Crude oil and its products, including light oils, heavy oils, fuels,
tar, asphalt, lubricating oils, heavy oils, spilled oils, and
hydrotreated oils, are complex mixtures containing thousands of chemical
compounds with diverse structures. The chemical structural
identification of crude oil and its products is extremely important for
gaining insights into the chemistry of petroleum in the petrochemical
industry. Mass spectrometry (MS), particularly ultrahigh-resolution MS
(UHR-MS), is considered an important technique for the accurate analysis
of the underlying mass and structure of crude oil components.
Hydrogen/deuterium exchange (HDX) tandem MS and ionmobility (IM)
spectrometry coupled with HR-MS have attracted significant attention for
their application in investigating the molecular structures of
petroleum and its products. The most effective HDX technique used for
crude oil analysis is atmospheric pressure in-source HDX, which is
suitable for the detailed structural identification of complex mixtures,
such as crude oil. By combining atmospheric pressure ionization
techniques, such as electrospray ionization (ESI), atmospheric-pressure
photoionization (APPI), and atmospheric-pressure chemical ionization
(APCI), the sample preparation step for HDX MS can be considerably
simplified, enabling the attainment of highquality results and the
specification of the heteroatom classes in crude oil. To isolate ions
with specific m/z values and, thus, understand the core structures of
oil compounds, the fragmentation patterns of the oil compounds are
studied by tandem MS with collision-induced dissociation (CID) or
infrared multiphoton dissociation coupled with HR-MS. In addition, IM
separation with multiple cycles combined with quadrupole selection is
considered a powerful technique for isolating ions with specific
mobility values during complex mixture analysis. Recently, IM coupled
with HR-MS, experimental collision cross-section (CCS) and theoretical
CCS values was employed to study the chemical structures of petroleum
compounds. Due to the separation of isomeric or isobaric ions in IM
cells, improved peak capacities and highly accurate structural
assignments of crude oil compounds can be achieved. This chapter
provides an overview of some of the key applications of HDX, tandem MS,
and IM-MS techniques to the structural analysis of crude oil and its
products.