Abstract: | Size exclusion chromatography (SEC) has been demonstrated to be an effective and reproducible sample pretreatment procedure for removal of heavy oil matrices prior to GC-AED analysis of metalloporphyrins, and for the resolution of volatile metal species into clean and defined fractions. This paper also discusses the results obtained by SEC for determination of the distribution of metallopor-phyrins in crude oils and the correlation between total metal, metal-loporphyrin, and total distillable metal content. |