Improved assessment of biodegradation extent and prediction of petroleum quality

Biodegradation of crude oil causes volumetrically important compositional changes, which lead to significant deterioration in quality, in particular during the early stages of alteration. To better understand these effects we focussed on a detailed assessment of light to moderate levels of alteration. We investigated a suite of 40 crude oil samples from five different petroleum systems to evaluate the extent of alteration occurring in reservoirs. Based on a comprehensive geochemical characterization, five individual crude oil sequences were defined, where compositional variability is mainly due to microbial activity in the reservoir. In particular, samples from the Gullfaks field (offshore Norway) and from a petroleum system offshore Angola illustrate that conventional molecular biodegradation parameters, such as the Pr/n-C₁₇ and Ph/n-C₁₈ alkane ratios are not suitable for defining the extent of biodegradation in petroleum reservoirs. Here, we suggest a new molecular biodegradation parameter, the degradative loss, that can be used to quantify depletion in individual crude oil constituents. The approach allows improved assessment of the extent of biodegradation in crude oil samples by means of the mean degradative loss. It is demonstrated that crude oil quality, as assessed from API gravity, can be predicted directly from the molecular composition of crude oils. Our data clearly indicate that the degradation patterns of light hydrocarbons and n-alkanes differ in different petroleum systems. This suggests that microbial communities are different and therefore generate different molecular degradation patterns which have to be evaluated individually for each system.