Abstract. Oil and natural gas are important energy supply around the world. The exploring, drilling, transportation, and processing in oil-gas regions can release abundant volatile organic compounds (VOCs). To understand the atmospheric behaviors of VOCs in such region, the fifty-six VOCs designed as the photochemical precursors by the United State Environmental Protection Agency were continuously measured for an entire year (September 2014–August 2015) by a set of on-line monitor system at an oil-gas station in northwest China. The VOC concentrations in this study were 1–50 times higher than those measured in many other urban and industrial regions. The VOC compositions were also different from other studies with alkanes contributing up to 87.5 % of the total VOCs in this study. According to the propylene-equivalent concentration and maximum incremental reactivity method, alkanes were identified as the most important VOC groups to the ozone formation potential. The photochemical reaction, meteorological parameters (temperature, relative humidity, pressure, and wind speed) and boundary layer height were found to influence the temporal variations of VOCs at different time scales. The positive matrix factorization analysis showed that the natural gas, fuel evaporation, combustion sources, oil refining process, and asphalt contributed 62.6 %, 21.5 %, 10.9 %, 3.8 %, and 1.3 %, respectively to the total VOCs on the annual average. Clear temporal variations differed from one source to another was observed, due to their differences in source emission strength and the influence of meteorological parameters. Potential source contribution function and contribution weighted trajectory models based on backward trajectories indicated that five identified sources had similar geographic origins. Raster analysis based on CWT analysis indicated that the local emissions contributed 48.4 %–74.6 % to the VOCs. This research filled the gaps in understanding the VOCs in the oil-gas field region, where exhibited different source emission behaviors compared with the urban/industrial regions.
Monitoring of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) from an oil and gas station in northwest China for 1 year
