Petrochemicals – Multimedia

Purpose: Exploring the possibility to perform a quantitative determination of dissolved gases in water in a reliable and accurate way. Methods: The quantification of dissolved gases is performed by building a calibration curve spiking blank water samples with increasing quantities of saturated water followed by headspace sampling and GC/ FID analysis. Results: The results show good correlation factors and limit of quantification lower than 10ppb for the four gas analyzed.

GC-HRT is an indispensable tool for complex sample analysis.
-Accurate mass measurements can be leveraged to calculate robust chemical formulae
-A workflow that includes complementary EI and CI-HRT analysis results for rigorous compound indentification

These results show the utility of high resolution time-of-flight mass spectrometry with high mass accuracy for comprehensive petroleomic studies. GC-HRT MS is especially useful for adding structural information in the analysis of complex samples like crude oil.

Py-GC-HRTOFMS analysis with high resolution and high mass accuracy is crucial for identification of crude oil and asphaltene pyrolysis products by unequivocal chemical formula assignment, with enhancement of sensitivity and selectivity. Analysis of petroleum and respective asphaltene fractions from diverse geographical origins are under evaluation as part of future work.

In order to help understand the impact that the oil spill has caused, laboratories are looking for rapid and robust analytical procedures to characterize the hydrocarbon contaminants. This work provides SPE, GPC, GC-FID, GC/MS, and HPLC analytical methods for analyzing the most common contaminants that originated from the leak.