For almost a century, various predictions have been made that the human race was imminently going to run out of available petroleum. The passing of time has proven all those predictions to have been utterly wrong. It is pointed out here how all such predictions have depended fundamentally upon an archaic hypothesis from the 18th century that petroleum somehow (miraculously) evolved from biologi...

We use time-resolved-small angle neutron scattering to study the kinetics of asphaltene nanoparticle aggregation in incompatible crude oil mixtures. We induce asphaltene aggregation by mixing asphaltene-rich Syrian crude oil ~SACO! with a paraffinic British crude oil and observe the scattered neutron intensity, I, as a function of wave number, q, over times, t, ranging from twenty minutes to ab...

The Yellow River Delta (YRD) is an important agricultural and ecological base that is being threatened by crude oil contamination. The remediation of the YRD can be potentially assisted by biosurfactants. Three native unknown biosurfactant-producing bacteria have been isolated (L1, L2, L3). In this paper, we measured the emulsification properties of the three biosurfactants in terms of emulsifi...