Development of Selective Tools for the Analysis of Heavy Crude Oil Components

Dear Colleagues,

Fossil materials have accompanied us for several thousand years. They have served as feedstock for a wide range of chemical compounds and – mostly – as a source of energy for heating, lighting and transportation. Today, crude oils are the dominating resource for transportation fuels and other products, with heavy crudes, including oil sands, gaining more and more importance. Despite the long-lasting utilization and the vast amount of knowledge gained in the past years, in many cases made possible through instrumental developments, crude oils and other fossil materials such as coal still exhibit large white spots when it comes to the molecular details: What compounds are actually present? Which ones are responsible for problems such as instability? How can these be removed, altered or their adverse effects be reduced? What happens during unwanted process reactions when feedstocks are upgraded? Is it possible to understand such effects when using modern and sophisticated analytical methods? On the other side, what happens to the components of these super-complex mixtures, once they are exposed to the environment? And in the end data obtained from complex analyses need to be processed and interpreted. What are necessary tools for data mining?

Answers to these and many other questions require a thorough chemical analysis of such materials, an analysis that, unfortunately, is often impeded by the complexity of the very sample. Solving such problems necessitates sophisticated methods, adequate instrumentation and an intelligent design of experiments.

In this special issue we invite interested researchers to submit original research papers as well as review articles on any topic that discusses aspects of the analysis of fossil energy materials, especially heavy crude oils. Some examples for relevant papers: instrumental developments and their implementation for fossil material analysis, chemical reactions like derivatization, work-up methods for sample simplification, separation of constituents, computerized methods for data evaluation, etc.

Our goal is to collect a state-of-the-art picture of what is now possible and also of what is currently not possible in the analysis of fossil materials, their constituents and especially the structures of these constituents. It is hoped that this collection of papers will give an overview of current fore-front research in this area.

We would like to invite all of you who are interested in this project to join us in providing this overview of new scientific achievements on this important topic.

Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Schrader
Prof. Dr. Jan T. Andersson
Dr. Alessandro Vetere
Guest Editors

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• Crude oil analysis
• Analytical method development
• Chemical changes in crude oil mixtures
• Data analysis