Fuel storage tanks are one of the main sources of water pollution as well as loss of crude oil and oil products in refineries.  In the process of utilization of these tanks, considerable amounts of hydrocarbons may find their way into the coastal water, which eventually lead to loss of valuable hydrocarbons. Oil type, climatic condition and characteristics of oil tanks are among the main variab...

Biocatalysis harnesses the catalytic potential of enzymes to produce building blocks and end-products for the pharmaceutical and chemical industry. Located at the interface between fermentation processes and petrol-based chemistry, biotransformation processes broaden the toolbox for bioconversion of organic compounds to functionalized products. BIOCATALYSIS AND BIOTRANSFORMATION CONNECT PETROL-...

We show that 85% of variation in total organic carbon can be explained by mineral surface area in a black shale deposit from two locations in the late Cretaceous Western Interior Seaway, United States. This relation suggests that, as in modern marine sediments, adsorption of carbon compounds onto clay mineral surfaces played a fundamental role in the burial and preservation of organic carbon. O...

Described herein is an environmentally benign method for the synthesis of multisubstituted 3-alkoxylated-2-oxindoles 3 via direct alkoxylation of 3-halooxindoles 1. A wide variety of such multisubstituted 3-alkoxylated-2-oxindole scaffolds were smoothly obtained in good yields (up to 94%) by heating in an oil bath at 35 °C for 24 h. A particularly valuable feature of this method was the develop...

We report on the behavior of micron-sized prolate ellipsoids trapped at an oil-water interface. The particles experience strong, anisotropic, and long-ranged attractive capillary interactions which greatly exceed the thermal energy k(B)T. Depending on surface chemistry, the particles aggregate into open structures or chains. Using video microscopy, we extract the pair interaction potential betw...