Chapter - Oil Spill Fingerprinting - Identification of Crude Oil Source of Contamination

Abstract

Source identification of oil with its thousands of compounds has always been a great challenge for analytical chemists. With the significant improvements in analytical instrumentation and work-up techniques this challenge has started to become possible to overcome. Lately, the development of new mass spectrometry techniques and the increased sensitivity of the instruments have made it possible to analyze a big fraction of compounds found in oil in one single analysis. The analytical field conducting oil fingerprinting is now commonly referred to as petroleomics. The main focus of this chapter is directed towards how analyses are used in environmental investigations at present and how the technology can be used in the future for oil spill forensics.

Keywords: Analytical chemistry, Crude oil, Mass spectrometry (MS), Oil fingerprinting, Petroleomics, Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs).

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