Patent ID: 8886467

Claim:
A method to determine a chemical distance between fingerprints for fluid samples from a reservoir, comprising: obtaining the fluid samples from the reservoir using a measuring device; producing chromatograms by performing chromatographic analyses on the fluid samples; selecting, using a processor, certain peak height values from the chromatograms; forming various peak height ratios using the selected peak height values; producing an experimental distribution of the differences between the peak height ratios using two chromatograms from one of the fluid samples; producing a simulated distribution of the differences between the peak height ratios as a function of an uncertainty model of the peak height values; optimizing the uncertainty model; producing a theoretical distribution using parameters of the optimized uncertainty model; and determining the interquartile range of the experimental distribution and the interquartile range of the theoretical distribution; and determining the chemical distance between the samples using the interquartile ranges.