Petroleomics

The science dedicated to the chemical characterization of petroleum is known as “Petroleomics”. Crude oil is considered one of the most complex organic mixtures in the world and it has a great economic value associated with it. Thus, it is essential to study petroleum and its fractions at molecular level for correlation and prediction of properties of the products as well as the processability of the feeds. Mass spectrometry has proved to be an efficient technique for the analysis of petroleum. The characterization is possible mainly because of efficient ionization techniques available for large molecules (e. g. ESI, APCI, and APPI) and as a result of mass spectrometers with ultrahigh resolution power (e.g. FT-ICR MS and Orbitrap). In addition, mass spectrometry allows the identification of thousand compounds in a single analysis.