Fingerprinting Crude Oils and Tarballs using Biomarkers and Comprehensive Two-Dimensional Gas Chromatography

Petroleum biomarkers are “molecular fossils” that can be analyzed with gas chromatography to fingerprint crude oil. Fingerprints can then be used to determine the source oil for an oil spill or highly weathered tarballs. This application note describes the GCxGC-TOFMS analysis of 43 different biomarker ratios in several crude oils from various regions and also in tarballs that washed ashore on the gulf coast of Florida up to a year after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill of 2010.