Evaluation of liquid chromatography inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry for arsenic speciation in water from industrial treatment of shale

This work describes an arsenic speciation analysis in aqueous effluent from a shale industrial plant using liquid chromatography coupled to inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (LC–ICP–MS). Arsenic species have been separated through an anion-exchange column and several parameters investigated, such as retention time, pH, flow rate and concentration of the mobile phase (ammonium carbonate), chloride interference and column conditioning time. The best conditions have been found by fixing the pH of the mobile phase at 8.7. Keeping the mobile phase flow rate at 1.5 ml min− 1, arsenic species were separated by varying the concentration of the mobile phase and the time of elution, as follow: 1.5 mmol l− 1 for 10 min, 12 mmol l− 1 for 10 min and 20 mmol l− 1 for 10 min, respectively. Up to 13 As species present in the samples were separated under these conditions and the following species could be identified and quantified: arsenite [As(III)], dimethylarsinic acid (DMA), monomethylarsonic acid (MMA) and arsenate [As(V)]. The limits of detection of the LC–ICP–MS method were 0.02, 0.06, 0.04 and 0.10 μg l− 1 of As(III), DMA, MMA, and As(V), respectively. The concentration of these species in the samples were from 3.7 to 6.4 μg l− 1, 6.9 to 13.2 μg l− 1, 100 to 142 μg l− 1 and 808 to 1363 μg l− 1 for As(III), DMA, MMA and As(V), respectively. The accuracy, evaluated by recovery tests, varied from 94 to 105% and the precision, evaluated by the relative standard deviation was typically lower than 10%.