Petroleum Business Review

Abstract This study aims to map the knowledge structure and elucidate the research trends related to the “sustainable supply chain” in the petrochemical industry. To this end, a total of 906 documents indexed in the Scopus database from 2000 to 2025 were collected and subjected to bibliometric analysis using VOSviewer and Biblioshiny tools. The results indicate that the scientific output in this field has experienced significant growth since 2010 and reached a maturity stage after 2019. Collaboration network analysis highlights the prominent role of the United States, the United Kingdom, and China in shaping the literature of this domain, alongside the gradually increasing contributions of countries such as Iran, Malaysia, and Brazil. Co-occurrence analysis of keywords reveals several established thematic clusters and interdisciplinary linkages among engineering, management, and environmental studies. By providing a comprehensive overview of the intellectual, conceptual, and social structure of the field, the findings of this study can serve as a foundation for guiding future research and supporting practical decision-making aimed at enhancing sustainability in the petrochemical supply chain.

Abstract This article examines public liability and administrative accountability for environmental and climate risks and harms in Iran’s oil and gas sector. It explains how recurrent harms, including oil pollution, industrial accidents, and chronic air-quality crises, are intensified by regulatory omissions and fragmented institutional mandates. The study clarifies when governmental bodies and state-owned operators may bear responsibility not only for polluting conduct, but also for failures of prevention, supervision, and timely response. Using doctrinal legal analysis combined with institutional governance analysis, it maps the interaction between constitutional and statutory environmental duties, civil and criminal liability tools, and administrative-law mechanisms for challenging unlawful inaction. The findings suggest that Iran’s framework contains significant formal safeguards, yet accountability is often weakened by overlapping competences, under-enforcement, and evidentiary barriers in proving omission-based causation and attribution. Judicial review of administrative inaction provides an important corrective, but it rarely suffices to internalize environmental costs or deter systematic negligence. Drawing brief comparative insights, the article argues that effective governance requires clearer allocation of duties, enforceable standards of diligence for public authorities, and credible oversight capable of triggering corrective action before harm becomes irreversible. It proposes targeted reforms, notably codifying a “public duty of care,” strengthening coordination and transparency, widening access to remedies against manifest non-performance, and establishing an independent oversight function to reduce blame-shifting and improve compliance. To avoid conceptual overbreadth, the article distinguishes direct oil-and-gas environmental incidents from air-pollution and climate-related harms, using the latter only where they illuminate the common problem of omission-based public accountability.

Abstract : Organizational performance is an important factor of the success of companies, organizations and businesses. Adapting an organizational model which fits appropriately with the context of an organization further increases the performance and in turn increases the success rate of that firm. Though there have been propositions for the adaption of certain universal frameworks, they aren't generally applicable to all organizations; the oil and gas industry, displaying unique organizational features requires a specific model to tend to its extreme conditions. This paper proposes customizing Weisbord's Six-Box Model (WSBM) in the context of the oil and gas industry, reviewing the unique organizational conditions of the oil and gas industry and the proper components required for an organizational model to measure the compatibility of the WSBM with the oil and gas industry. The findings depict a contextualized WSBM, the potential benefits of the WSBM and the challenges facing the adaption of the model into the oil and gas industry.

Abstract In the context of the energy transition and increasingly stringent climate policies, understanding oil demand requires a product-specific perspective that goes beyond aggregate indicators. This study examines naphtha, a key feedstock linking the refining and petrochemical sectors, and analyzes the factors associated with its demand across ten major oil-consuming countries during 2000–2024. Using long-term panel data, naphtha prices are first modeled as a function of crude oil prices through an ARMA specification, after which a naphtha demand equation is estimated with cross-section fixed effects and a lagged dependent variable. The results indicate that naphtha demand is significantly associated with economic growth and downstream petrochemical product prices, especially olefins and aromatics. The positive and statistically significant lagged demand term suggests persistence and gradual adjustment in consumption, consistent with structural inertia in petrochemical feedstock use. Overall, the findings suggest that the energy transition may reshape the composition of oil demand rather than lead to a uniform decline across all petroleum products. The results provide policy-relevant insights for product-specific energy-transition strategies, refinery reconfiguration, and refinery–petrochemical integration, while underscoring that the estimated relationships should be interpreted as conditional associations rather than causal effects.