The exploration, production, and environmental biotechnology of petroleum are all topics covered in the Journal of Petroleum & Environmental Biotechnology. Petroleum exploration and production involves extracting hydrocarbons from the earth's underground reservoirs with the aid of several different disciplines, including petroleum geology, drilling, reservoir simulation, reservoir engineering, completions, and oil and gas facilities engineering. Crude oil or natural gas are two of the available forms of the hydrocarbons that were generated. Environmental engineering is a method for integrating science and engineering that can be used to enhance the quality of the environment, including the air, water, and land.

Rhamnolipids are amphipathic molecules with surface activities that lower surface tensions. At ambient temperature and atmospheric pressure, they may lower water's surface tension from 72 mN/m to values below 30 mN/m, and their critical micellar concentrations range from 50 to 200 mg/L. In line with this, they have a great deal of potential to boost residual oil recovery, IFT reduction, and wettability alteration, making them one of the most significant research subjects in the MEOR sector.Despite the fact that rhamnolipids have a wide range of industrial applications and benefits like high biodegradability, structural diversity, and low toxicity, despite 65 years of research and attempts at process optimization since the first rhamnolipid was described, they are still not widely used in industry due to their high cost.

Rhamnolipids are synthesised in different ways depending on the microbial strains, carbon source, and culture conditions. Rhamnolipids are typically assumed to be created by microbes that break down hydrocarbons because their amphipathic properties are necessary for bacteria to absorb and use hydrophobic hydrocarbons as a carbon source . Over the past few decades, numerous rhamnolipid-producing strains have been identified and characterised. Pseudomonas aeruginosa is still the most capable producer of rhamnolipids among the strains that are currently available. However, P. aeruginosa's intricate gene regulation poses a problem for industrial production, which has been the focus of an increasing number of studies.

Possibile approaches based on metabolic engineering for rhamnolipid production improvement, such as strain alterations by overexpression of the key genes and raise the copy numbers of the important genes, were examined to help in the development of rhamnolipid synthetic processes in P. aeruginosa. Moreover, numerous reports exist demonstrating that the production and structural characterization of this secondary metabolite is dependent on the composition of the microbial growth medium, such as the carbon and nitrogen sources, as well as the expression levels of the key enzymes for rhamnolipid. These studies on factors affecting rhamnolipid production have been carried out to explore safe and affordable methods aiming at their large-scale production based on renewable resources.