ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the environmental occurrence and persistence of naphthenic acids (NAs), the impacts and effects of their exposure on different biota, and their chemistry and how this relates to advancement in chromatographic analysis. It focuses on wastes produced during the surface mining processes. In the environment, NAs exhibit different characteristics depending on the geographical location. The extraction, processing, upgrading, and refining of bitumen generate different components which are xenophobic in nature and are persistent in the environment. The toxicity of Naphthenic acid fraction components (NAFCs) spans across an array of organisms within the ecosystem and food webs including rats, birds, fish, plants, zooplankton, and bacteria. Advancements in instrumentation and analytical power have relieved some of the uncertainty about what precisely had been measured in Oil sand process-affected water and NAFCs. The combination of high-resolution and chromatographic separation of high performance liquid chromatography/time-of-flight-mass spectrometry is a further development in the analysis of oil sand components in environmental samples.
