Bacterial co-occurrence patterns are more complex but less stable than archaea in enhanced oil recovery applied oil reservoirs

Abstract

A complex microbial community exists in oil reservoirs after the application of chemical enhanced oil recovery (EOR) technologies, where the dynamic interactions of microorganisms are thought to be critical to petroleum composition, recovery, and production technologies but are poorly understood. Here, we used the 16S rRNA gene to construct co-occurrence networks for bacterial and archaeal communities associated with water-, polymer-, and alkaline surfactant polymer (ASP)-flooded oil reservoirs. Nonmetric multidimensional scaling analysis showed that bacterial and archaeal community structures differed significantly (p < 0.01) among the oil reservoirs with different EOR compositions. The microbial co-occurrence pattern in water-flooded reservoirs was more complex, with more nodes, edges, and average degrees (i.e., average links per node in the network) than in the polymer- and ASP-flooded reservoirs. However, the archaeal co-occurrence pattern maintained a more robust structure than that of bacteria under the application of polymer and ASP flooding technologies, suggesting that the application of different enhanced oil recovery techniques has diverse effects on the bacterial and archaeal co-occurrence patterns in reservoirs. The pH and [HCO3−] were significantly correlated with the variations in bacterial and archaeal network structures. Our findings provide new insights into the response of microbes to diverse EOR processes by regulating their interactions in deep oil reservoirs. Revealing the effects of water, polymer, and ASP flooding on the co-occurrence patterns of bacteria and archaea in oil reservoirs, which may facilitate the implementation of microbial enhanced oil recovery technology in the future.