Is demineralization with dilute hydrofluoric acid a viable method for isolating mineral stabilized soil organic matter?

Abstract:

While you might not be able to dispose of a body with hydrofluoric acid (HF), as fans of Breaking Bad know HF will break silicon-oxygen bonds. These dual properties make HF a powerful tool in investigations of soil organic matter (SOM).

When a soil sample is treated with HF, any low molecular weight OM that was bound to mineral surfaces will be released into solution allowing study of the amount and composition of this stable SOM pool. In the work presented here, we take advantage of this property of HF to explore if different forms of SOM are becoming stabilized to mineral surfaces in terrestrial and marine environments. Difference spectra obtained from solid-state 13C NMR spectroscopic analysis of bulk and 10% HF treated soil samples suggest that in aerobic terrestrial environments alkyl-C and aryl-C compounds can dominate the mineral stabilized fraction. However, in anoxic coastal environments this fraction is dominated by O-alkyl C.

Demineralization of soil samples with HF is often necessary for removing paramagnetic interferences and concentrating carbon prior to obtaining NMR spectra. The working assumption using dilute HF is that the resultant SOM chemistry determined by NMR spectroscopy has not been significantly biased by the HF treatment process. This assumption has been validated in several studies but also refuted in others. A second goal of this study was to revisit this critical assumption by looking at carbon loss and resulting 13C NMR chemistry from a diverse set of soils and organic materials using HF in 2% and 10% concentrations. We found that 10% HF resulted in slightly greater loss of C than 2% HF but in cases where a preferential shift in chemistry was observed it was observed in both the 2% and 10% treatments.

The implications of both of these findings will be discussed in the context of understanding the sources, stability and potential loss mechanisms of mineral stabilized SOM.