With substantial contributions from experienced industrial scientists and engineers, this work will have real application towards improving process efficiency and improvement in the trillion-dollar global petroleum industry. It presents an overview of the emerging field of petroleomics, which endeavors to understand the fundamental components of crude oil. Petroleomics promises to revolutionize petroleum science in much the same way that genomics transformed the study of medicine not long ago. Asphaltenes are a particular focus, with many chapters devoted to the analysis of their structure and properties.