Most of the world’s heavy crude oil resources, equal in size to our global conventional oil resources, are located in the western hemisphere, making them a strategic resource for our national security by providing independence from middle east oil. Yet, fully utilizing them is a significant technical challenge, in part because of the metals including Ni, V, and Fe, that are present in crude oil. The metal contaminants in these liquids poison catalysts used to refine them, corrode equipment, and contaminate the environment during their consumption (similarly to the lead fuel additives of the past). As consumption of resources pushes us towards less desirable oil sources, we will be looking to ways to use other carbonaceous fuels, including heavy crude oils, and gas condensates that often contain mercury and arsenic. We need new research tools to identify the metal contaminants in these fuels. Here, we describe progress towards creating a new research instrument to separate and measure the metal analytes of low relative abundance in petroleum, leveraging the power of synchrotron x-ray fluorescence which allows us to explore materials at concentrations that cannot be interrogated with bench-top instrumentation.

Combining separation science and synchrotron X-ray fluorescence for fuels

249th National Meeting (2015)

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