Effect of Bacterial Polysaccharide Production on Formation Damage

Abstract

In-situ growth of cellular material is known to cause formation damage. Bacterial reproduction and polysaccharide production are the key factors that segregate bacterial formation damage from fines and particulate damage. Carefully controlled experiments conducted on both high-and low-permeability ceramic cores showed that bacteria can plug the pore space and damage the cores. However, further experimentation demonstrated that polysaccharide production is largely responsible for this damage. This conclusion is based on a comparison of two experimental systems: core plugging from bacterial replication and polymeric production and plugging of the porous medium caused solely by cell division with no polysaccharide production. In light of these results, the interpretation of reservoir plugging resulting from the presence of bacteria requires further scrutiny.

Effects of pH and Trace Minerals on Long-Term Starvation ofLeuconostoc mesenteroides

“…In the batch experiments, stock solutions of 15 g of sucrose/dm 3 and the mixture of 7.9 g of fructose and 7.9 g of fructose were prepared and added to growth media. Due to the different exopolymer production depending on the carbon sources, i.e., insoluble dextran production on sucrose feed and no dextran production on glucose and fructose, L. mesenteroides shows distinct differences in the plugging of porous media (26).…”

Laboratory tests for the application of nitrate-based inhibitor against H₂S formation

“…It is in general necessary to emphasize that phenomena connected with chemical colmatage of deposits, as well as with the colmatage of a biochemical character, were many times described in literature [4,5,6,10,16,17]. The results of research on the influence of active substances pumped to the deposit zone constitute a very important parameter.…”

A brief review of bacterial transport in natural porous media

“…Active biological adhesion can result from changes in microbe surface coat polymer changes and from polysaccharide production (Fletcher and Floodgate 1973;Allison and Sutherland 1987;Lappan and Fogler 1992). Predation (e.g., grazing by protozoa) is discussed by Harvey et al (1989) and Harvey and Garabedian (1991).…”

“…Growth and starvation are often associated with size or shape changes (Bakken and Olsen 1987;Cusack et al 1992;Kjelleberg 1993), which in turn will affect physical filtration properties and possibly other properties. More importantly, alternative microbial production of polysaccharides has been shown to have a strong impact on attachment mechanisms (Lappan and Fogler 1992). However, most controlled experiments involve microorganisms in a resting state and/or short enough times of exposure to substrate that growth/decay can reasonably be ignored (Scholl et al 1990;Hornberger et al 1992).…”