Tandem Mass Spectrometry of Alkanolamines in Environmental Samples

Alkanolamines are anthropogenic compounds used extensively not only in the processing of sour natural gas but in other operations such as the petrochemical and fossil-fuel fired industries to reduce and prevent the emission of green house gases into the environment. Alkanolamines also find uses as corrosion inhibitors, emulsifying agents and in pharmaceutical formulations (Dobberpuhl and Johnson, 1995). Over many years of operation, there have been inadvertent leaks of these chemicals from the surrounding gas processing facilities to groundwater, wetlands soil, and associated uptake by vegetation (Luther et al., 1998; Headley et al., 1999; Hamborg et al., 2011). Since alkanolamines are highly water miscible (Davis and Carpenter, 1997), their analysis has presented some challenges (Jagota et al., 1996) particularly the requirements for suitable extraction from biological matrices and soil, along with sensitive detection using commonly available instrumentation. Early methods of analyzes were focused on direct determination of the analytes with little or no derivatization steps (Witzaney and Fedorak, 1996). Alkanolamines were determined primarily using gas chromatography (GC) with flame ionization (FI) or mass spectrometric (MS) detection (Shahi et al., 1994; Dawodu and Meisen, 1991, 1994, Niitsue et al., 1993 as cited in Peru et al., 2004). Positive-ion electrospray ionization tandem mass spectrometry (ESI-MS-MS) is well suited for the confirmation of uptake of alkanolamines and transformation products in wetland vegetation (Headley et al., 1999). The objective of this chapter is to enumerate the use of tandem mass spectrometry for the determination of alkanolamines from environmental samples exemplified by wetland vegetation.