The potential to illegitimately collect subsidies through the sale of fossil fuel as counterfeit bio-based fuel was created with the introduction of federal tax subsidies for bio-originated fuels. In addition, renewable diesel created from hydrotreating (refinery based hydrogenation) fats and oils to remove metals, oxygen, and nitrogen become similar to petroleum-based diesel and meet the same specifications. This potential for counterfeiting has created a need for methods to determine the presence or absence of bio-originated fuel in a sample is of interest.<br/>The method of Liquid Scintillation Counting (LSC) has the potential to differentiate between fossil and bio-originated fuels in a mixed sample due to the absence of <sup>14</sup>C in fossil fuel as a result of decay. This method has been previously studied for determination of bio-originated fuel and was investigated as a simple method of distinguishing bio-originated and petroleum based fuels. Despite being an effective method for some mixed fuel samples, samples with quenching effects resulting from either chemical or color interference in the solution – which reduces the light emitted from the LSC cocktail – were found to result in skewed data. To allow for the analysis of quenched samples, a Modified Direct LSC method was developed which incorporates internal spiking along with sample preparation techniques for the determination of the percent bio-originated fuel content in samples which exhibit varying amounts of quenching. The modified method was found to be accurate in determining the percent bio-originated fuel to within 5% of the actual value for samples with quenching effects as large as 43%.

Determination of bio-originated fuel content using a modified direct LSC method in the presence of quenching

253rd National Meeting (2017)

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