Way, way down at the bottom of a very dark hole in the ground there is a very special kind of community. It is related to communities living in the black tar sands near Fort McMurray and they in turn have some connection to the liquids filling tailings ponds in Alberta and other places around the world.
These are the communities of microbes responsible for souring of gas wells, corrosion in pipelines, and over a very much longer period of time, also responsible for the conversion of black gold to the black mud mined up in norther Alberta. 
We've prepared a business case to put those wee little beasties to work.

New sequencing technologies make it possible to characterize the microbes and help to identify their capabilities. While we've been preparing the business case and the project proposal I realized there already been some ad hoc work being done that is proving to be both practical and rewarding. Some of the findings have been published in Nature in 2007 and one of the Alberta-based researchers Steve Larter was featured in a Nature podcast December 13th of the same year.
Not surprisingly Craig Venter sees the possibilities in this research and was up here recently for a quick tour of the oil sands. (Followed a few weeks later by Warren Buffet and Bill Gates who I'm sure had other reasons for the courtesy helicopter ride that had nothing to do with genetics)

Over the years, I've certainly read about using microbial activity to clean up oil spills but as I've been working on some of the documents for our proposal I still find it somewhat amazing that microbes live and love inside a hydrocarbon deposit.
The plan we are putting forward is to use metagenomics to solve some of the problems. Metagenomics is simply the science that looks at the entire genomic makeup of a population of organisms, which for our purposes would mean sampling a tailings pond or the community deep down in an oil deposit. Once we have the hydrocarbon equivalent of the human genome project completed then we feel we can harness their capabilities by essentially 'fertilizing' the good and silencing the bad. One of the first meeting of the minds on this project was in 206 and as one of the participant put it at the time we need to find out “who is there, what they are doing, and how can we steer their actions to our advantage”.

The anticipated outcomes include:

• Enhancing oil recovery in the oil sands or conventional wells by reducing the viscosity.
• More efficient water use in oil recovery and in tailings ponds.
• Sustained improvement to production practices.
• Converting some deposits to more easily recoverable methane gas.

Let's face it, depside the label of 'dirty oil' put on the oilsands, the world's appetite for energy is not going to diminish to the point where we can abandon the deposits. There is also still a surprising amount of oil (50-80 % in some cases ) left in conventional wells and metagenomics could be a way to make those wells good to the very last drop. There are inevitable consequences to putting gas in our cars or using oil to heat our homes, so anything we can do to lessen the environmental impact is well worth the effort.

So much of the preliminary framework has been done and so much of the expertise surrounds us in Alberta that when the ideas were first floated it seemed like a 'no-brainer'. Of course this research doesn't come cheap but we're doing our best to raise the funds and perhaps more importantly hope to see as much of the results as possible live in the public arena.
We aren't circulating the full proposal widely at this point but if you'd like to see a summary of where we trying to take the idea we have one available on our website.

Now if I could put those same microbes to work in my Jeep so I wouldn't have to change the oil quite as often...