Determination the Hydrocarbon Group-Type Composition of Petroleum Feedstocks and Products through Foreign Experience

The hydrocarbon group-type composition (saturated and aromatic hydrocarbons, resins, asphaltenes) of oil dispersed systems is predominantly determined using chromatographic methods: liquid adsorption chromatography, high-performance liquid chromatography, thin-layer chromatography with flame ionization detection. The specificity of standard procedures developed for analyzing petroleum feedstocks and products by various methods often leads to the incomparability of the results, both in terms of the nomenclature of the identified hydrocarbon groups and the determined concentrations. This review assesses chromatographic methods for analyzing the hydrocarbon group-type composition of petroleum feedstocks and products, highlighting their features, advantages, and disadvantages. The main modifications of standard procedures aimed at achieving a correlation between the results obtained by different analytical methods are described.