Field method for the detection of total petroleum hydrocarbon in water and soil samples

A new field GC/MS method for fast evaluation of total petroleum hydrocarbons is presented. It can be seen as a spin-off from our fast non target screening GC/MS analysis developed in the last years. This sum parameter evaluation of chromatographically unseparated multicompound mixtures is an additional favour of chromatographic methods on short GC columns. Straight forward sample preparation and analysis in less than 10 min make this method also interesting as substitution to common IR methods for hydrocarbon sum parameter estimation which use banned chlorinated solvents in large amounts.