The Carbon Stable Isotopes Features Of Oil Spill Fingerprints

Nowadays, crude oil is one of the main energy. With the social development and demands for energy grow worldwide, the probability of oil spill is increased significantly. Once petroleum products enter the sea, due to petroleum products possess toxic properties, and will cause extensive damage to marine life, terrestrial life, and natural resources. In order to unambiguously identify spilled oils and petroleum products and to link them to the known sources are extremely important in settling questions of environmental impact and legal liability. We have to analyze their chemical fingerprintings. Oil spill identification is one of the important technological means to link the spilled oils to their sources, which is not only able to support a guiding role in investigating with the oil spill accidents, but also to provide a scientific and powerful evidence.Now the most commonly used oil spill identification technology is GC, GC-MS and GC-IRMS. Therefore, this paper studies on oil spill fingerprintings by these three means.(1) Analyses the samples of simulated weathering experiment, then calculates the content of n-alkanes and PAHs. The results show:①The low-molecular-mass n-alkanes had completely lost, it's limited for oil spill identification.②Under lightly extent of weather, the content of PAHs had a little change, it's easy for linking the spilled oils to the suspicious source by GC-MS.(2) Analyses the samples of Nantuo banthing of Dalian, then calculates the content of n-alkanes and PAHs, in order to study oil spill fingerprint. The results show:①The content of n-alkanes and PAHs had largely increased, and the chemical fingerpring had largely changed. Under such circumstances, it's difficult to link the spilled oils to the suspicious source.②Compared with the simulated weathering experiments, the chemical fingerprinting depends on a number of physicochemical and biological factors, therefore, it changed a lot.(3) This paper analyses the chemical fingerprinting using the stable isotope analysis(GC-IRMS), which is first to study on oil spill fingerprinting. The results show that the chemical fingerprinting have a little change, have the stableδ13C/12C value. The stableδ13C/12C value(the chemical fingerprinting) can link the spilled oil to the suspicious source.