La biotecnología actual y su impacto en la industria de la refinación del petróleo

This paper comes out from the need to provide a general overview of the current biotechnology situation and its future impact on the petroleum industry. This important industrial sector already encounters challenges as the decreasing oil reserves, the fluctuating oil prices, the increasing demand of petroleum, fuels and petrochemicals and finally more strict environmental regulations. These challenges will persist and strengthen in the following 25 years. Biotechnology has a long-way overcome since the 1950's and today impacts different industrial sectors as food, pharmaceutics, medicine, agriculture, textile, etc. Because good experiences of the above industries, petroleum industry interests now in biotechnology as an alternative technology to resolve the challenges and needs of this worldwide important sector. We described throughout the paper the main factors that drive or restrain research and development (R&D) in biological processes applied to petroleum industry. We propose also a prospective of the biotechnology incidence to the petroleum sector. Moreover, we identified several challenges and opportunities, where R&D in petroleum biotechnology will play an important role to surmount the future industrial needs.