and discovered that in the field the hydrogen route dominates. They think this to be true of all heavy oil fields.
“Why not just speed up the natural process by lobbing in some fertilizer?”

Steve Larter

Larter and his team have been working with oil companies to try and take advantage of their new-found knowledge. The micro-organisms in the subsurface reservoirs have plenty to break down, but not enough key nutrients such as phosphorous and trace elements. This is why the bacteria take so long to break down the oil. To recover more energy from the oilfields, more efficiently, Larter suggests encouraging the bacteria to biodegrade the oil more quickly and then collect the methane they produce. “We’ve got a process that naturally turns oil into natural gas,” he says. “Why not just speed up the natural process by lobbing in some fertilizer?”

Larter estimates that methane recovery could convert at least 20% of the heavy oil to methane. His team is hoping to run some field tests in 2009.

Gas collectors

The practicalities of such a methane-recovery scheme, however, are not straightforward. “How would you ever collect the methane?” asks Robert Burruss, a geologist at the US Geological Survey.
Should the problem of gas collection be solved, Larter’s team and Burruss both advocate an even more ambitious goal than collecting methane. “If you could stop the [hydrogen-using] methanogens, and speed up the other guys [the acetic acid-processing bacteria], you could get gas enriched in molecular hydrogen.” Hydrogen has long been touted as a clean fuel.
To get this to work will take a lot of extra research to understand how to manipulate the bacterial process, says Larter.
Burruss thinks an additional scheme might have merit: “perhaps CO2 could be added from an external source to be converted to methane,” he says. “If that could be done at the scale of a large depleted oil reservoir, then one could inject CO2, have the bacteria make methane, and have a renewable source of natural gas. That could be an interesting new aspect of geological sequestration of CO2.”

NORVAL SCOTT

From Friday’s Globe and Mail

July 3, 2008 at 8:16 PM EDT

In its race to secure its energy supply, India is taking a new look at the oil sands.

State-owned Indian energy companies are looking to invest at least $2.5-billion (U.S.) and as much as $10-billion in Alberta’s oil sands as part of a national strategy aimed at fuelling India’s fast-growing and energy-hungry economy.
While they are technologically and environmentally challenging to develop, the oil sands are also one of the few remaining places in the world where companies can still acquire vast reserves of crude. For energy-poor, oil-thirsty India, the price may be starting to look better.

“In times to come, when we know that a resource base for oil and gas is drying up everywhere and the prices going up so high, this production from tar sands is a good commercial proposition,” Mr. Sharma said.

India’s economy is growing quickly, at about 9 per cent a year, as the country develops its manufacturing and service industries. However, energy is a huge concern; India’s 2008 oil consumption is expected to be about 100,000 barrels a day greater than in 2007, but the country has little in the way of domestic oil and natural gas.

Consequently, finding new oil supply sources is a priority if the country’s boom is to be maintained. India’s Oil Secretary, M.S. Srinivasan, told the Madrid conference that the companies are looking to pick up holdings rather than buy foreign firms, and are looking to invest between $2-billion and $2.5-billion.

As I said before China and India will want this Dirty oil if USA doesn’t want it.

Tankers are sent all over the world depending who wants to pay for its charter. Demand for oil thoughout the world is going up and the simple fact is that most of the know oil for Canada will be produce from the oil sands. Conventional oil supplies in Canada are declining expontentially.

Oil sand extraction is getting better with technology.
Petrobank use a process called THAI™ technology

THAI™ is a evolutionary new combustion process, that combines a vertical air injection well with a horizontal production well. During the process a combustion front is created where part of the oil in the reservoir is burned, generating heat which reduces the viscosity of the oil allowing it to flow by gravity to the horizontal production well. The combustion front sweeps the oil from the toe to the heel of the horizontal producing well recovering an estimated 80 percent of the original oil-in-place while partially upgrading the crude oil in-situ.
Lower environmental impact

-Negligible fresh water use
-50 percent less greenhouse gas emissions
-Smaller surface footprint and easier reclamation

Then their is TITANIUM CORPORATION INC.

TITANIUM CORPORATION is developing process technology to recover bitumen and titanium and zircon minerals from mined oil sand tailings in Fort McMurray,

Technology from these two canadian companies to help reshape the oil sand business to a better more environmental direction.

Another Canadian company that has excellent technology that will help the mining sector is:BIOTEQ ENVIRONMENTAL TECHNOLOGIES

BIOTEQ ENVIRONMENTAL TECHNOLOGIES INC. finances, builds, owns, and operates water treatment plants that remove metals and sulphate from contaminated water, primarily in the mining industry. The company’s technologies produce saleable metals and clean water that can be discharged to the environment.