抄録
Recently, a sharp skyrocket in crude oil has become a destabilizing factor to the world economy. For instance, all over the world including China and India have been competing against one another for maintaining the petroleum resources. Hence, the position of Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) techniques in the petroleum development technology has become more important. On the other hand, various environmental problems caused by global warming also have become serious issues since 1990, so that consideration to environmental problems will be also required for oil industry. On this background, expectations are rising for the practical use of Microbial Enhanced Oil Recovery (MEOR) technique which is one of the techniques expected to be both economically feasible and environmentally friendly.
This paper elaborates the present state of MEOR regarding the acquisition methods and preceding results relevant to high performance microbes for MEOR process, in addition to introducing the outline of MEOR technique and the current state of MEOR research. Culture conditions of microbes for achieving even greater functionality are also described as a critical technology for MEOR process.
