Science: Oil Bugs

A modern industry can never be sure what sciences it will need. In a new book, Petroleum Microbiology (Elsevier Press; $9.50), Professor Ernest Beerstecher Jr. of the University of Texas tells how the hard-muscled oil industry is both helped and bedeviled by lowly bacteria. To begin with, the oil itself was originally formed by bacteria out of organic remains sinking to the bottom of shallow seas. Bacteria still live in oil sands deep underground; many kinds of petroleum and oilfield brine are alive with them. One species lives only on the tops of salt domes, the telltale indicators of oil deposits, 1,500 ft. below the surface.

Oil geologists have learned to use bacteria as an aid to exploration, e.g., certain important layers of rock can be identified by the fossil microorganisms imbedded in the strata. Some of these are remains of bacteria that lived freakishly on iron or sulphur compounds; others, still living, get along on petroleum itself. Most common soils contain bacteria that can “eat” hydrocarbons; if oil is spilled on the soil, they multiply enthusiastically, and soon the oil disappears.

Bacteria can even live on paraffin, asphalt and natural gas, says Dr. Beerstecher. Sometimes the ground above an oil pool is greasy with a substance that oil prospectors call “paraffin dirt.” This is mostly the fat-rich bodies of bacteria that prospered for years on trickles of natural gas seeping up through the soil. Dr. Beerstecher believes that bacteria can be trained like truffle hounds to find oil under the ground. His proposal: expose gas-eating bacteria to air taken from below the soil; if they grow, it will prove that the air contains gas and that chances are good that an oil or gas field lies far below.

After a field is found, bacteria prove pesky saboteurs. The drilling mud that oilmen force down the well often contains starch, tannin and other things that bacteria love to work on. So the mud is apt to go sour and spoil like milk left out of the refrigerator. Dr. Beerstecher’s advice: disinfectants to keep the mud sweet and efficient.

Dr. Beerstecher believes that oil-eating bacteria will eventually prove more useful than harmful to man’s operations. He foresees a great industry built on the fermentation of hydrocarbons by specially trained bacteria. Some of them will turn petroleum or natural gas into valuable organic compounds too complicated to be produced by man’s simple chemical processes. Others will graze on hydrocarbons like microscopic cattle. Their harvested bodies, fat and nutritious, will serve as food for man and his larger cattle.