Development of methods for isolation and compositional evaluation of acid species present in oils, emulsions, and produced waters using two-dimensional comprehensive gas chromatography coupled with mass spectrometry (GC×GC-MS)

We have developed filtering scripts based on accurate masses to automate and simplify GC×GC-MS data handling. These scripts were built to perform group-type analysis of 154 naphthenic acids’ classes in complex mixtures, such as produced water samples. The best performance was obtained for tert-butyldimethylsilyl derivatives with electron ionization, which generated reproducible fragmentation patterns and high-intensity even-electron ions, resulting in high rates of true-positives, over 98 % and 88 % for the reference and unknown PW samples, respectively. This study will be important for compositional evaluation since the scripts have provided faster and more reliable data handling than the contemporary petroleomics approach.