Abstract
Due to environmental hazards arising from sulfur containing combustion products, strong legal regulations exist to reduce the sulfur content of transportation fuels down to a few ppm. With the ongoing depletion of low-sulfur crude oil reservoirs, increased technological efforts are needed for crude oil refining to meet these requirements. The desulfurization step is a critical part of the refining process but partly suffers from recalcitrance of certain species against sulfur removal and the inability to quantitatively understand the behaviour of individual classes during the process. Here a new and simple approach for the parallel quantification of three different classes of sulfur species present in crude oils using LC-separation and an online detection and quantification by ICP-MS is shown. This new and simple approach will help to estimate the amount of recalcitrant species and thus to allow a better optimization of desulfurization conditions during fuel production.
DOI Link to Publication