Funding injections by British Petroleum this summer are fueling studies in the Gulf Coast, raising hopes that the Deepwater Horizon oil spill might provide answers to long-standing questions on the nature of cellular toxicity. Rebecca Alvania investigates.

OBJECTIVES There are no recognized analytical methods for measuring oil mist and vapours arising from drilling fluids used in offshore petroleum drilling industry. To inform the future development of improved methods of analysis for oil mist and vapours this study assessed the inter- and intra-laboratory variability in oil mist and vapour analysis. In addition, sample losses during transportati...

A lot of oil and gas reservoirs have been or will be abandoned in petroleum industry. In this study, we pointed out that these oil and gas reservoirs might be transferred into exceptional enhanced geothermal reservoirs with very high temperatures by oxidizing the residual oil with injected air. A concept to generate power from these exceptional enhanced geothermal reservoirs by using geothermal...

The corrosion protection of petroleum storage tank is important for safety work in petroleum depot. Precise prediction of soleplate corrosion may reflect the security state of a storage tank, and it can provide scientific references to the anti-corrosion and maintenance in safety management. Grey Model GM (1,1) in the Grey Theory is a good prediction method based on small volume of original dat...

Oilfield Review Summer 2011: 23, no. 2. Copyright © 2011 Schlumberger. For help in preparation of this article, thanks to Nicholas Drenzek, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. FLAIR is a mark of Schlumberger. Rock-Eval is a mark of the Institut Français du Pétrole. Rock-Eval 6 is a mark of Vinci Technologies SA. Every oil or gas play originates from source rock. The viability of each play—convention...

A petroleum fluid can be di®ided into three types of species: asphaltenes, resins, and oils. Asphaltenes and resins are polar, while the rest of the so-called oils are either nonpolar or mildly polar. The interaction among these species strongly affect asphaltene precipitation from petroleum fluids. Different measuring methods for asphaltenes in a petroleum fluid gi®e similar results, but diffe...

Even though petroleum-degrading microorganisms are widely distributed in soil and water, they may not be present in sufficient numbers to achieve contaminant remediation. In such cases, it may be useful to inoculate the polluted area with highly effective petroleum-degrading microbial strains to augment the exiting ones. In order to identify a microbial strain for bioaugmentation of oil-contami...

Deep subsurface petroleum reservoir ecosystems harbor a high diversity of microorganisms, and microbial influenced corrosion is a major problem for the petroleum industry. Here, we used high-throughput sequencing to explore the microbial communities based on genomic 16S rDNA and metabolically active 16S rRNA analyses of production water samples with different extents of corrosion from a high-te...

The study investigated the diversity and genotypic features of alkane hydroxylase genes on rhizoplanes of grasses planted in artificial petroleum-contaminated soils to acquire new insights into the bacterial communities responsible for petroleum degradation in phytoremediation. Four types of grass (Cynodon dactylon, two phenotypes of Zoysia japonica, and Z. matrella) were used. The concentratio...

Each different molecular elemental composition-e.g., C(c)H(h)N(n)O(o)S(s)-has a different exact mass. With sufficiently high mass resolving power (m/Deltam(50%) approximately 400,000, in which m is molecular mass and Deltam(50%) is the mass spectral peak width at half-maximum peak height) and mass accuracy (<300 ppb) up to approximately 800 Da, now routinely available from high-field (>/=9.4 T)...