Clean soil environment is of crucial importance to sustain lives of ecosystem and humans. With rapid industrialization, there has been a great increase of soil contamination by accidental releases of petroleum products. In general, soil remediation is an expensive and time-consuming process as compared to cleanup of water and air. Moreover, determining the source and responsible parties of soil pollution often turns into legal conflicts and that further delay the cleanup process of contaminated sites. In practice, total petroleum hydrocarbon (TPH) analysis has been employed to determine the petroleum species and to track down the responsible polluters. However, this approach often suffers from differentiating similar TPH species. In this study, we analyzed TPH chromatogram patterns of 24 domestic petroleum products in specific carbon ranges (${\sim}C_{10}$, $C_{10}-C_{12}$, $C_{12}-C_{36}$, and $C_{36}{\sim}$) and the fractional changes of THP ratio in the mixture products of gasoline, kerosene and diesel. The proposed TPH analysis method in this study could serve as a useful tool to better analyze the petroleum species in soils contaminated with complex oil mixtures, and ultimately be used to identify the polluters of soil.

Keywords: Soil contamination;Petroleum;TPH;Complex oil contamination;Fractional analysis;