Developing Innovative Mass-Spectrometry Method for Petroleum Crude from Various Oil-Field Samples

Over the last few decades, the growing demand for environmentally friendly technologies to screen the composition of petrochemicals constituents in crude oil samples. Composition of polar residues such as sulfur, organic acids, and isosteric oxygens (Furans) produced an undesirable effect in the petroleum process industry. Crude oil is a very complex molecule, molecular profiling is very challenging, and it consists of more than a few hundreds of compounds. Understanding the composition of crude oil will help to design the refining process and maturity of the production well. Current analytical technologies require to vary tedious sample preparation techniques with selective instrument configuration to quantitate the composition of crude oil samples. Profiling techniques reported in the literature requires multifunctional extraction, followed by a various instrumental analytical approach. Among the instrumental analysis mass spectrometry plays a crucial role in small molecular identification. Large molecular aromatic compounds are challenging to ionize in mass spectrometry which includes: asphaltene and porphyrins. Herein, for the first time, a single step analytical method is proposed using double laser-assisted mass spectrometry, namely L2MS for the identification of molecules in Arabian crude oil. This customized instrument designed by Prof. Richard Zare, Stanford University at the chemistry department. The proposed topic is significant to the Kingdom and the Middle East.