Isolation and study of microorganisms from oil samples for application in Microbial Enhanced Oil Recovery

Microbial Enhanced Oil Recovery (MEOR) is potentially useful to increment oil recovery from a reservoir beyond primary and secondary recovery operations using microorganisms and their metabolites. Stim- ulation of bacterial growth for biosurfactant production and degradation of heavy oil fractions by indig- enous microorganisms can enhance the fluidity and reduce the capillary forces that retain the oil into the reservoir. MEOR offers major advantages over conventional EOR, namely low energy consumption and independence of the price of crude oil. In this work, the isolation and identification of microorganisms capable of producing biosurfactants and promote degradation of long-chain n-alkanes under conditions existent in oil reservoirs were addressed. Among the isolated microorganisms, five Bacillus strains were able to produce extracellular biosurfactants at 40