Chromatography in the petroleum industry

Chromatography in the petroleum industry

JOURNAL OF CHROMATOGRAPHYA ELSEVIER Journal of ChromatographyA, 709 (1995) 395-396 Book Review Chromatography in the Petroleum Industry, Journal of...

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JOURNAL OF CHROMATOGRAPHYA

ELSEVIER

Journal of ChromatographyA, 709 (1995) 395-396

Book Review Chromatography in the Petroleum Industry, Journal of Chromatography Library Series No. 56, edited by E.R. Adlard, Elsevier, Amsterdam, Lausanne, New York, Oxford, Shannon, Tokyo, 1994, XVIII + 434 pp., price Dfl. 435.00, ISBN 0-444-89776-3. I can not claim to have read all, or even most, of the text in this book. In fact it is the kind of book that almost no-one would - or could - read all of. This is not a criticism. The book covers, so far as I can judge, the entire spectrum of common and uncommon chromatographic analyses carried out on petroleum or fractions thereof, and as such it encompasses a broader range than single individuals (certainly this individual) will have experience of. I personally was most interested in two of the chapters (Ch. 1 "The analysis of hydrocarbon gases" and Ch. 5 "Chromatography in petroleum geochemistry"), but then I am a geochemist. These were well written, although I found the chapter on petroleum geochemistry somewhat too concise (i.e. short) to be of practical use. This is not a criticism of the authors, who were presumably writing to a prescribed format. Funnily enough, I found no chapter devoted to plain, straightforward gas chromatography, despite the fact that the editor states in the Foreword that "gas chromatography in particular is the most important analytical technique in petroleum analysis" (no-one would argue with that). After all, there are entire chapters on HPLC and column liquid chromatography (Ch. 12), supercritical fluid chromatography (Ch. 11), hydrodynamic chromatography (Ch. 4) and capillary electrophoresis (Ch. 14). It is true that gas chromatography is covered a lot along the

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way, for example in chapters 2 ("Advances in simulated distillation"-remarkable for a complete absence of figures), 3 ("The chromatographic analysis of refined and synthetic waxes") and 9 ("Multi-column systems in gas chromatography"), but why not a chapter devoted to the fundamental applications of this most important of techniques? This could have been in the form of an introductory chapter to the more specialised sections above. And why were the chapters dealing mostly with gas chromatography not grouped together, which would have been more logical and made it easier to grasp the scale and scope of the applications? As it is, the ordering of the chapters appears almost random. Compared to the coverage of the basic gas chromatographic analysis, I thought there was an excessive amount of detail on rather less-common detectors. Microwave plasma detectors (Ch. 7) did not really merit 42 pages in my opinion, nor did the sulphur chemiluminescence detector (Ch. 8) demand so much as 29 pages. As with all books, one has to put the question "who is going to read this?" The editor intends this one to be "primarily for those concerned with the analysis of crude oil and its p r o d u c t s . . . " . That encompasses a lot of people, but I am not sure that all of them will get much out of this book. Those already experienced people working in companies with well-developed methods probably will not read it - even

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R. Patience / J. Chromatogr. A 709 (1995)395-396

if they s h o u l d - as it contains too much experimental detail for them. It could however be a good starting point for those trying to set up shop and who want to get a feel for how things are done. Despite the editor's undoubtedly correct belief that "many of the chapters have much broader applications", the apparent narrowness

of the content suggested by the title may stifle the hope that "many outside the immediate sphere of petroleum analysis will f i n d . . , it a worthwhile purchase."

Stavanger, Norway

Richard Patience