A novel approach for assessing the biodegradability of constituents in petroleum substances

Petroleum substances contain hundreds to thousands of constituents, making it very difficult to generate biodegradation data on all of those constituents individually.

Concawe is undertaking a novel project with SINTEF—one of Europe’s largest independent research organisations—and other independent researchers to utilise an analytical method (GCxGC-FID) to track the constituents during biodegradation testing, allowing generation of biodegradation data on many constituents simultaneously. This approach develops data that are consistent with Concawe’s existing risk assessment framework (e.g. PetroRisk).