I believe that the labs have been trying to develop a method that provides an accurate result without success thus far. As soon as the samples were injected into the instrument, the level of Lithium was very high but because of interference from trace amount of hydrocarbons in the sample, they cannot report the result with 100% certainty as the method has not yet proved to be validated. If there was no Lithium, the whole thing would be an easy matter to report. For example: they can spike a sample with 200ppm of Lithium as a background and if the testing was found to be this amount then the sample has no Lithium. However, if 700ppm was found then they need to verify if this 500ppm was due to the interference or whether its the real value hence the validation process comes in to the picture. Hope this helps those with no chemistry background to understand more of the process involved.
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