Systems Analysis of the Evolution of Views on Oil Systems: From Petroleum Chemistry to Petroinformatics

Essentially different approaches to studying oil systems (analytical, colloid-chemical, model, chemo-informational), regardless of the chronological periods of their development, are described. The analytical approach, being historically first, today, with the progress of petroleomics, becomes the source of digital data on the detailed chemical composition of oil systems, which is particularly important for the progress of the chemo-informational approach, petroinformatics. From the standpoint of systems analysis, specifically petroinformatics combines the achievements of all the other approaches, because the availability of the initial digital data on the detailed composition, obtained by petroleomics, on the parameters of the colloid-disperse structure, and on reference properties of a representative set of oil system samples gives grounds to expect that the use of chemometrics and mathematical methods of multivariate data analysis will allow reliable prediction of practically important reference properties of new oil system samples. An example of comparative processing of multivariate data for a limited sample of Russian crude oils using mathematical methods is presented.