Effect of Sodium Bisulfite Injection on the Microbial Community Composition in a Brackish-Water-Transporting Pipeline

Abstract

Pipelines transporting brackish subsurface water, used in the production of bitumen by steam-assisted gravity drainage, are subject to frequent corrosion failures despite the addition of the oxygen scavenger sodium bisulfite (SBS). Pyrosequencing of 16S rRNA genes was used to determine the microbial community composition for planktonic samples of transported water and for sessile samples of pipe-associated solids (PAS) scraped from pipeline cutouts representing corrosion failures. These were obtained from upstream (PAS-616P) and downstream (PAS-821TP and PAS-821LP, collected under rapid-flow and stagnant conditions, respectively) of the SBS injection point. Most transported water samples had a large fraction (1.8% to 97% of pyrosequencing reads) of Pseudomonas not found in sessile pipe samples. The sessile population of PAS-616P had methanogens (Methanobacteriaceae) as the main (56%) community component, whereas Deltaproteobacteria of the genera Desulfomicrobium and Desulfocapsa were not detected. In contrast, PAS-821TP and PAS-821LP had lower fractions (41% and 0.6%) of Methanobacteriaceae archaea but increased fractions of sulfate-reducing Desulfomicrobium (18% and 48%) and of bisulfite-disproportionating Desulfocapsa (35% and 22%) bacteria. Hence, SBS injection strongly changed the sessile microbial community populations. X-ray diffraction analysis of pipeline scale indicated that iron carbonate was present both upstream and downstream, whereas iron sulfide and sulfur were found only downstream of the SBS injection point, suggesting a contribution of the bisulfite-disproportionating and sulfate-reducing bacteria in the scale to iron corrosion. Incubation of iron coupons with pipeline waters indicated iron corrosion coupled to the formation of methane. Hence, both methanogenic and sulfidogenic microbial communities contributed to corrosion of pipelines transporting these brackish waters.

Effect of sulfate on the transformation of corrosion scale composition and bacterial community in cast iron water distribution pipes

“…In recent years, molecular biological methods, including clone library (White et al, 2011), T-RFLP (Pavissich et al, 2010, PCR-DGGE (Teng et al, 2008), particularly pyrosequencing as a more powerful technique (Park et al, 2011) were used to investigate the temporal and spatial distribution of bacterial populations of biofilm on/in corrosion scales. The change of iron corrosion products in DWDS under source water switch had been observed by some researchers (Tang et al, 2006), but the transformation of bacterial community existed in corrosion scale and the chemical composition of corrosion scales under the influence of sulfate concentration has not been reported.…”

Acetate Production from Oil under Sulfate-Reducing Conditions in Bioreactors Injected with Sulfate and Nitrate

“…For pyrosequencing, the extracted DNA was amplified for 30 cycles with FLX titanium primers 454T_RA_X and 454T_FwB as described elsewhere (31,40). These have the sequences for 16S primers 926Fw and 1392R as their 3= ends.…”

“…Purified 16S amplicons (ϳ125 ng) were sequenced at the Genome Quebec and McGill University Innovation Centre, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, with a Genome Sequencer FLX instrument and GS FLX Titanium series kit XLR70 (Roche Diagnostics Corporation). Data analysis was conducted with Phoenix 2, a 16S rRNA data analysis pipeline (40).…”

Microbial community structures of an offshore and near-shore oil production facilities after biocide treatment and the potential to induce souring and corrosion

“…PCR product quality was verified on an 0.7% agarose gel and PCR products were purified with a QIAquick PCR Purification Kit (Qiagen) following which their concentrations were determined on a Qubit Fluorometer (Invitrogen), using a Quant-iT dsDNA HS Assay Kit (Invitrogen). Detailed procedures have been described (Park et al, 2011). PCR products (typically 20 μL of 5 ng μL −1 ) were sent to the Genome Quebec and McGill University Innovation Centre for pyrosequencing with an FLX Instrument, using a GS FLX Titanium Series Kit XLR70 (Roche Diagnostics Corporation).…”

“…PCR products (typically 20 μL of 5 ng μL −1 ) were sent to the Genome Quebec and McGill University Innovation Centre for pyrosequencing with an FLX Instrument, using a GS FLX Titanium Series Kit XLR70 (Roche Diagnostics Corporation). Data analysis was conducted with Phoenix 2, a 16S rRNA data analysis pipeline, developed in house (Park et al, 2011;Soh et al, 2013). High quality sequences that remained following quality control and chimeric sequence removal were clustered into operational taxonomic units at 3% distance by using the average linkage algorithm (Schloss and Westcott, 2011).…”