Review of Spectrometric Techniques for the Characterization of Crude Oil and Petroleum Products

In the recent years the stringent environmental requirements and the potential for depleting oil reserves have posed many challenging problems for the petroleum industry. Dealing with these challenges calls for better process monitoring, quality control and in many cases choosing or designing new processes. Knowledge of the chemical composition and physical properties of the feedstocks and the products are essential for this purpose. The makeup of the hydrocarbon products requires a careful balance among the components and a reproducible consistency of the resultant mixtures. Hence, it is important to be able to determine quickly and reliably the amount and quantity of critical chemical components present in the process streams. Conventional methods such as octane number by the ASTM knock engine method or vapor pressure by the Gabner method are time consuming and often expensive to maintain. With recent advances in instrumentation and computing facilities, spectrometric methods offer a great potential for fast and reliable characterization of crude oil and it's products. The objective of the present paper is to review the spectrometric techniques, which have been used for characterization of the crude oil and various petroleum products, with the goal of providing advanced and responsive tools for process measurements.