Lola Gayle, STEAM Register
Earthquakes in Oklahoma and other parts of the country have been linked by many experts to the practice of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. One such earthquake, a 5.6 magnitude tremblor, occurred on Saturday near Pawnee, Oklahoma. In the wake of that news, The Oklahoma Corporation Commission has ordered the mandatory shutdown of 35 disposal wells.
But despite the bad press fracking seems to get, there’s a bit of interesting news coming from the science world. Ohio State University researchers and their colleagues have discovered dozens of microbes forming sustainable ecosystems within shale oil and gas wells, and one of them — Candidatus Frackibacter, or ‘Frackibacter’ for short — appears to be unique to hydraulic fracturing sites.
The new genus is one of the 31 microbial members found living inside two separate fracturing wells — one drilled in Utica shale and the other drilled in Marcellus shale — that are hundreds of miles apart, the researchers report in the Sept. 5 online edition of the journal Nature Microbiology.
See Also: Texas Earthquakes Caused By Fracking-Related Activities
While Frackibacter appears to be unique, almost all of the other microbes are identical, and many likely came from the surface ponds that energy companies draw on to fill the wells, said Kelly Wrighton, assistant professor of microbiology and biophysics at Ohio State.
“We think that the microbes in each well may form a self-sustaining ecosystem where they provide their own food sources,” Wrighton explained. “Drilling the well and pumping in fracturing fluid creates the ecosystem, but the microbes adapt to their new environment in a way to sustain the system over long periods.”
By sampling fluids taken from the two wells over 328 days, the researchers reconstructed the genomes of bacteria and archaea living in the shale, finding that both wells had developed nearly identical microbial communities, reports Ohio State’s Pam Frost Gorder. Surprisingly, the two wells are each owned by different energy companies that utilized different fracturing techniques. And while the two types of shale were formed millions of years apart and contain different forms of fossil fuel, one bacterium — Halanaerobium — emerged to dominate communities in both wells.
Epifluorescence microscope image of Halanaerobium bacteria cells — one of the bacteria species which Ohio State researchers and their partners have discovered thriving in hydraulic fracturing wells. Credit: Michael Wilkins, Ohio State University
“We thought we might get some of the same types of bacteria, but the level of similarity was so high it was striking. That suggests that whatever’s happening in these ecosystems is more influenced by the fracturing than the inherent differences in the shale,” Wrighton said.
Wrighton and her team are still not 100 percent sure of the microbes’ origins, but some may have been living in the rock before drilling began, including Candidatus Frackibacter.
See Also: Your Water Pipes Are Crawling With Millions Of Bacteria
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