Challenges in Petroleum Characterization—A Review

252 literature sources and about 5000 crude oil assays were reviewed in this work. The review has shown that the petroleum characterization can be classified in three categories: crude oil assay; SARA characterization; and molecular characterization. It was found that the range of petroleum property variation is so wide that the same crude oil property cannot be measured by the use of a single standard method. To the best of our knowledge for the first time the application of the additive rule to predict crude oil asphaltene content from that of the vacuum residue multiplied by the vacuum residue TBP yield was examined. It was also discovered that a strong linear relation between the contents of C5-, and C7-asphaltenes in crude oil and derived thereof vacuum residue fraction exists. The six parameter Weibull extreme function showed to best fit the TBP data of all crude oil types, allowing construction of a correct TBP curve and detection of measurement errors. A new SARA reconstitution approach is proposed to overcome the poor SARA analysis mass balance when crude oils with lower density are analyzed. The use of a chemometric approach with combination of spectroscopic data was found very helpful in extracting information about the composition of complex petroleum matrices consisting of a large number of components.