Analytical Expertise

Strategic Carbon LLC founders are international experts in all geochemical and environmental provided through our overview statement.  Several analytical protocols has been developed, tested and applied by our team.

Orbitrap Mass Spectrometry:

To understand and quantify the biogeochemical and environmental impacts of natural and anthropogenic organic compounds, it is essential to decipher the chemical signatures left by various processes on the chemical structures and transformations of these compounds. The complex nature of these organic molecules makes molecular-level structural analysis challenging, leaving many compounds and their transformations unidentified. Over the past decade, we have developed various identification and quantification techniques leveraging the high resolution and mass accuracy of Orbitrap mass spectrometry. This state-of-the-art mass analyzer has been coupled with multiple ionization techniques to ensure comprehensive ionization of diverse compounds and paired with different chromatographic techniques such as high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC), gas chromatography (GC), and ion chromatography (IC). This integration allows for the effective separation of organic compound isomers and enables the precise identification and quantification of thousands of organic compounds and their transformation products with high accuracy, confidence, and low detection limits.

These advancements now empower us to fingerprint diverse sources of natural and anthropogenic organic compounds, quantify their concentrations, and track their transformations under different environmental perturbations.

Light Element Isotope Chemistry:

We analyze stable isotope ratios of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and hydrogen to study basic and applied investigation in the biological, geological and environmental fields across water, soil, sediment and atmospheric systems. This work in different ecosystems is carefully focused on the analysis of each element in all geochemical matrices. For example carbon from oil can be found in the original oil source, dissolved in water and transported, trapped in soil or sediment, vaporized and transported to the atmosphere or degraded and transferred to carbon dioxide gas or solid carbonate. This carbon isotope pattern can also be observed in bacteria compounds showing that bacteria degrade the oil. In complicated situations further source analysis of other elements will assist in determining the oil carbon source and fate. For oil fate tracking radiocarbon is also beneficial to tracking the fate because natural oil does not have the modern day radiocarbon to age. Old carbon is easily traced in a modern environment. Each of the element isotopes in our analyses provides remarkably accurate understanding of the source, cycling, transport and fate.

Integration of Geochemistry, Geology and Seismics:

Characterization of oil and gas loading and potential to store carbon dioxide in deep coastal sediment is challenging.  Our global experience has shown that the initial interpretation of seismic data or geochemical data alone may provide the incorrect understanding of petroleum or gas hydrate loading.  When we combine geology, geochemistry and geophysics to evaluate the deep ocean floor we are more successful.  For a complete site evaluation we start with a view of the ocean floor characteristic and this provides the initial broad seismic profiles to investigate oil and gas trapping, fractures where strong vertical migration and potential stability zones for gas hydrates.  Where these key sites are found, we conducted piston coring in 4 to 12 meter profiles to look at geochemical data confirming the presence of deep oil and gas.  In this analysis we do realize that we need to confirm the geochemical data is truly sources from deep reserves and we use heat flow data to confirm vertical migration of fluids and gas from the seismic focus points to the shallow geochemical study areas.  There are times when the seismic data do not match the geochemical profiles and prior to deciding there are not deep oil and gas deposits we have shown that controlled source electromagnetics can be an alternate interpretation of the deep sediment.   This combination of data bases raises the potential to determine oil and gas hydrates in the deep sediment is beneficial prior to test drilling.  This development and application around the world also provides us with a thorough understanding of the potential to store and capability to monitor CO2 injected into the sediment for long term carbon sequestration.  Our global coastal experience does indicate potential for extensive variation in vertical oil, gas and fluid migration and needs careful consideration when selecting a site for long term CO2 storage.

Geochemistry with a Legal Focus; certain identification of any compound source and fate:

In industrial environments there are many potential sources of a wide range of anthropogenic compounds and the sources of these compounds could be the past from closed industry, current day and in some cases even a natural source.  Determining liability is important and we have developed the capability over the last thirty years to provide certain proof of source and residence time.  Early efforts applying stable carbon isotope analysis to evaluate the fate of oil during the Valdez Alaska spill looked at the isotope ratios of oil and biomarkers from bacteria around the spill to show there was certain degradation of the oil.  Further technology development with the analysis of specific compounds provided the capability to evaluate one or multiple sources of anthropogenic compounds in the natural environment.  For example in downtown Washington DC, where there is long term highway runoff of polyaromatic hydrocarbons from car exhaust we are able to determine the amount of this contribution relative to a leaking power plant.  More recently there has been development by our team of applications of the Orbitrap Mass Spec where we can evaluate hundreds of compounds and the stable carbon isotope ratios for very accurate delineation of multiple sources.  This capability provides certain identification of those responsible for environmental contamination.  This has been applied to oil, PAHs, PCBs, and nitroaromatics to assist in determining responsibility for spills and planning remediation.  We are currently undergoing development of a global oil library that with continuous analysis of source will expand our ability to determine from where oil based compounds originate.