Terra Tech Energy Services' long-awaited treatment truck arrived in July. And it's been busy every day since.

"We've just been on the go every day, all over Kansas and even out to Wyoming," said company president Bruce Reed.

Terra Tech, which started operations in June 2003, uses a microbial product, Paragone M, to reduce paraffin, wax and other buildups in wells and increase the flow of oil.

The tank truck, which Terra Tech had custom-built, carries nutrient water to promote microbe growth as well as the biochemicals for the well treatment.

"We used to have to wait for the water haulers. Now we can bring all our own resources to the site, which means we can serve more customers and serve them better," said Reed, who operates the family business with his wife, Maggie, who is office manager, and his son, Mike, who is sales manager. Jeff Burk is field operations manager. Bruce Reed and Burk are also geologists.

"We started out with just a few operators willing to try an alternative to the traditional petrochemicals used for well bore cleanup," Reed said. "We've grown by word of mouth and in some instances with engineers that had used us before, then moved to another company."

Reed said he ordered the treatment truck last year, but ran up against a backlog of orders for tanker trucks.

He said he buys his microbial treatment products from a San Antonio provider who grows them himself.

"The secret to our product is the addition of the nutrient water, which really gets the bacteria growing. They go down with about 2 million colony-forming units per milliliter of solution. And they really get to work," he said.

The treatments are initially a little more expensive than traditional chemicals but over the long run have reduced operating costs for customers by more than enough to compensate, Reed said.

They are also not tied to the price of oil, as traditional petrochemicals are, so they have remained steady in price as their competitors' prices have escalated.

Microbial treatments in the oil patch are not a new discovery, Reed said. They've been used with water flood techniques for two decades.

Reed said he first became aware of them when working in a Wyoming oil field.

"They are biohazard level one, take no special permits to haul down the road and no special handling is required," Reed said.

Reed said Paragone M does not have the drawback of creating bio-slime that plagued some bacterial well treatments years ago.

"These little bugs eat the slime," he said.

Terra Tech plans to expand its treatment protocol next month, by providing treatment to five wells in the Central Kansas Uplift that have problems with a different kind of bacteria -- one that is not friendly.

"We will be going after sulfur-reducing bacteria known as SRBs," he said. "They cause problems in the well, including the creation of hydrogen sulfide gas. We are going to use microbes to eliminate them. Our beneficial microbes can out-compete them for the food source and the nitrogen in the nutrient water disrupts their biology," he said. "It's going to be neat to see them work."

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