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During 2004 Hurricane Ivan in the Gulf of Mexico, Taylor Energy’s MC20 oil platform was destroyed with a storm surge that created an underwater mudslide and buried the subsea infrastructure under 100 feet of sediment. In 2007, the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement directed Taylor Energy to remove the platform deck, remove sub-sea debris, decommission the oil pipeline, attempt to contain the leaking oil, and plug the wells that were deemed highest risk. Today Strategic Carbon LLC has joined remediation effort with Taylor Energy to use state-of-the-art instrumentation to confirm that the long term well leakage has been closed.

SCLLC provides analysis on the Thermo Fisher Scientific Orbitrap Fusion Tribrid Mass Spectrometer (OT-FTMS) a unique mass spectrometry system with no comparable system currently available. It combines three state-of-the-art mass analyzers:

  1. Quadrupole mass filter that provides high ion transmission at isolation widths down to 0.4 amu to improve sensitivity and selectivity.
  2. A High-Field Orbitrap analyzer (HF-Orbitrap) operates at 5 kV.
  3. High performance linear ion trap, with dual-pressure configuration.

This unique design allows for new experiments that were not previously possible, especially in de novo structures’ elucidation of compounds within complex mixtures (e.g. metabolomics, dissolved organic matter and environmental samples). The combination of CID and HCD provides the freedom to decide how to fragment molecules for structural characterization with no restriction in order. Additionally, the OT-FTMS can perform up to MS10, fragmentations resulting in a mass spectrum fragment tree connected hierarchically to the parent ion that provides richer structural information for unknown compounds than MS/MS alone.