Biodegradation to Bioremediation to Microbial Enhanced Energy Recovery: The Same Questions Different Environments?

From pure culture enrichments and oxygenase initiation of aromatic hydrocarbon biodegradation to anaerobic hydrocarbon reservoirs and microbial communities. This talk will focus on research leading to reservoir scale application of Methanogenically ­Enhanced Energy Recovery [MEER] from “stranded” subsurface hydrocarbon resources. Historically methane production had enormous potential as a sustainable energy source and may still in an evolving alternative energy economy.  It is found in a wide variety of subsurface, anaerobic, hydrocarbon bearing environments.  We know that some coal and oil reservoirs have been “alive” over geologic time frames.  The Powder River Basin has previously been shown to be an active “geobioreactor”, or an area where active in situ methanogenesis is occurring as determined by coal conversion to methane in laboratory experiments, the presence of metabolic intermediates in coalbed methane formation waters, and the capability of the indigenous consortia to convert these metabolites to methane.  Understanding the composition and metabolism of the methanogenic consortia was one of several key steps in commercializing the process of microbial community engineering to achieve a sustained biogenic methane production. The microbes present in these methanogenic consortia were characterized using error-correcting barcode pyrosequencing and the QIIME bioinformatic pipeline. Thousands of spatially discrete and temporally complete field samples were collected and analyzed over a several years.  Bacteria and Archaea specific primers were used to amplify these distinct populations from DNA samples.  This talk will summarize laboratory and field research data collected over 5 years.