Master of Science

thesisOil and gas industry is one of the most crucial industries powering the modern world. Billions of dollars have been invested into the science of petroleum extraction. Yet, due to the constraints of sample collection, very few techniques for in-situ petroleum quality assignment exist. This study develops a method of economic and efficient characterization of in-situ petroleum. The pyrolysis machine HAWKâ„¢ is used to build a temperature-based method to understand the hydrocarbon molecules using their boiling points. A set of experiments and simulations were performed on a suite of rocks to build a novel technology to predict American Petroleum Institute (API) gravity of petroleum in the rocks. Simulations of the experiments were also performed. These simulations were used to understand and highlight different relationships between oil densities and their boiling points. In this study, while a correlation between density and boiling point of hydrocarbon molecules was observed, prediction of API gravity strictly with boiling point data turned out to be inadequate. Fortunately, the refractive index was found to be the parameter bridging the gap between experimental values of boiling points of residual petroleum in the rock and density