ABSTRACT
Petroleum distillates and heavy residues and coal liquid products are all very complex mixtures of hydrocarbons, polar compounds principally hydroxylated aromatics, and oligomeric systems. This chapter shows how complexation chromatography argentation chromatography and charge-transfer chromatography can participate in the analysis of petroleum and coal liquid products. In the case of petroleum products, hydrocarbon group type analysis i.e., the quantitative estimation of the three main groups: saturates, olefins, and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons has the greatest interest for the evaluation of feedstocks and for refinery process control. Many separation methods were proposed, often tedious and not giving satisfactory results for the higher-boiling fractions of crude oils. Some of these methods involve complexation chromatography, by complexation of the sulfur lone pair of electrons with metal salts. The selective complexation of nitrogen compounds by ferric chloride supported on a clay mineral kaolin was used by Jewell and Snyder [68] for the separation of neutral and nonbasic nitrogen compounds from petroleum.
