TITLE:
Relationship between Microbial Community Characteristics and Flooding Efficiency in Microbial Enhanced Oil Recovery
AUTHORS:
Gangzheng Sun, Jing Hu, Qiongyao Chen, Zihui Chen, Weidong Wang, Qin Qian, Feng Han, Ling Li, Yuesheng Li
KEYWORDS:
Microbial Enhanced Oil Recovery (MEOR), Nutrient Concentration, Bacterial Concentration, Methanogens, Microbial Activity
JOURNAL NAME:
Advances in Bioscience and Biotechnology,
Vol.13 No.5,
May
30,
2022
ABSTRACT: Microbial enhanced oil recovery (MEOR) is the
research focus in the field of energy development as an environmentally friendly and low cost
technology. MEOR can bes divided
into indigenous microbial oil recovery and exogenous microbial oil recovery. The ultimate goal of indigenous microbial
flooding is to enhance oil recovery via stimulation of specific
indigenous microorganisms by injecting optimal nutrients. For studying the
specific rule to activate the indigenous community during the long-term
injection period, a series of indigenous displacement flooding experiments were
carried out by using the long-core physical simulation test. The experimental
results have shown that the movement of nutrients components (i.e., carbon/nitrogen/phosphorus)
differed from the consumption of them. Moreover, there was a positive
relationship between the nutrients concentration and bacteria concentration
once observed in the produced fluid. And the trend of concentration of acetic acid was consistent with that of
methanogens. When adding same activators, the impacts of selective activators
to stimulate the indigenous microorganisms became worse along with the
injection period, which led to less oil recovery efficiency.