Enrichment and identification of biosurfactant-producing oil field microbiota utilizing electron acceptors other than oxygen and nitrate

Common operational issues and possible solutions for sustainable biosurfactant production from lignocellulosic feedstock

Surfactants are compounds with high surface activity and emulsifying property. These compounds find application in food, medical, pharmaceutical, and petroleum industries, as well as in agriculture, bioremediation, cleaning, cosmetics, and personal care product formulations. Due to their widespread use and environmental persistence, ensuring biodegradability and sustainability is necessary so as not to harm the environment. Biosurfactants, i.e., surfactants of plant or microbial origin produced from lignocellulosic feedstock, perform better than their petrochemically derived counterparts on the scale of net-carbon-negativity. Although many biosurfactants are commercially available, their high cost of production justifies their application only in expensive pharmaceuticals and cosmetics. Besides, the annual number of new biosurfactant compounds reported is less, compared to that of chemical surfactants. Multiple operational issues persist in the biosurfactant value chain. In this review, we have categorized some of these issues based on their relative position in the value chain - hurdles occurring during planning, upstream processes, production stage, and downstream processes - alongside plausible solutions. Moreover, we have presented the available paths forward for this industry in terms of process development and integrated pretreatment, combining conventional tried-and-tested strategies, such as reactor designing and statistical optimization with cutting-edge technologies including metabolic modeling and artificial intelligence. The development of techno-economically feasible biosurfactant production processes would be instrumental in the complete substitution of petrochemical surfactants, rather than mere supplementation.

Laboratory Investigation of Indigenous Consortia TERIJ-188 for Incremental Oil Recovery

Bacterial Profile modification is an efficient process which brings the alteration in permeability of the porous media of the reservoir by selective plugging which eventually recover the residual oil. It is an advantageous and feasible method for residual oil recovery from high permeability zones of the reservoir. In this study, indigenous bacterial consortia, TERIJ-188 was developed from Gujarat oil fields. TERIJ-188 was identified as Thermoanaerobacter sp., Thermoanaerobacter brockii, Thermoanaerobacter italicus, Thermoanaerobacter mathranii, Thermoanaerobacter thermocopriae. The novelty of consortia was that it produces biomass (850 mg l-1), bio-surfactant (500 mg l-1), and volatile fatty acids (495 mg l-1) at 70°C in the span of 10 days, which are adequate to alter the permeability and sweep efficiency of high permeability zones facilitating the displacement of oil. The biosurfactant was analyzed for its functional group by FTIR and NMR techniques which indicate the presence of C-N bond, aldehydes, triacylglycerols. TERIJ-188 showed an effective reduction in permeability at residual oil saturation from 28.3 to 11.3 mD and 19.2% incremental oil recovery in a core flood assay. Pathogenicity test suggested that TERIJ-188 is non-toxic, non-virulent and safe for field implementation.