Determination of petroleum trace impurities in aqueous samples by chromatography in a steam flow

A procedure was developed for the determination of trace petroleum products in water by gas chromatography with steam as the carrier gas. Solid-phase microextraction was used for sample preparation. A method for the stabilization and homogenization of water samples before the analysis and a method for the removal of polar components of the sample were proposed. The precision and accuracy indices of the proposed procedure were estimated for aqueous solutions of a mixture of diesel fuel and oil with a concentration close to the maximum permissible concentration. The relative error in the measurement is no more than ～25% in the concentration range of petroleum products of 0.05–0.5 mg/L.