What is it about?
Each petroleum is an extremely complex mixture comprising hundreds of thousands of different chemicals, most of which have yet to be identified. Here we sequentially isolated some compounds from this 'unresolved complex mixture' sufficiently well to obtain 'fingerprint' mass spectra to tentatively identify them.
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Why is it important?
Some of the, as yet, unidentified chemicals in petroleum may have uses as geochemical biomarkers or applications in other scientific fields.
Perspectives
Interestingly, whilst this work was aimed at identifying novel chemicals, it also allowed us to estimate that the total number of chemicals in this crude oil was around 250,000, which may be typical for black (biodegraded) oils.
Dr Paul A Sutton
University of Plymouth
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Isolation of individual hydrocarbons from the unresolved complex hydrocarbon mixture of a biodegraded crude oil using preparative capillary gas chromatography, Organic Geochemistry, June 2005, Elsevier,
DOI: 10.1016/j.orggeochem.2004.11.007.
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