Buried hydrocarbon deposits, such as liquid petroleum, represent an abundant source of reduced carbon for microbes. It is not surprising therefore that many organisms have adapted to an oily, anaerobic life deep underground, often at high temperatures and pressures, and that those organisms have had, and in some cases continue to have, an effect on the quality and recovery of the earth’s dimini...

In the Spill o Llibre de les dones, the 15th century writer and physician from Valencia, Jaume Roig, uses the motif of pilgrimage to attack earthly women, particularly women healers. Roig undermines the salutary function of medieval pilgrimage in order to expose worldly women in their effort to harm male pilgrims. Since men cannot rely on earthly women, they must seek a healing encounter with t...

The short-term effects of oil spills on marine species and communities are well known and predictable. However, concerns are often raised about possible longer-term ("sub-lethal") population effects through, for example, low levels of residual oil affecting the ability of certain species to breed successfully. In fact, extensive research and detailed post-spill studies have shown that many comp...

This study examines the random walk hypothesis for the crude oil markets, using daily data over the period 1982–2008. The weak-form efficient market hypothesis for two oil crude markets (UK Brent and US West Texas Intermediate) is tested with non-parametric variance ratio tests developed by Wright (2000) and Belaire-Franch and Contreras (2004) as well as the wild-bootstrap variance ratio tests ...

In this paper the relationships between crude oil and refined product prices are investigated in a multivariate framework. This allows us to test several (partly competing) assumptions of earlier studies. In particular, we find that the crude oil price is weakly exogenous and that the spread is constant in some but not all relationships. Moreover, the multivariate analysis shows that the link b...

The most usual type of petroleum mulch, which has been successfully used to combat desertification in large areain Iran for more than thirty years, is produced by heavy residue petroleum cuts. The petroleum mulch consists of awide range of different heavy hydrocarbons such as Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons (PAHs). PAHs are present atlow level in petroleum mulch, where there is contact with wa...

due to the location of a domestic, industrial and agricultural zone near the caspian sea, this water body has long been under pressure and environmental threat. as a result of development of oil production activities in caspian region, such as oil exploration and extraction, a large volume of oil related pollutants is released annually into this important water body. considering the fact that h...

petroleum hydrocarbons are among the major organic environmental pollutants whose toxicity and carcinogenicity effects have raised great concerns while the numerous available physical and chemical methods to remove petroleum hydrocarbons are rarely employed due to their extreme costs and harmful side effects, biological methods, including phytoremediation, have attracted wide attention during t...

The Hubbert model of crude oil production can describe several regional cases, but it is not yet generally accepted as being of validi for all cases, especially for the worldwide case of oil extraction. The present paper shows that the model is of general validity to describe cases in which a resource is depleted faster than it can be replaced, as in the case of biological resources. In some ca...