An effective microbiology management strategy is pivotal to avoid biofouling, microbial influenced corrosion (MIC) and reservoir souring in oil production. MIC has often occurred despite the application of biocide chemicals into the affected systems. This is understandable since present biocide efficacy tests are performed mostly on bacterial cultures grown in suspension. Inactivation of stratified biofilms requires higher concentrations of biocide or longer exposure times compared to cells in suspension. Thus, conventional biocide tests may be insufficient to ensure the best possible biocide strategies in industrial systems with biofilm growth. Biofilm activity is monitored by state-of-art Molecular Microbiological Methods and production of specific metabolites. Biocide and chaperone chemicals can be fed to the continuous reactor under conditions similar to the pipeline environment and transient effects from biocide dosage monitored. The set-up has been shown to operate with mixed prokaryotic communities of either methanogens or sulfate-reducers in biofilms. The set-up is intended to support and develop existing mitigation strategies, and enable system operators to optimize biocide management programs by comparing different treatment strategies (e.g., type of biocide, dosage duration, and dosage frequency).
Microbiological growth in offshore oil production facilities results in problems such as biofouling, souring and Microbiologically Influenced Corrosion (MIC), which are of severe economic impact to the industry.1 Microbial growth in pipelines and process systems is controlled by combining physical removal of internal debris with chemical biocide treatment. Selection of efficient antimicrobial reagents and optimization of the chemical dosage program thus comprises a crucial step in obtaining an effective and cost-efficient microbiological management strategy. At present, biocide efficacy is typically evaluated based on planktonic kill studies, in which bacterial cultures are growing as free cells in suspension and surviving cells are quantified using the Serial Dilution technique.2
