Abstract: The XANES spectrum is employed to study the sulfur functional groups in asphaltenes. Since the asphaltenes are complicated mixture, it is difficult to distinguish different classes of sulfur compounds in asphaltenes. Therefore, the higher order derivative spectra of sulfur XANES were introduced in order to improve sulfur XANES resolution and to qualitatively analysis sulfur functional groups in asphaltenes. Sulfur XANES spectra were deconvoluted by using of several Gaussian and arctangent functions to quantify the sulfur species. In order to convert peak area percentages to atomic percentages, the relative 1s→3p transition probabilities of different sulfur classes must be considered. The areas of the different Gaussian peaks were calculated and revised for their oxidation state-dependent absorption cross-section. The contribution of sulfur species to total sulfur was calculated by the corrected peak areas. The result showed that sulfur species in asphaltenes of atmospheric and vacuum residue were mainly in form of thiophene, sulfoxide, thiophene sulfone and sulfate, while hardly contained sulfide.