A significant quantum of crude oil is trapped in reservoirs and often unrecoverable by conventional oil recovery methods. Further downstream, the petroleum industry is facing challenges to remove sulfur, metal, nitrogen as well as undesirable organic compounds from the crude. Conventional secondary recovery methods such as water and gas injections helped to increase the productivity of the well...

Crude oil is the major source of energy worldwide being exploited as a source of economy, including Oman. As the price of crude oil increases and crude oil reserves collapse, exploitation of oil resources in mature reservoirs is essential for meeting future energy demands. As conventional recovery methods currently used have become less efficient for the needs, there is a continuous demand of d...

production of highly viscous tar sand bitumen using steam assisted gravity drainage (sagd) with a pair of horizontal wells has advantages over conventional steam flooding. this paper explores the use of artificial neural networks (anns) as an alternative to the traditional sagd simulation approach. feed forward, multi-layered neural network meta-models are trained through the back-error-propaga...

BACKGROUND Biodegradation is a cheap and environmentally friendly process that could breakdown and utilizes heavy crude oil (HCO) resources. Numerous bacteria are able to grow using hydrocarbons as a carbon source; however, bacteria that are able to grow using HCO hydrocarbons are limited. In this study, HCO degrading bacteria were isolated from an Omani heavy crude oil field. They were then id...