What’s in an Oil Drop?

Cracking the Code

Let’s say you’re contemplating drilling for oil far out at sea – an increasingly familiar scenario to oil companies that have exploited all the easily accessible reserves. This undersea stash will be awfully difficult – and expensive – to get to. Is it worth it?

A group member working in the ICR facilities.

To find out, you extract a drop of it and send it to the MagLab. After all, it was here that the micro-analytical study of these substances – petroleomics – was born.

To you, all crude oil might look, smell and feel the same. And in fact, all crude oil is made up mostly of hydrocarbons, molecules of carbon and hydrogen. But on a molecular level, there can be tremendous differences. There are many types of hydrocarbons, for example. Crude oil contains varying amounts of nitrogen, sulfur, nickel and other elements, as well. The makeup depends on where, and under what pressures and temperature, it was formed, as well as the types of plants that decomposed to make it.

In fact, crude oil is supremely complex – one sample might contain more than 30,000 different chemical substances. Those molecules harbor important information – about the sample’s tendency to rust steel pipes or to clog them (corrosivity), for example, or what makes it form an emulsion with water. A close look at the content of sulfur, a pollutant, in the oil would indicate how difficult it would be to get rid of. Having such detailed chemical profiles of crude oil could also help pinpoint the origin of a spill.

Next Page Weighing In

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | Links