Brief Summary

• The Athabasca oil sands region is the second largest oil reserve in the world, and is estimated to contain 173 billion barrels of recoverable oil.
• Current extraction methods for surface mined bitumen results in 3.3m³ (20 bbls) of oil sands process affected water (OSPW) for 1 barrel of recovered bitumen.
• OSPW must be stored in large ponds on site due to toxicity of tailings. Currently, these ponds contain over 720 million m³ of OSPW and occupy an area of 130 km², with the total volume expected to grow.
• The toxicity of OSPW has been attributed to naphthenic acids, a complex group of aliphatic and alicyclic carboxylic acids which fit the formula C_nH_2n+zO₂, where n is the number of carbons and Z is the number of hydrogens lost due to formation of ring structures in the molecule.
• Previous work has utilized high resolution mass spectrometry to determine Z and carbon number; however, this method provides no structural information necessary for toxicological evaluation.
• Two-dimensional (2D) chromatography provides increased separation ability compared to single dimension chromatography. Comprehensive 2D-GC has enabled the resolution of hundreds of components of OSPW, and allowed for the identification of a many. Liquid chromatography is advantageous as it requires no derivitization, is easily coupled to high-resolution mass spectrometers, and can be scaled up to preparative levels.
• In this study, we demonstrates the development of a comprehensive two-dimensional liquid chromatography method for the analysis of naphthenic acids.

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