oa Developing an ecofriendly approach to reduce the use of biocides for preventing Microbial Induced Corrosion

Sulfate Reducing Bacteria (SRB) cause significant damage to marine oil pipelines necessitating the use of biocides for reducing the Microbial Induced Corrosion (MIC) and potential for great environmental harm. Currently, oil companies pump frequent batches of biocides to these under water pipelines without proper quantification of the bacterial population. This is primarily because the existing method for quantifying the bacterial population in a sample is not very effecient, as it can take up to 2 weeks to obtain the results. Our team has focused on developing an eco-friendly approach to limit the use of these biocides, which are used for targeting the SRB. SRB require high salt and low oxygen so first we genetically engineered a strain of bacteria that would report the osmolarity in oil pipelines, thus act as a biosensor for salt concentrations. The ratio of salinity in the seawater flowing in versus the seawater flowing out of the well will be used to estimate SRB populations in the pipelines, thus limiting the amount of biocides added in times of high Microbial counts.