Abstract
During the 1980’s, studies initiated to resolve problems due to the activity of sulfate-reducing bacteria in oilfield systems were instrumental in the early recognition of the importance of biofilms in natural environments, the use of radiotracers to measure bacterial activity, the application of molecular techniques to study non-culturable bacteria and the detection of previously unknown Archaea in subsurface aquifers.
Over the past 15 years, however, oilfield microbiology practices have not kept pace with other fields of environmental microbiology research and now the ideas and practices applied in the oilfield lag significantly behind the most recent scientific advances. This is despite the fact that the oil industry is currently attempting to control very diverse and extensive sulfide producing microbial populations by the application of nitrate to bring about a shift in the population dynamics in a process of biological competitive exclusion.
Environmental microbiology is now in the midst of a revolution in the understanding of the marine and subsurface microbial world, much of which is resulting in completely new concepts of the interaction between microbes and the environment and vice versa. These advances must be recognized and wherever possible incorporated into oilfield microbiology technology.
This paper describes how the application of even a few of the recent advances in environmental microbiology offers a huge potential to improve our understanding of control and remediation of sour reservoirs using nitrate treatments.
