Want more gas or oil? Just toss in fertilizer

Golden, Colo.-Feeding fertilizer or other nutrients to anaerobic microbes existing in energy reserves deep beneath the surface of the earth can shorten the centuries-long process of turning oil or coal into methane to years or perhaps even months or weeks, according to scientists in the U.S. and Canada. Researchers at the University of Calgary were in the news recently because of their search for a quicker way to improve recovery from Canada’s heavy oil and tar sands fields, which contain 175 billion barrels of oil. “We’ve got a process that naturally turns oil into natural gas,” said Steve Larter, the petroleum geologist who is leading the research at the University of Calgary. “Why not speed up the process by just lobbing in some fertilizer. You’d basically feed them Miracle-Gro or fertilizer to accelerate their growth rate.” At this point, the Canadian concept hasn’t been tested on a large scale, but the Calgary researchers hope to be working on that in 2009. Here in the U.S., Luca Technologies, located in Golden, has been working much longer on the technology and has advanced to where Luca officials are talking about producing methane sooner, not later. Luca has been doing field testing of microbe stimulation, mainly in Wyoming’s Powder River Basin. “The results from these studies are so encouraging that we believe a commercial process is in the not too distant future,” said Mark Finklestein, Luca vice president of biosciences. Finklestein told Green Markets Luca doesn’t use fertilizer per say, but agreed that the term is correctly applied in a general sense. He said the makeup of the Luca amendments is proprietary, but disclosed that “certainly nitrogen and phosphorus are two key ingredients in stimulating microbes to work faster.” Eventually, he indicated, Luca’s needs for such nutrients could run into the tons. He said most of Luca’s research has focused on coalbed methane, but the technology is equally applicable to shale or other coal or oil deposits as a “greener, more sustainable approach to solving some of our energy problems.” These efforts have attracted interest from chemical giant BASF, venture capitalists Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers, Oxford Bioscience, and others who now hold a minority interest in the company.