In the petrochemical industry there is a vital need for the characterisation and understanding of oil and gas reservoir geometry, and the flow patterns that are existing or may be induced in these reservoirs during exploitation. Many different characterization tools are nowadays available, such as the tracing tests. Interwell tracing techniques, involving multiple injection and production points, have proven to be the main useful tool in complex oil reservoirs, providing reliable, definitive and unambiguous information on flood patterns within the reservoir.

Many different types of water and gas tracers for both single and interwell tests have been used in the petroleum industry during the last decades. Fluorinated benzoic acids, like those examined in this work, are the water tracers with the widest use, due to their favourable physico-chemical properties.

This project aims at method development for the analysis of a large set of fluorobenzoic acids (FBAs), based on a simple and efficient derivatisation technique, solid-phase extraction as preconcentration and analysis by gas chromatography/mass spectrometry (GC/MS). Optimization of the individual steps of the method is to be performed and will yield a method that allows to quantitatively determine up to 16 different FBAs in one run. Depending on the preconcentration factor, the method is expected to provide a sensitivity down to the low ppb range for individual compounds which will allow their efficient use in interwell tracer studies.