Energy, Petroleum, and Biofuels: Instrumentation and Applications

This Monday morning session will cover a variety of issues in petroleum and biofuel analysis. It will be chaired by Carolyn Hutchinson of Willamette University and will be held in Ballroom 6DE from 8:30 to 10:30 a.m.

The first presentation in this session will be given by Florian Albrieux of IFPEN Solaize and is titled “Molecular Level Insights in Heavy Gas Oil Hydrodenitrogenation by Fourier Transform Ion Cyclotron Resonance Mass Spectrometry.” Albrieux will discuss how FT-ICR-MS can be used to investigate hydrotreating effluents, probing the reactivity of basic and neutral species in gasoil fractions.

Next, Maha Abutokaikah of the University of Missouri-St. Louis will present a talk titled “Aromatic Core Formation and Side Chain Losses from Series of Isomeric Model Compounds of Petroleum: Energetics and Practical Applications.” This presentation will discuss combined high-level fragmentation energetics from theory for a systematic series of isomeric model petroleum compounds.

The next presentation, to be given by Martha Chacón-Patiño of the the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory in Tallahassee, Florida, is titled “Advances in Asphaltene Petroleomics: Overcoming Limitations in Selective Ionization to Reveal the Structural Continuum of Island and Archipelago Motifs.” This talk will address the controversy of island versus archipelago by separation of asphaltenes into fractions with similar monomer ion yields.

Sophia Schreckenbach of Mount Royal University in Calgary, Ontario, Canada, will then present a talk titled “Characterization of NAFCs in Laboratory Constructed Wetlands by GCxGC/HRMS and FTMS.” Her presentation will report on the complementary use of the two techniques for the temporal profiling of naphthenic acid fraction compounds within oil sands process water exposed to a laboratory constructed wetland.

The penultimate presentation in this session, titled “Compositional Analysis of Low and High Volatility Species within a Bio-Oil and Its Esterified Product,” will be given by Diana Catalina Palacio Lozano of the University of Warwick in Coventry, UK. Her talk will discuss the use of GC-APCI FT-ICR MS and direct infusion ESI FT-ICR MS techniques to characterize the bio-oil components.

The session’s final presentation will be given by Curtis Mowry of Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The talk, titled “Detecting and Identifying Volatile Chemical Signatures of Algae Pond Crash,” will describe the use of thermal desorption GC–MS to examine volatile organic compounds from cultures grown in standard biofuel pond conditions.