Microbial Methane Production Associated with Carbon Steel Corrosion in a Nigerian Oil Field

Abstract

Microbially influenced corrosion (MIC) in oil field pipeline systems can be attributed to many different types of hydrogenotrophic microorganisms including sulfate reducers, methanogens and acetogens. Samples from a low temperature oil reservoir in Nigeria were analyzed using DNA pyrotag sequencing. The microbial community compositions of these samples revealed an abundance of anaerobic methanogenic archaea. Activity of methanogens was demonstrated by incubating samples anaerobically in a basal salts medium, in the presence of carbon steel and carbon dioxide. Methane formation was measured in all enrichments and correlated with metal weight loss. Methanogens were prominently represented in pipeline solids samples, scraped from the inside of a pipeline, comprising over 85% of all pyrosequencing reads. Methane production was only witnessed when carbon steel beads were added to these pipeline solids samples, indicating that no methane was formed as a result of degradation of the oil organics present in these samples. These results were compared to those obtained for samples taken from a low temperature oil field in Canada, which had been incubated with oil, either in the presence or in the absence of carbon steel. Again, methanogens present in these samples catalyzed methane production only when carbon steel was present. Moreover, acetate production was also found in these enrichments only in the presence of carbon steel. From these studies it appears that carbon steel, not oil organics, was the predominant electron donor for acetate production and methane formation in these low temperature oil fields, indicating that the methanogens and acetogens found may contribute significantly to MIC.

An Electrochemist Perspective of Microbiologically Influenced Corrosion

“…Venzlaff et al [91] conducted electrochemical potentiodynamic measurements on the corrosion on iron by SRB, and came to similar conclusions to Dinh et al [31], i.e., that non-H 2 consuming bacteria resulted in higher corrosion rates, seemingly confirming a biological catalysis role rather than an abiotic cathodic effect of FeS. Several other authors have also claimed "direct" corrosion on carbon steel by SRB, methanogens and both iron-reducing (IRB) and iron-oxidizing bacteria (IOB) [33,35,92,93]. This class of mechanisms has recently been reviewed by Li et al [94].…”

Iron to Gas: Versatile Multiport Flow-Column Revealed Extremely High Corrosion Potential by Methanogen-Induced Microbiologically Influenced Corrosion (Mi-MIC)

“…Determination of corrosion rates for environmental samples is often conducted by incubating certain sizes and types of metal coupons in an anaerobic serum bottle. After certain incubation period, the differences in weight are used for corrosion rate calculation (Dexter et al, 1991;Park et al, 2011;Enning et al, 2012;Mand et al, 2016). The corrosion rates determined through this method are general corrosion rates, although pit depths can be measured on the coupons but regional corrosion rate is difficult to measure (Voordouw et al, 2016).…”

“…In addition to SRB, acetogens, iron-reducers/oxidizers, sulfide-oxidizers and methanogenic archaea (MA) are also corrosive (Dinh et al, 2004;Mori et al, 2010;Park et al, 2011;Sun et al, 2014;Kato et al, 2015;Mand et al, 2016). MA can metabolize limited substrates for growth, including H 2 /CO 2 , acetate, methanol and methylamines (Youssef et al, 2009;Tucker et al, 2015).…”

Severe corrosion of carbon steel in oil field produced water can be linked to methanogenic archaea containing a special type of [NiFe] hydrogenase

“…Methanogenic archaea are commonplace members of the oil field microbiome (16,17,34,35). However, unlike SRB which produce corrosive sulfides as a metabolic product, methanogenic archaea are not intrinsically corrosive (24,36); they oxidize molecular hydrogen or a limited spectrum of small organic compounds and produce chemically inert CH4.…”

“…This practice offers the opportunity to access steelassociated microorganisms from pressurized hydrocarbon pipelines. We obtained pig debris from nine different pipelines in seven geographically distinct oil field operations in North America, East Asia and West Africa to survey the prevalence of methanogenic archaea ( investigations (13,17,19,24). However, there was no apparent correlation between the types or abundances of methanogens, and the perceived severity of MIC in the surveyed pipelines ( Fig.…”