The study of sulfur compounds for oils fingerprinting application

Abstract

Oil spills are one of the serious problems to marine and coastal environment worldwide. Besides the known incidents, a number of oil spills are unknown, which may come from both accident and unauthorized drainage. Moreover, the spills cause tarball to arise on the beach and the origin of tarballs are still subtle. Thus, the development of oil fingerprinting is important in order to identify the origin of oil spills and tarballs. Generally, the current standard technique is using GCxGC-TOFMS to analyze the biomarker compounds in oil such as hopane groups. However, this technique is expensive and requires long time for analysis. Beside the hopane groups, the sulfur compounds in oil is the other groups which can be used as biomarkers for oil fingerprinting application. The sulfur compounds in oil are present in various types with a different amount depending on the source of oil. In this study, the new sulfur compounds distribution technique is developed by using GC-SCD instrument. This technique is cheaper and easier for analysis as compared to GCxGC-TOFMS. Moreover, the sulfur compound ratio is calculated and then created the correlation. The result from GCSCD chromatogram shows a similar pattern of fresh and weathered oil samples. In addition, the GC-SCD chromatogram can differentiate each type of crude oil and fuel oil samples. Thus, the sulfur compounds distribution technique can be used to support the oil spill identification. Furthermore, the sulfur compound species which used for oil fingerprinting are identified to be C2-alkylated dibenzothiophene groups.