[11] Geobacter's ability to consume oil-based pollutants and radioactive material with carbon dioxide as waste byproduct has been used in environmental clean-up for underground petroleum spills and for the precipitation of uranium out of groundwater.

[14] Microbial biodegradation of recalcitrant organic pollutants is of great environmental significance and involves intriguing novel biochemical reactions.

Novel biochemical reactions were discovered, enabling the respective metabolic pathways, but progress in the molecular understanding of these bacteria was slowed by the absence of genetic systems for most of them.

[15] Geobacter species are often the predominant organisms when extracellular electron transfer is an important bioremediation process in subsurface environments.

[16] Many Geobacter species, such as G. sulfureducens, are capable of creating thick networks of biofilms on microbial fuel cell anodes for extracellular electron transfer.

[18] Previous research has proposed that the high conductivity of Geobacter biofilms can be used to power microbial fuel cells and to generate electricity from organic waste products.

[19][20] In particular, G. sulfureducens holds one of the highest records for microbial fuel cell current density that researchers have ever been able to measure in vitro.

Low pH environments have been found to change redox potentials, thus inhibiting electron transfer from microorganisms to cytochromes.

[22] The presence of pili or flagella on Geobacter species has been found to increase electric current generation by enabling more efficient electron transfer.

[21] In a University of Massachusetts Amherst study, a neuromorphic memory (memristor) utilized Geobacter biofilm cut into thin nanowire strands.

In a paper co-authored by Derek Lovely, Jun Yao observed that his team can "modulate the conductivity, or the plasticity of the nanowire-memristor synapse so it can emulate biological components for brain-inspired computing....".