Fingerprinting of oil-spills in a petroleum refinery using Gel Permeation Chromatography (GPC) and Principal Component Analysis (PCA)

Summarization: Crude oil and refining products are the most frequent contaminants, found in the environment. The rapid determination of their spills and the reliable identification (fingerprinting) of their sources are important topics in environmental studies. Fingerprinting involves appropriate sampling and analytical procedures in conjunction with data analysis and interpretation techniques. A wide variety of analytical methods have been employed. Gas chromatography is the most widely used method, while multivariate statistical methods, like Principal Components Analysis (PCA), discriminant function analysis and cluster analysis are commonly employed for data treatment and interpretation. In this work two analytical methods – gas chromatography and gel permeation chromatography (GPC) – were used to fingerprint 18 free phase samples obtained from different locations in the subsurface of a Greek oil refinery. PCA was applied on the obtained analytical data, with the aim to identify groups of samples with similar compositional characteristics. Both techniques led to similar conclusions, concerning the distribution of petroleum fractions in the refinery subsurface. GPC found to be a convenient analytical technique in fingerprinting applications of oils, especially for heavy petroleum fractions and can be employed as a reliable alternative to the GC analysis.Παρουσιάστηκε στο: 1st International Conference, Advances in Mineral Resources Management and Environmental Geotechnolog