Research Projects

Assam, India's northeastern state, is Asia's oldest petroleum producing basin. Due to the aging of oil fields, high quantities of formation water are produced as by-products of crude oil production. Petroleum hydrocarbon-laden formation water can lead to ecological consequences, such as polyaromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) bioaccumulating and entering food, especially in tea gardens and rice fields. Microbial hydrocarbon remediation is a potent technology that relies on the biodegrading capabilities of native microbial populations. The different crude oil contaminated environment of upper Assam is predicted to be a good habitat for potential petroleum hydrocarbon utilizing microbes. A remediation process developed using native algal-bacterial consortium specific to oil contaminated sites in upper Assam overcomes this bottleneck associated with bioremediation of formation water without requiring external nutrient supplementation or dilution. The study demonstrates that native algal/bacterial hydrocarbon degraders from oil fields of upper Assam can be applied to develop cost-effective, efficient, and practically applicable in-situ hydrocarbon remediation strategy for hypersaline oil field formation water.