This article links up the disastrous history of fossil fuels with the celebrated ecology of mangroves. Building on ethnographic and historical research in Puerto Rico and St. Croix, it outlines the often neglected but quite consequential place of crude oil in the Caribbean. Following the construction of what became the second largest refinery in the world, I describe how the imperial energy networks of the United States first came to the Caribbean. Troubling a popular origin story of the Caribbean, colonial and industry leaders voiced a robust critique of the plantation in order to justify the introduction of these enclave refineries. Imperial energy networks welcomed an unprecedented problem to the region: coastal oil spills. The scientific and legal response to these spills brought new attention to the vital relationality of mangroves. Rather perversely, the destruction of the mangroves in the Caribbean—in which crude oil played the leading role—opened mangroves up to new forms of knowledge and care. While many claim that fossil fuels helped cultivate a modern disregard for the natural world, I show how the negative ecologies of fossil fuels also instigated new scientific and political appreciations for the liveliness of the natural world. This story of oil in the Caribbean has implications for scholarly debates around the so-called Anthropocene. Against scholarship that looks at the coming disaster of crude oil as an epochal break in thought and politics, this paper instead describes the long history of acknowledging and managing the disastrous qualities of fossil fuels.

The objective of this experiment was to replace soya bean oil with glycerol in laying hen diets and assess the change’s effect on performance, parameters of egg quality and the egg fatty acid profile. A total of 60 44-week-old Hy-Line W36 laying hens were distributed according to a completely randomised experimental design into four treatments consisting of glycerol substitutions for soya bean oil dietary at varying inclusion levels (0%, 25%, 50% and 75%), with five replicates of three birds each. Dietary treatments had no significant effect on BW change, egg production, feed intake, feed conversion ratio, egg weight and egg mass of laying hens. The inclusion of glycerol in the diet of laying hens had no significant effect on egg specific gravity, eggshell breaking strength, eggshell weight, eggshell thickness, egg shape index, albumen index, yolk index, haugh unit, albumen pH, yolk pH and egg yolk colour values. The inclusion of glycerol in the diet of laying hens had no significant effect on palmitic, palmitoleic, stearic, oleic and linolenic acid contents of the egg yolk. The linoleic acid and polyunsaturated fatty acid contents of the egg yolk significantly decreased with the higher levels of dietary glycerol supplementation (P<0.05). The results of this study show that it is possible to replace 75% of soya bean oil (4.5% in diet) with glycerol.

Exchange rates have long been thought to have an important impact on the export and import of goods and services, and, thus, exchange rates are expected to influence the price of those products that are traded. At the same time, energy impacts commodity production in some very important ways. The use of chemical and petroleum derived inputs has increased in agriculture over time; the prices of these critical inputs, then, would be expected to alter supply, and, therefore, the prices of commodities using these inputs. Also, agricultural commodities have been increasingly used to produce energy, thereby leading to an expectation of a linkage between energy and commodity markets. In this paper, we examine the price relationship through time of the primary agricultural commodities, exchange rates, and oil prices. Using overlapping time periods, we examine the cointegration relationship between prices to determine changes in the strength of the linkage between markets through time. In general, we find that commodity prices are linked to oil for corn, cotton, and soybeans, but not for wheat, and that exchange rates do play a role in the linkage of prices over time.

This paper explores empirically the causes of extreme fluctuations in commodity prices from January 1990 to June 2010 and seeks to identify the relative contribution of advanced and emerging market economies to the changes in commodity prices. Our assumption is that analyzing two very distinct goods—crude oil and fine wine—helps to identify common determinants of commodity prices. We find that the growth rate of global aggregate demand is the key macroeconomic determinant of the fluctuations in both crude oil and fine wine prices over the sample period. While advanced economies account for more than half of global consumption, emerging market and developing economies make up the bulk of the incremental change in demand, thereby having a greater weight in commodity price formation. The coefficient of emerging market industrial output growth is about three times as high as that of advanced economies in oil price regressions and almost five times as powerful in fine wine price regressions. The results also show that the shift in the composition of aggregate commodity demand is a recent phenomenon. (JEL Classifications: Q11, Q39, Q41, Q43)

This study applies a multivariate model to examine the dynamics of mean and volatility transmission between fine wine and crude oil prices using daily observations from January 2004 to December 2011. The results suggest that the crude oil mean determines the wine market. In each series, volatility persistence is high and significant; innovations in each market seem to include figures that are valuable to risk managers seeking to predict volatility in other markets. During the financial crisis of 2008, wine and oil conditional volatilities climbed but then returned to their overall pre-crisis levels. (JEL Classifications: G11, G15, Q14, Q40)

In this paper we investigate the effects of oil price uncertainty and its asymmetry on real economic activity in the United States, in the context of a bivariate vector autoregression with GARCH-in-mean errors. The model allows for the possibilities of spillovers and asymmetries in the variance–covariance structure for real output growth and the change in the real price of oil. Our measure of oil price uncertainty is the conditional variance of the oil price–change forecast error. We isolate the effects of volatility in the change in the price of oil and its asymmetry on output growth and employ simulation methods to calculate generalized impulse response functions and volatility impulse response functions to trace the effects of independent shocks on the conditional means and the conditional variances, respectively, of the variables. We find that oil price uncertainty has a negative effect on output, and that shocks to the price of oil and its uncertainty have asymmetric effects on output.

Natural radionuclide concentrations in soil samples collected within and around crude oilflow and gas compression stations in the Niger Delta, Nigeria, were determined usinggamma-ray spectroscopy. The mean activity concentrations of 40K,238U and 232Th varied from 30.1 ± 3.0 to 59.0 ± 17.1, BDL to 8.8 ±2.3 and 7.9 ± 3.7 to 10.9 ± 1.9 Bq.kg-1, respectively. The 40K,238U and 232Th contents of the soil samples are very low comparedwith the world average for natural background area. The absorbed dose rate and effectivedose ranged from 6.9 to 11.1 nGy.h-1 and 8.5 to 13.6 μSv.y-1,respectively. The annual gonadal dose equivalent rate ranged from 48.9 to 77.5μSv.y-1, which is lower than the world average of 0.30 mSv.y-1.The radium equivalent activity and the external hazard index of the soil samples werebelow the recommended limits of 370 Bq.kg-1 and unity, respectively. Theresults obtained reveal that there is no significant radiation hazard due to naturalradionuclides of the soil samples in the studied areas.

The crude oil is a non-Newtonian fluid exhibiting, during its flow, phenomena which cannot be described with the traditional models which consider the fluid as homogeneous. Thus, it is necessary to use or develop a more realistic approach which can take into account the microstructure characteristics of crude oils in the law of behaviour. The application of a non-linear differential model in the case of crude oil flow can not be used. This paper deals with the modelling approach resulting from rheology of the polymer solutions. The Modified Phan-Thien and Tanner model (MPTT) is considered in this paper for an axisymmetric flow in a pipe. The shear stresses calculation with this model is an important step as it allows to study subsequently some important phenomena as the corrosion or the pressure drop which is controlled by the friction factor under turbulent flow conditions. The calculations were about different crude oils and the obtained results are compared to experiments. Some discussions are given.