Alkanes comprise a substantial fraction of crude oil and refined fuels. As such, they are prevalent within deep subsurface fossil fuel deposits and in shallow subsurface environments such as aquifers that are contaminated with hydrocarbons. These environments are typically anaerobic, and host diverse microbial communities that can potentially use alkanes as substrates. Anaerobic alkane biodegra...

Particulates and complex organic mixtures were sampled from the exhaust of a flame retention head residential oil burner combusting No. 2 fuel oil at three firing conditions: continuous at Bacharach Smoke No. 1, and cyclic (5 min on, 10 min off) at Smoke Nos. 1 and 5. The complex mixtures were recovered by successive Soxhlet extraction of filtered particulates and XAD-2 sorbent resin with methy...

All cyanobacterial membranes contain diesel-range C15-C19 hydrocarbons at concentrations similar to chlorophyll. Recently, two universal but mutually exclusive hydrocarbon production pathways in cyanobacteria were discovered. We engineered a mutant of Synechocystis sp. PCC 6803 that produces no alkanes, which grew poorly at low temperatures. We analyzed this defect by assessing the redox kineti...

A comprehensive two-dimensional gas chromatography/time-of-flight mass spectrometry (GC × GC/TOFMS) method has been developed for the formation and identification of unresolved complex mixtures (UCMs) in lacustrine biodegraded oils that with the same source rock, similar maturity, and increasing degradation rank from Nanxiang Basin, China. Normal alkanes, light hydrocarbons, isoprenoids, steran...

Bimolecular reactions of phenyl-type radicals with the C4 and C5 hydrocarbons vinylacetylene and (methyl-substituted) 1,3-butadiene have been found to synthesize polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) with naphthalene and 1,4-dihydronaphthalene cores in exoergic and entrance barrierless reactions under single-collision conditions. The reaction mechanism involves the initial formation of a van ...

Specific interactions of aliphatic linear and branched hydrocarbons as well as cyclic and aromatic hydrocarbons with new packings containing chemically bonded complexes of transition metals are studied. The possibility of using these packings to separate these compounds is also discussed. The packings under study contain complexes of Cu(II) and Cr(III) chemically bonded to the silica surface. C...

The activity coefficients at infinite dilution, c13, of 55 organic solutes and water in three ionic liquids with the common cation 1-butyl-3-methylimidazolium and the polar anions Cl , [CH3SO3] and [(CH3)2PO4] , were determined by (gas + liquid) chromatography at four temperatures in the range (358.15 to 388.15) K for alcohols and water, and T = (398.15 to 428.15) K for the other organic solute...

The Oil & Gas Journal, in 2004, states that CO2 flooding is the fastest-growing enhanced oil recovery technique in USA, and production derived from CO2 projects has more than tripled from 50,000-Barrels/day to 200,000-Barrels/day. Cyclic injection of CO2 and N2 combines environmental benefits attendant to reducing CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere and economic benefits realized through impro...

A new approach to stabilize compounds containing a planar tetracoordinate carbon (ptC), embedded in aromatic hydrocarbons, is presented herein. This is achieved by using ligands that promote the formation of a 3c-2e σ-bond with the ptC under two conditions: without altering the sp2 hybridization of the aromatic carbons; and containing empty orbitals perpendicular to the aromatic ring to partici...

Quantitative interpretation of stable hydrogen isotope ratios (H/H) in organic compounds is greatly aided by knowledge of the relevant equilibrium fractionation factors (eeq). Previous efforts have combined experimental measurements and hybrid Density Functional Theory (DFT) calculations to accurately predict equilibrium fractionations in linear (acyclic) organic molecules (Wang et al., 2009a,b...