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S. Drozdova, E. Rosenberg, W. Ritter, B. Lendl:
"Quantification of Petroleum Hydrocarbons (Hydrocarbon Index) by One- and Two- Dimensional Gas Chromatography";
Poster: 36th International Symposium on Capillary Chromatography (36th ISCC), Riva del Garda, Italy; 27.05.2012 - 01.06.2012.

Petroleum hydrocarbons represent one of the most important sources of large-scale environmental pollution. Accurate measurement of petroleum hydrocarbon contaminations is thus an important task which is nowadays done mostly by one-dimensional gas chromatographic (GC) methods, such as the standard ISO 9377-2:2000 (providing the so-called `Hydrocarbon Index´) and the OSPAR (Oslo-Paris commission) method.
Comprehensive two-dimensional gas chromatography (GCxGC) has gained considerable interest for analysis of highly complex mixtures. It is a valuable tool to provide both qualitative and quantitative results in the analysis of petroleum hydrocarbons. Our experiments show that different types of oil even for equal mass fractions of oil in water lead to qualitatively and quantitatively strongly differing results in one-dimensional gas chromatography, which is one of the reasons why quantitative results obtained according to the procedure of hydrocarbon index must be interpreted with care. In this work GCxGC was applied for the compound class specific analysis of hydrocarbons present in the samples and for quantitative determination of total petroleum hydrocarbons. Quantitative GCxGC results were compared with one-dimensional GC quantitative results. Factors such as recovery of the method for different types of oil, losses during the clean-up procedure, and choice of calibration standard, significantly affect the trueness and precision of the one-dimensional GC method for petroleum hydrocarbon determination. The same factors were investigated by GCxGC with compound class specific analysis and their impact was evaluated as well.