International Journal of Development and Sustainability ISSN: 2168-8662 – www.isdsnet.com/ijds Volume 3 Number 3 (204): Pages 431-440 ISDS Article ID: IJDS13092601 Speciation of arsenic in drinking water at Amansie West District Joseph Apau * , Isaac Enyemadze Department of Chemistry, College of Science, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, PMB, Kumasi, Ghana Abstract A study of arsenic speciation in drinking water at Amansie West District was conducted. Drinking water samples from boreholes, hand dug wells and streams were taken from 23 communities in the district. Amansie West is a gold mining community with surface mining being the main method used. As (III) and As (V) in the water samples were separated using hydride generation and detection by flame AAS. Drinking water samples collected from boreholes, hand dug wells and streams in Amansie West District was analysed for pH, conductance, DO, Eh. The pH was in the range (6.57 - 7.78 in boreholes, 6.10 - 7.62 in wells, and 6.48 – 8.27 in streams) while conductance was obtained in the range of (74.5 - 313.5 in boreholes, 82.0 – 210.7 in wells, and 152.6 – 563.4 in streams) µS/cm. The results obtained showed that the concentration of arsenic in streams, boreholes and hand dug wells fall between 0.24-37.22 µg/L, 13.49-26.41 µg/L, and 24.11-39.43 µg/L respectively. 74% of surface and ground water samples had arsenic concentrations above 10 µg/L. Correlation between arsenic concentration and some physical parameters (pH, DO, conductivity and redox potential) was done to ascertain any relationship. Speciation results showed that arsenic (III) is the dominant inorganic arsenic species. On average, 64% of all inorganic arsenic species is in the (+3) oxidation state, the rest is in the (+5) oxidation state. There was a strong negative correlation between arsenic speciation and the redox potential. Keywords: Arsenic; Borehole water; HG-AAS; Speciation; Stream water; Well water * Corresponding author. E-mail address: apaujoseph@yahoo.com Published by ISDS LLC, Japan | Copyright © 2014 by the Author(s) | This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Cite this article as: Apau, J. and Enyemadze, I. (2014), “Speciation of arsenic in drinking water at Amansie West District”, International Journal of Development and Sustainability, Vol. 3 No. 3, pp. 431-440.