Fingerprinting of hydrocarbon fuel contaminants: Literature review

Fingerprinting of hydrocarbons was developed in the petroleum industry to develop an understanding of source rock and crude oil relationships. From this beginning, the use of fingerprinting has been transferred to the study of environmental pollution. Environmental fingerprinting is used in the assessment of fuel pollutants to characterize the type of the fuel contaminants, determine their source, and understand their fate in the environment. The purpose of this literature review is to provide an update of the state-of-the-art of environmental fingerprinting techniques. The actual published literature in this area was evaluated, especially those articles describing new laboratory fingerprinting techniques and new developments in the application of these results to real case studies. However, this report also focuses on new combinations of analytical techniques for detailed characterization of analytes.