The oil and gas industry is as big as it has ever been and the companies need to be able to transport the materials quickly across long distances, and to do this they use underwater steel pipes that can handle high pressure but are also cheap to make.The sea is filled with all types of things inside of it, living and non-living. Things such as these are sulfate reducing bacteria (SRB) and chloride ions. Chloride ions are highly concentrated withing the ocean which is why it's called salt water. The problem is that chloride ions over time cause corrosion on steel pipes throughout the ocean. F. Xie and colleagues tested to see the higher the concentration of chloride ions how the SRB would react and they found that more grew with the higher concentration. The SRB is used as a bio film around the steel pipes to create a protective layer between the steel and the high concentration of salts/chloride within the ocean. It's crazy to thing that little microbes are protecting the ocean from a pipe corroding and having an oil spill, imagine if they weren't there.
Original article:
(2019). Synergistic Effect between Chloride and Sulfate Reducing Bacteria in Corrosion Inhibition of X100 Pipeline Steel in Marine Environment. Corrosion Science.
http://electrochemsci.org/papers/vol14/140302693.pdf (Accessed September 20, 2019).
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