Geochemical investigation of an oil spill in San Francisco Bay, California

TL;DRAbstract

In an ongoing study of sources of organic input to San Francisco Bay, the 1988 spill of more than 400,000 gallons of a San Joaquin Valley crude oil from a shoreline refinery operated by Shell Oil Company has been investigated. The aim of the work was to find geochemical parameters that could be used to differentiate this oil from the chronic petrogenic background in the local Bay sediments and thus identify this oil's impingement on the sediments. The Shell crude oil has a partially degraded character and therefore lacks several categories of compounds, such as n-alkanes and isoprenoid hydrocarbons, that might have aided the differentiation. In addition, the sediments, which receive input from anthropogenic petroleum contamination, pyrogenic sources, and urban drainage, contain many of the same chromatographically resolvable constituents as the oil. Therefore, comparisons of relative amounts of selected constituents were found to be best suited for the differentiation. Ratios of compou

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