Sharif Digital Repository

Evidently, environment contamination by water insoluble chemicals present at the industrial wastes could bring about catastrophic consequences to the biosphere. Biological based cleaning technologies are commonly considered as a practical remedy to remove these contaminations. In fact, these techniques are founded on the ability of certain microorganisms to degrade the contaminants. It is crystal clear that the availability of contaminants to the microorganisms is an essential parameter determining the final efficiency of the biodegradation process. In practice, the limited solubility of the contaminants in the aqueous phase leads to mass transfer constraints which consequently, decrease the... 

Because of production of large volumes of Produces Water during oil exploration, it is necessary to purify this water for reuse or discharging to environment. Thus, finding a suitable method for removing contaminations seems necessary. In the present study, removal of soluble and dispersed organic contaminants from produced water by Dissolved Air Precipitation/ Solvent Sublation has been studied. Combination of floatation by dissolved air and extraction with solvent has been used for removal of organic compounds in order to study simultaneous effect of both methods on removal efficiency. Samples used in the experiments were tested in two groups: the first group was synthesized samples of... 

This thesis analyzes the behavior of inflation in the Iranian economy by introducing a micro-founded model of monetary policy. The model predicts a direct relationship between inflation and oil export revenues in the oil dependent economy of Iran. This theory driven claim is verified empirically, and test results tend to confirm a meaningful relationship between inflation and Oil export data in Iran. Based on results attained from the micro-founded model, an augmented SVAR model is proposed for estimating underlying inflation in the Iranian economy. The proposed model is found to render better results than the conventional models used for estimating underlying inflation. Moreover it is... 

Empirical results in this research show that oil abundance in an economy tends to increase income inequality. Three mechanisms: Trade, civil liberties and imperfections of financial markets can explain this empirical finding, with the first being an alternative explanation for the Dutch disease. Besides, due to the influence it could have on parents underestimating the future costs of their children and because of the rents it produces, Oil abundance could reduce the opportunity cost of having children which results in a higher fertility rate. Moreover, empirical results confirm the negative relation between inequality and growth through the fertility mechanism. Therefore apart from... 

Within the past few years, soil and groundwater resources contamination by petroleum-based products has become of great concern in the environmental engineering literature as a serious environmental problem throughout the world. Amongst petroleum hydrocarbons, groundwater contamination by Non-Aqueous Phase Liquids (NAPLs) is one of the most important environmental problems. In order to effectively remediate contaminated sites, knowledge of the distribution of the NAPLs is essential. The success of the remedial design will be dependent on the ability to predict the subsurface distribution of the NAPLs. Release of these compounds from spills and leaky underground storage tanks into subsurface... 

The market demand of super heavy crude oil is very low due to its determinative both physical and chemical properties. Unfortunately existing refineries in Iran are not capable to refine this kind of crude oil. Marketing issues besides great price difference with other crude oil types leads us to find economical solution for optimal use of this national possession. About 70 percent of super heavy crude oil produced from Soroush and Norouz oil fields is un-refineable materials and to refine this heavy crude oil to refinery products like gasoline or gas oil a refinery with RFCC ( Residual Fluid Catalitic Cracking) technology must be made. Super high Technology and very heavy capital cost... 

The objective of this project is to study the behaviour and performance of an innotative floating offshore platform. Such Platform not only can be used for exploring oil from offshore fields, but for creating artificial islands, where land is in short supply. Due to its specific and, at the same time, simple geometry (symmetric), its fabrication does ont involve much complexity. Studies carried out on this platform include the investigation into its structural behaviour under gravitational (including self weight) and bouyancy forces. Studied cases include a number of platforms with different (geometrical) sizes and under 3 various bouyancy conditions (percentage), namely 1) 50% of the height... 

The membrane bioreactor (MBR) as an alternative method for simultaneous biodegradation and separation of oily water has received more attention, recently. Normally the MBR works at ambient temperature; therefore, the yield of biodegradation recalcitrant components is low. Increasing temperature improves the efficiency of degradation and reduces the amount of produced sludge. In this study the performance of an aerobic thermophilic and mesophilic membrane bioreactor (MBR) for treating oily wastewater has been investigated. In batch conditions (without applying the membrane), a comparison between COD removal in mesophilic and thermophilic conditions was done. In thermophilic conditions COD and... 

Biodegradation has always been as a proper method for treatment of oil contamination. Accordingly, several investigations have been done by mesophilic bacteria for biodegradation of hydrocarbons while few studies have been conducted about thermophilic bacteria.
There are many factors like high growth rate of thermophilic bacteria and good resistance of enzymes secreted from thermophiles against physical and chemical variations lead to the extensive use of thermophilic bacteria for removal of oil contamination. The important factors should be optimized in order to choose a suitable method for the removal of oil contaminations. Optimal conditions for oil contamination removal by... 

Relative permeability is an important factor that controls the two phase fluid flow in porous media. The use of carbon dioxide in enhanced oil recovery methods is common. But the question is, how does the carbon dioxide affect the relative permeability curves? In this thesis, the CO2-oil relative permeability is measured in CO2 flooding process with unsteady state method. For this purpose, the core flooding apparatus is used and the results are compared with N2-oil relative permeability in N2 flooding. The results of comparison show that oil relative permeability in CO2 flooding is higher than N2 flooding. Reduction of Interfacial tension and oil viscosity, solubility of CO2 in oil and oil... 

In this research the risk of oil price for Iran and Opec basket is studied. Several methods in order to estimate Value at Risk (VaR) such as Standard Historical Simulation, Historical Simulation with Autoregressive Forecast, Historical Simulation with moving average forecast, and ARMA are examined. The experiment is performed based on daily oil prices, from January 2005 to December 2009. The data is divided into two smaller time periods. The first, from 2005 to 2008, was used to estimate the model coefficients. The second part of data, i.e., the data gathered in 2009, was used for forecasting purposes. The result of experiment show that Historical Simulation with Autoregressive Forecasts... 

The effects of biosurfactants on sandstone rocks are known in the literature. However, there are few examples of experimental works in Iranian carbonate reservoirs dealing with the effects of biosurfactants under reservoir conditions. This thesis discusses the effect of an efficient biosurfactant produced from Pseudomonas aeroginosa MRo1, a bacterial strain isolated from oil excavation areas in southern Iran, on the recovery of residual oil trapped within carbonate rocks was investigated. The MRO1 could reduce surface tension from 72 to 28 dyne/cm. It also could reduce Interfacial tension from 18.382 to 5.646 dyne/cm.
In a core holder set-up bearing four limestone- and... 

There are a lot of Fractured reservoirs around the world that have large portion of oil production. These reservoirs have complex structure and fractures have important role in production but the remaining oil in matrix causes that the oil recovery decreases. One of the most important factors in these reservois are wettability. Because most of the fractured reservoirs are oil wet and water injection process in these reservoirs are not effective and chemical EOR methods such as surfactant flooding method is used. Surfactant improve oil recovery by two reasons: 1- reduction of interfacial tension between oil and water . 2-Wettability alteration of matrix. The porpose of this project is... 

After primary and secondary recovery processes more than 50 percent of oil remains in reservoirs. Therefore for more recovery from these reservoirs, methods of enhanced oil recovery should be applied.In this paper the effect of nanoparticles of SiO2 in size of 14 nm, on wettability is investigated. Using this nanoparticle, the wettability of carbonate rock in reservoirs could be changed and alter from oil-wet or mix-wet to water-wet. To assess this, hydrophilic changes of sandstone core and carbonate core are studied using the contact angle test. The same test is done on the carbonate core saturated with brine and oil that had received injection with brine and nanoparticles of SiO2 with two... 

This research was done in order to test the capability of endemic microorganisms in treating hydro-carbonic pollutants found in the soil specimens of Assaluye industrial region. To find the optimum conditions for treating the contaminations, we tried several amounts of substrate as well as temperature and humidity. The total concentration of hydrocarbon compounds in polluted soil samples was measured by both infrared spectrometry and gas chromatography, in treatment process after extraction. The results show that, having 50mg substrate per 1kg of contaminated soil added and keeping humidity at 11%, in a 60-days course the level of initial pollution decreased by 60%. 10 degrees increase in... 

In this study, the effect of oil price shocks on stock markets is examined for Iran and Norway as two oil-exporting countries. To do this, an unrestricted Vector Auto-regression model is applied based on monthly data from April 2001 to March 2011. The variables used in the model are Brent oil price shocks, interest rate, consumer price index and stock returns. To find the relationship between oil price shocks and stock markets and determine the effects of oil shocks on stock markets, impulse-response analysis and variance decomposition are employed. To compare the effects of positive and negative oil price shocks, a Chi-square test is used. The proposed model is applied on different types of... 

In this project, a comprehensive model is developed for energy and exergy analysis in refineries. By studying Tehran’s North Refinery unit as a case study, the Reference Energy System as the conceptual model of the thesis and also Energy & Exergy Balance table is prepared. Through the exergy balance table, the Exergy efficiency defined. These factors help to settle priority for efficiency improvement investment. Then, the economic and technical relations and costraints are formulized using linear programming model. In this model, the CO2 emission and exergy destruction costs are intended. Using Energy System Model (ESM) software, the thesis model is advanced as RESM stands for Refinery... 

Today, due to limited number of light oil reservoirs, enhanced recovery from heavy oil reservoirs is taken into consideration. During the early production from heavy oil reservoirs, due to high viscosity, only a small amount (about 5%) of the oil can be produced; also after water injection operation due to unfavorable mobility ratio of water and oil, sorely more than about 10% of the original oil can be produced. On the other hand, fractured reservoirs represent about 20% of the world's oil reserves, while over 60% of the world's remaining oil reserves are in fractured reservoirs. Water flooding process leaves very high amounts of oil as remaining oil in these reservoirs too. One of the... 

Interfacial Tension (IFT) behavior of crude oil/CO2 system is recognized as the main factor affecting the efficiency of CO2 flooding during enhanced oil recovery (EOR) process. Adding paraffin group hydrocarbon to asphaltenic crude oils as an asphaltene precipitant component is aimed to mimic asphaltene precipitation process during crude oil production and transportation. Asphaltene precipitation would critically effects the IFT behavior of crude oil/CO2 systems. In the first part of this study, the equilibrium densities of oil samples which contain different heptane ratio were measured at different pressures and the temperature of 323 K. Then, the equilibrium IFT between CO2 and the crude...