Diversity of organisms associated with oil and gas production

Monitoring of microbial populations in oil and gas operations is routinely conducted in order to evaluate the need for and performance of biocides.  Operators utilize a variety of methods designed to determine if bacteria and archaea capable of causing corrosion, fouling, or souring are present in the systems before, during, and after control methods are applied.  The structure and composition of bacterial populations from oil and gas operations was elucidated by 16s gene survey sequencing and patterns of bacterial distribution based on factors including type of operation, geographical location, and microbial problems experienced defined and hundreds of species identified. Information on both the distribution and relative abundance of each type of bacteria was obtained.  Linking species annotation to physiological functions, such as sulfate reduction, iron reduction and acid production provided the best insight into the impact these bacteria have on the systems.  Most species were found in only one, or a very few, of all the samples analyzed and most were present as “low abundance”, eg, not present in greater than 1% of the total population in any sample.  The number of different species considered sulfidogenic, including true sulfate reducing bacteria as well as thiosulfate reducing, sulfur reducing, and peptide fermenting, bacteria was quite high.  This has implications for using alternate detections methods such as qPCR for rapid diagnostics.