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Abstract

The rapid rise of prices on the world's oil markets in the last years demonstrates that a better use of the remaining supplies becomes distinctively important until new and renewable energy resources become the major source for energy consumption. In fact, higher oil prices allow the exploitation of heavier crude oils because it becomes economically feasible to apply rather expensive chemical work-up procedures to gain clean and useful energy supplies. FT-ICR-MS is the major tool to gain sufficient information to observe chemical work-up procedures of complex crude oil mixtures.

A combination of chromatography and high resolution mass spectrometry allows analyzing high boiling fractions of crude oil, like vacuum residues, VGOs or even asphaltenes. An important part is the ionization of the samples, because different ionization methods give different information about the components. The newest data about crude oil analysis and the development of a laser based ionization method is presented.