Both soil and water become contaminated by oil and oil derivatives due to accidental spills in their exploitation, transportation, processing, storing and utilization. In 2010, 3.91 billion tons of crude oil was produced (BP Statistical Review, 2011) and estimations are that annually 0.1% of produced petroleum is released into the environment (Ward et al., 2003) as a result of anthropogenic act...

We present a coherent and unified group of general explanations for the various phase transitions, which may occur in the seven naturally occurring petroleum fluids with emphasis on their heavy organics. The seven petroleum fluids include, in the order of their fluidity, natural gas, near-critical gas-condensate, light crude, intermediate crude, heavy oil, tar sand and oil shale. At first the n...

Analysts have likened the growing direct state role in Kazakhstan’s petroleum sector since 2002 to a form of ―resource nationalism‖ that is part of a global trend precipitated by high oil prices. This interpretation has obvious appeal, both in light of earlier periods in which waves of nationalization coincided with oil price booms and the recent socalled ―re-nationalizations‖ in Bolivia, Venez...

Fuel ethanol is one of the technology success stories of the 21 century. In less than one third of a century, it has gone from being a material produced rather inefficiently in small quantities to a major commercial product. This success can be attributed not only to the fact that ethanol is a renewable fuel and replaces imported oil, but also because it is capable of competing with petroleum b...

A molecule-based characterization methodology was developed for correlation and prediction of assays and properties for crude oil and petroleum fractions. From readily accessible crude oil, the assay data such as distillation curve, API gravity, and PNA contents, identifies an optimal set of chemical compositions of model hydrocarbon molecules that were designed to mimic measurable physical and...

Crude oil blending is an important unit operation in petroleum refining industry. A good model for the blending system is beneficial for supervision operation, prediction of the export petroleum quality and realizing model-based optimal control. Since the blending cannot follow the ideal mixing rule in practice, we propose a static neural network to approximate the blending properties. By the d...