The kinetics of oxygen chemisorption on resin chars were investigated in this study. The Elovich equation was employed to facilitate the interpretation of the chemisorption process. It was found that the activation energy for chemisorption is not constant and varies with surface coverage. This observation can be explained by a distributed kinetic parameter model, here implemented as a distributed activation energy model. The energy distribution model reveals that the amount of mass uptake obtained in a typical chemisorption study does not involve full coverage of all of the active sites on carbon. It is concluded that the information on active sites obtained from low-temperature chemisorption cannot be directly applied to gasification at higher temperatures.