How Oil-Eating Microbes Could Revolutionize The Energy Transition [Video]

As any sourdough bread enthusiast can attest, beneficial microbes live all around us. Estimates suggest the Earth harbors as many as a trillion microbial species. Many make our lives better, enabling us to do everything from fermenting foods to synthesizing human insulin.

Those possibilities attracted the attention of Tara Karimi, an academic researcher specializing in biologically inspired technologies. Her brother, Moji Karimi, worked with a company that wanted to sequence the DNA of microbes living in oil and gas wells. Both Karimi siblings were passionate about sustainability; when their professional lives intersected, they started thinking about ways their knowledge of science and technology might help reverse climate change.

Ultimately, their collaboration led to Cemvita Factory, a biotech startup they founded in 2017. Today, their focus is to bring biotechnology to the energy transition with applications such as harnessing microscopic organisms to turn carbon dioxide into something else, extract lithium from clay or feast on oil, which would be enormously beneficial in the global effort to decarbonize.

Amassing a microbial army

Oil extraction is an inherently declining process. As more oil is produced, the subsurface pressure drops, and it’s typical to leave 20% to 50% of the oil unrecovered. Cemvita saw these end-stage reservoirs as ideal for testing microbes’ effect on hydrocarbons, and its multidisciplinary team had the idea to look for microbes that transform the residual oil into another useful product.

The process involved screening a range of microbes to see what they could do and identify which ones might be able to adapt and survive in an oil field. During the process, they found a strain of microbes that could produce hydrogen as they consumed oil. Moji, Cemvita’s CEO, figured these microbes might be able to perform a distinctly modern form of alchemy – turning black gold into what he dubbed “gold hydrogen.”

“Our team loves discovery. It’s the beauty of the research: You start with solving one challenge, and then you uncover something bigger.”

Disrupting the energy transition

The hydrogen discovery was no coincidence. Cemvita’s core mission is to learn from nature and develop technologies that work in harmony with it. “Our team loves discovery,” says Tara, Cemvita’s CTO. “It’s the beauty of the research: You start with solving one challenge, and then you uncover something bigger.”

The awareness of microbes that digest hydrocarbons isn’t new. They played a key role in limiting the ecological damage of the Exxon Valdez oil spill in the 1980s and digesting the mix of crude oil and natural gas leaking from BP’s Macondo well in 2010. In the lab, the Cemvita team tested the cousins of those microbes to find strains hardy enough to survive in the anaerobic sub-surface environments where the scientists wanted to send them.

“Once we checked those boxes, we felt we had a shot at producing hydrogen at the cost of less than a dollar per kilogram,” says Moji. Those economics would put Cemvita’s gold hydrogen on a par with hydrogen produced from natural gas. To put that feat in perspective, in 2021 the U.S. Department of Energy launched the Hydrogen Shot—an initiative aiming to reach the dollar-per-kilo price within a decade.

A compelling path to development

Like any new technology, broad adoption of Cemvita’s solution will require trust from potential investors and partners. Mitsubishi Heavy Industries has invested in the company as part of its strategic focus on identifying and accelerating decarbonization opportunities. “Developing and de-risking the innovative technologies that will catalyze the energy transition is a major focus for us, particularly in terms of developing carbon and hydrogen value chains,” says Ricky Sakai, Senior Vice President of Investment & Business Development at Mitsubishi Heavy Industries America.

“Subsurface biomanufacturing could wind up generating a whole new industry of hydrogen exploration and production.”

Oil and gas companies have strong incentives to partner with Cemvita. The capped wells and tapped-out oil fields Cemvita targets for field-testing are essentially liabilities for exploration and production companies. Turning the remaining oil into hydrogen offers a way to extend the lives of wells that have been written off.

“Conventional wells drilled into porous sandstone and limestone formations between the 1920s and 1990s often have 20% to 50% of their hydrocarbons still in place,” says Moji. “We think of that as a source of really cheap feedstock we could use.”

In the next year or so, Cemvita Factory will be looking for pockets that could yield the 30 to 50 tons a day of gold hydrogen that it will take to be commercially viable in today’s market. The company estimates that those commercial setups could run for 10 to 15 years before they deplete the existing reservoirs. And in the U.S. alone, it estimates that more than 100,000 wells meet its initial criteria.

As the hydrogen economy evolves, it may become more economical to keep oil in the ground and let microbes convert it into hydrogen than to pump it out. “Subsurface biomanufacturing could wind up generating a whole new industry of hydrogen exploration and production,” says Moji. “We just need to get a foot in the door and open it.”

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