Deposition of high molecular weight paraffin on the inner wall of subsea production and transportation pipelines continues to be a critical operational problems faced by the petroleum industry. The accumulation of the deposited material on the inner wall of the lines may lead to increased pumping power, decreased flow rate or even to the total blockage of the line, with loss of production and capital investment. In the present work a critical review of the literature on wax deposition was conducted leading to the conclusion that there is not enough experimental evidence to determine which are the relevant mechanisms responsible for wax deposition. Based on the conclusions of the literature search, experimental studies and numerical simulations were conducted. The focus of the work was on simple, basic studies that were able to contribute to the understanding of the relative importance of the deposition mechanisms. The experiments on deposition cavities containing stagnant fluids and in laminar flow through channels yielded temporal and spatial distributions of paraffin deposits not yet available. A molecular-diffusion-based model developed underestimated the deposit thickness for the stagnant cavity. The results obtained were not sufficient to corroborate the hyphotesis that the wax deposition process is controlled by molecular diffusion.