Much of the world's oil reserves lies in giant tar sand stretches in places like Alberta and Venezuela. While the oil industry uses an energy-intensive and fairly dirty process to make steam to cook the oil out of the tar sands, underground bacteria simply eat the crude oil and break it down into methane, or natural gas. In nature, that process takes millions of years. A small group of cross-disciplinary microbiologists with their feet both in the oil industry and academic geochemistry wants to speed up the work. They are trying to get these bugs to break down carbon much faster to produce a steady supply of commercial natural gas, and to enhance the recovery of crude.
"Most of the oil in the oil sands is already microbially degraded," said Steve Larter, the Canada research chair in petroleum geology at the University of Calgary, explaining that bacteria have already turned it into methane and CO2. "There’s 1 trillion barrels of oil in the oil sands, but this is only 50 percent of what was ever present."
Read the full story here.