Crude oil contamination is one of the major environmental concerns and it has drawn interest from researchers and industries. Heavy oils contain 24-64% saturates and aromatics, 14-39% resins and 11-45% asphaltene. Resins and asphaltenes mainly consist of naphthenic aromatic hydrocarbons with alicyclic chains which are the hardest to degrade. Crude oil biodegradation process, with its minimal en...

Microbial Enhanced Oil Recovery (MEOR) is a potential technology for residual heavy oil recovery. Many heavy oil fields in Oman and elsewhere have difficulty in crude oil recovery because it is expensive due to its high viscosity. Indigenous microbes are capable of improving the fluidity of heavy oil, by changing its high viscosity and producing lighter oil fractions. Many spore-forming bacteri...

The acute toxic effect of different crude oils (heavy crude oil and bonny light crude oil) on embryos of marine medaka Oryzias melastigma was measured and evaluated by exposure to the water-accommodated fraction (WAF) in the present study. The cardiac function of medaka embryos was used as target organ of ecotoxicological effect induced by oil exposure. Results showed that the developing marine...

Heavy crude oil can be upgraded to lighter oil using several techniques. However, current methods usually require high temperatures, long reaction duration, and cause serious environmental pollution. This study shows that by using carbon nanocatalysts, heavy crude oil can be efficiently upgraded to lighter oil at a relatively low temperature of about 150 °C. The temperature of crude oil was inc...

The need of heavy and unconventional crude oil as an energy source is increasing day by day, so does the importance of petroleomics: the pursuit of detailed knowledge of heavy crude oil. Crude oil needs techniques with ultra-high resolving capabilities to resolve its complex characteristics. Therefore, ultra-high resolution mass spectrometry represented by Fourier transform ion cyclotron resona...

it has been known for years that microbial surface active agents have a wide range of applications not only in oil spill environment but also in many industries. their properties including: (i) changing surface active phenomena, such as lowering of surface and interfacial tensions, (ii) wetting and penetrating actions, (iii) spreading, (iv) hydrophylicity and hydrophobicity actions, (v) microbi...

An obligately thermophilic strain ZY-10 was isolated from the crude oil in a high-temperature oilfield, which was capable of degrading heavy crude oil. Phenotypic and phylogenetic analysis demonstrated that the isolate should be grouped in the genus Geobacillus, which shared thd highest similarity (99%) of the 16S rDNA sequence to Geobacillus stearothermophilus. However, the major cellular fatt...

A heavy crude oil has been treated with deuterated alkylating reagents (CD₃I and C₂D₅I) and directly analyzed without any prior fractionation and chromatographic separation by high-field Orbitrap Fourier Transform Mass Spectrometry (FTMS) and Fourier Transform Ion Cyclotron Resonance Mass Spectrometry (FT-ICR MS) using electrospray ionization (ESI). The reaction of a polycyclic aromatic sulfur ...