Finger Print Analysis of Petroleum Hydrocarbons and Their Derivatives for the Identification of Illegal Discharges: Case Study Turkish Coasts

An increasing traffic of over 55,000 ships a year in Turkish seas are producing an average of 12 illegal oil spills a year. Fingerprint analysis is initiated by comparison of fluorometric spectra of polluted sea water sample and suspected source sample. ‘Matching’ is confirmed or rejected by subsequent comparison of FTIR, HPLC and GC-FID. In this study, 39 clean sea waters, 41 polluted sea waters and 111 suspected samples were analysed. 76 suspected samples were spectrofluorometrically analysed and categorised as “Non-match”. Finally, 28 suspected samples were classified as a “Match”.