Category Archives: Chemistry Blogs

Disconnects Between Chemistry and Space Science

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I continue to marvel at how isolated chemistry is from non-chemists.  Not in the physical sense, but as a cultural disconnect.  Case in point: Our local high school principal wants to make the high school a “magnet” school for math, physics, and engineering. What about chemistry? It seems doubtful that he considered chemistry and purposely left it out. More likely, it is not on his radar screen.

In the course of operating the local astronomical observatory, we volunteers have the opportunity to interact with the public and with aerospace people and some local space science organizations.  The Boulder-Denver area has an unusual concentration of astronomy, physics, and aerospace engineering organizations. 

A very large part of space exploration is concerned with building probes, getting them in space, and acquiring the data. Behind every mission is an army of space system specialists, scientists, post-docs, accountants, project managers, and a collection of congressional supporters.  Maintaining a space exploration program requires extensive infrastructure and a healthy flow of cash. 

Despite this massive effort at the exploration of our solar system, what is notably absent is the larger participation of chemists.  Television programming aimed at mass markets rarely gives more that a passing mention to chemical composition of the cosmos. Chemists are never interviewed in this regard, nor are their books on the shelves of bookstores.

How strange. 

Ostensibly, our interest in the universe resolves to a few basic questions:  How big is the universe? How much stuff is out there? What is the stuff doing? And, what is the stuff, anyway?

A large part of the first question- How big is the universe?– must necessarily must come to grips with the distribution of matter in the universe.  The second question- How much stuff is out there?– requires an understanding of cosmic abundances of the elements and how mass funnels into certain buckets in the periodic table. The third question- What is the stuff doing?– requires an understanding of how matter is partitioned between the stars and the spaces between. It also requires that we have an idea of what kind of chemical compositions are out there because that determines how we quantitate the matter. Finally, the last question- What is the stuff, anyway?–  Golly, isn’t that just chemistry?

I do not mean to imply that nothing is being done in regard to chemical questions in space science. Considerable effort is being made to perform chemical analysis on a couple of Mars landers and work has been accomplished therein.  The Tempel 1 impactor experiment performed recently is another good example.

This essay isn’t meant to highlight deficiencies in space science.  Space science people are pretty busy trying to keep the process steaming along.  But I think that chemists as a group have perhaps been less than anxious to address cosmochemical questions. Part of it has to do with the space science establishment. Space science is dominated by government funding and is managed to a large extent by engineers, physicists, and aerospace management. Putting a package into space is largely a physics and aerospace exercise that exploits defense related technology. Propellant people and materials science people are involved, but they do not manage the projects and the cash.

Nobody thinks about strapping chemists to a rocket and sending them into space, though I know few chemists I would like to send into space. Space exploration thus far has been an aerospace adventure and the science packages have been largely physics-oriented. The chemical community has little experience as a whole in participation in space missions. So, the disconnect is an artifact of how space exploration evolved.

My point is that in the education of chemists, there should be a bit more exposure to nuclear and geochemistries.  The present emphasis on life science supports the allied health field very well, but perhaps at the expense of other areas of chemical science.  It all boils down to the funding and training of professors and the consequent development of curriculum. Professors teach what they know. If they do not know cosmochemistry, geochemistry, or nuclear chemistry, it won’t get taught.

[Edited for content 9/2/07]

The Ethanolic Dark Age. 27 CFR Part 19. Distilled Spirits.

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Should there be any lingering doubt about our Puritanical Heritage, all a person has to do is to scan 27 CFR, parts 1-31 to view our statutory fretting about ethanol. This is the code that covers the production and sale of alcohol.  Part 19 is particularly interesting since it pertains to distilled spirit production and the documentation requirements therein. 

It is a funny thing. The more regulation that I come into contact with, the more libertarian I become.  Righteous persons might say that gangsterism that arose over liquor in the prohibition days clearly demonstrates how an underground laissez faire production and distribution economy can arise under poor enforcement conditions.  I would counter that gangster control of liquor arose quite naturally from the substantial profits from high demand for forbidden intoxicants. It is in the nature of puritans to deny access to natural urges.

One of the unfortunate consequences of this requlatory fixation on ethanol (EtOH) is evident in chemical processing.  Purified EtOH is highly taxed and regulated with licensure requirements. Denatured EtOH is available, but is contaminated with additives that may be deleterious to the reaction conditions or could leave undesirable residues.  The result is that manufacturers use methanol in place of EtOH. Methanol is inexpensive and is unregulated for coolant, solvent, or reagent use, but it does have the downside of being more toxic than EtOH. 

The result is that process chemists may engineer around the need for ethanol in favor of methanol. Absolute or 95 % ethanol for processing carries the penalty of added documentation and expense that few have an interest in. In effect, because of regulations and taxes, chemical workers are exposed to methanol rather than the less toxic ethanol.  Using ethanol vs hydrocarbon-derived alcohols carries a benefit of being faintly greener owing to the renewability of ethanol.

Speaking of intoxicants, at a recent street festival I happened to try a New Belgium brand of beer called Mothership Wit.  As I tipped it back, the FortJazz band was belting out a brassy Zoot Suit Boogie. It was dusk, 75 degrees, still air, under a cloudless sky.  Ordinarily I’m not a big fan of wheat beers.  But this had a fruity finish that was remniscent of juicy fruit gum. The orange peel and the coriander somehow conspire to produce this subtle effect.  I rather enjoyed the Mothership Wit and the music. It was a grand time.

Wake up chemists! The DHS is on the Case.

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While American chemists have been busy going about their lives, making and analyzing molecules, the legislative and executive branches of the government have also been busy making things more complex for the chemical industry. Procedures, protocols, rules, guidelines, and consequences for inaction have been drawn up for our “safety” by the Department of Homeland Security, DHS. Even the American Chemistry Council (ACC) has bought into the changes.

I remember as an adolescent boy in the 70’s daydreaming with friends about how much trouble we could cause society.  We would scheme about how easy it would be to crash the power grid or interefere with traffic or a hundred other things that would amuse idle teenagers.  These were mischievious thought experiments that we would titter about, but would have never actually done.  Some fellows discovered marshal arts and others developed a fascination with weapons and personal protection. 

For a few of these fellows, the teenage obsession with weapons and security has grown into an adult paranoid lifestyle whose world view features a threat environment squirming with risks. To be sure, there are risks. But the 9/11 attack and chronic Islamic terrorism have stimulated the fight or flight bundle of neurons in the brainstem and they are firing alert signals everywhere.  It is worth noting that some of this threat is push-back stimulated by a century of unintelligent foreign policy by petroleum importing states.

Some of these righteous-yet-paranoid youth have grown up and gone into government.  The politics of fear mongering is everywhere. Security at all costs. Monitor telecommunications. Control everything. Worry about everything.  Restrictions on liberty are always justified because we are trying to protect liberty. We’re the good guys, right?

<<< Sigh >>>

One of the most intellectually challenging things for humans to do is to quantitate and plan for risk. Few people walking around on earth have a true grip on what probability really means, and only a few of those folks have an idea of how to devise plans based on it. Good data is scarce so planners have to make assumptions.  Most people, when faced with a perceived risk, will assume and plan for the worst. It seems defensible.  After all, isn’t the satisfaction of the complete excision of risk worth any price?

A more mature and nuanced view must balance risk with the cost to liberty and make choices about what kinds of failures are acceptable. But this is the choke point. It is difficult to come to agreement on acceptable risk in a democracy because votes have no logic test. For the chemical industry, it would appear that choices are being made for us by someone else.  Chemical incidents have a fair likelihood of exiting the perimeter of a plant, so the authorities naturally become involved. This is not unreasonable.

What is unreasonable in my view is the newly enacted statutory control of useful or even critical industrial substances.  The military considers chemical weapons to be largely ineffective owing to the point source nature of the release and unpredictable factors such as wind direction and speed. Somehow we’re worked ourselves into a lather over imagined improvised terrorist chemical calamities at US manufacturing facilities. 

US chemical industry should audit for weaknesses in security. But the path we’re on with the security state imposition of controls on materials is a bad trend and is likely to harm an industry that is already in a precarious competitive position.

[Disclaimer: Opinions expressed here are solely those of this writer and do not represent opinions and policies of any organization the writer may be associated with.]

Solar Perplexus- Is the Sun Electrically Neutral?

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I wonder to what extent a star can accumulate an electrical charge?  Nuclear transformations conserve charge, so electrical neutrality should be preserved in nuclear chemistry. But what about CME’s– Coronal Mass Ejections or other energetic bursts of plasma from the sun?  Are such mass ejections electrically neutral? Do the processes that accelerate solar protons provide a mechanism that includes an equivalent number of electrons? Are electrons swept along with the proton burst like lepton groupies?

If the sun is 1.4E6 km in diameter, then it is about 4.7 light seconds in diameter, using the vacuum velocity of light in the estimation (this may not be the velocity to use). It seems that an electrical imbalance could occur on one side of the sun and be “unnoticed” by the rest of the star for a fairly long period of time.

The magnetic processes that eject mass from the sun perform work on the solar plasma by accelerating some of it from the sun into space.  My question is this, is it possible that charge separation can occur as well. If mass-flows are directed (or partitioned) according to charge and occur by confinement or acceleration in pinched magnetic fields (like in a cyclotron or a Tokamak), then it seems plausible that ejected particles streams could be charge imbalanced on a local scale. On a broad enough scale, the charge would be balanced, of course. 

Here are the questions that follow:  How much charge imbalance could a star accumulate and how would it get back into equilibrium?

Comments?  Pure Bullshit? Partial Bullshit?

On Importing Chemicals

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Th’ Gaussling has previously written on issues related to doing business with China.  The business climate in China resembles a gold rush in some ways. It is a Chinese Klondike bursting with optimism and strutting confidence.  Rather than streams full of gold nuggets, however, China’s hinterlands provide a bountiful stream of entry-level labor anxious for a chance for the good life in the city.

But just like other gold rush periods, a very few strike a rich vein, a larger minority make their fortunes on the miners, and the majority making up the big bulge in the bell curve labor like mules to energize production. Inevitably, some move from rural poor to urban poor. 

You can feel the glow of optimism radiating from the Asian land mass when you go shopping for products on the internet or at trade shows.  Entering a CASRN into Google will often bring back a collection of sites, often enough one in particular comes up first.  Chemexper is a site that presents a large list of suppliers for many compounds. However, the list is notably lacking in US suppliers, favoring those in Europe and Asia.  When sourcing non-commodity, specialty chemicals it is useful to have foreign supplier resources handy.

I’m not biased to foreign suppliers. I am admittedly biased toward US suppliers. However, sometimes entry to a piece of business requires rock bottom raw mat pricing, even in the specialty chemical market. You have to do what you have to do.  But to help maintain a strong US manufacturing base, US companies individually have to be competitive and strong.  If the US has trouble competing on the raw materials end, then it has no choice but to excel on the back end of the chain where the final assembly occurs.  It is not uncommon for specialty chemical companies to source outside the US to find bulk raw mats that domestic suppliers don’t want to offer at less-than-railcar levels.

We’re all familiar with Aldrich, Alfa Aesar, GFS, Strem, etc.  Sometimes you can justify going to a catalog company for bulk raw material or reagent.  But very often in scale-up the economics favor direct supply from the manufacturer.  While R&D level sourcing can almost always be done from US vendors, bulk supply is increasingly an international game [remember, Th’ Gaussling refers to the specialty chemical market]. International sourcing is an acquired skill.

Importers of chemicals must be wary of many pitfalls awaiting them. There are regulatory concerns and among them  TSCA is a big one.  Before you import a chemical, be sure to understand the TSCA ramifications.  However, TSCA is just the tip of the iceberg.

It pays to seek general business advice on this kind of activity.  If one has designs on a long term supply relationship, there is no substitute for a visit to the suppliers facility.  Reputable foreign manufacturers are there for the long term business and want a relationship with their customers. 

Google McGoogle

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I cannot account for why I never looked previously, but there are web resources that explain how Google does its job and how to make better use of it.  Doh!!  Even if you aren’t involved in marketing and have nothing to sell, it makes sense to have a better knowledge of how this system works.

If you are involved in selling things, eventually you have to turn to the internet and view your ranking on the various search engines.  Google uses some kind of black magic to rank websites.  While the details may be proprietary, many of the general principles are out in the open. One of the criteria is the extent of interconnectedness the site has with other sites.  Sites that are linked to by many other sites will be ranked higher than those with fewer links, all else being the same. Clues to the ranking mechanisms are revealed in the Google patent appln link here. 

Th’ Gaussling is not so bored with life yet that this patent appln is high on the reading list. But digital savants and code monkeys out there may dig reading this stuff.

Markush Claim Reform

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The USPTO is proposing changes in the rules related to the practice of writing “Markush” claims. Markush claims are used heavily in chemical patent applications and allow applicants to claim vast arrays of chemical species by way of composition of matter or by association with a claimed process. The Markush claim makes use of generic formulae that represent the substance of interest as well as a class of equivalent entities.  It is not difficult to specify features of a simple formula that claim many hundreds or thousands of chemical species. 

The PTO admits that it is overwhelmed with the workload associated with these large collections of substances.  I have no doubt that this is true. Patent prosecution requires a search of the prior art for the novelty requirement. A Markush space filled with a large number of compounds slows down the workflow.  

I would hope that the congress and the PTO consider the cost to the public in performing due diligence as well.  I wonder if our cheminformatics friends can find a way to map the space defined by a Markush claim. This would make a due diligence exercise more cost effective and reliable.

REACH for the Sky. EU Comes Down on Chemicals.

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I suppose there are more than a few out there who are not familiar with REACH.  Those of us in the States are a bit confused about the implications on trade and the possibility that the US EPA will attempt to adopt and promulgate the same sort of regulation. REACH has formally begun, as of June 1, 2007.

From the EU Parliament website-

Parliament adopted the compromise it negotiated with Council on the new regulation for chemicals, REACH, which will oblige producers to register all those chemical substances produced or imported above a total quantity of 1 tonne per year. Registration will affect about 30,000 substances. For more hazardous substances, producers will have to submit a substitution plan to replace them with safer alternatives.

When no alternative exists, producers will have to present a research plan aimed at finding one.

Hold the bus!!  “Where no alternative exists, producers will have to present a research plan aimed at finding one.”  Hopefully, there are provisions for reactive precursors or intermediates.

Reactive chemicals are useful chemicals.  Synthesis chemistry is about the management of reactivity.  Differential reactivity gives selectivity.  Chemical manufacturing is all about selectivity.

What if you need a ton of butyllithium or triphosgene or PCl3? Hopefully there is language that provides for manufacturing non-commodity, specialty chemicals with reagents that are highly reactive.  

It will be interesting to watch the unintended consequences pop out of the ground on this program.  The business of testing may end up being more profitable than specialty chemical manufacturing.  The bedrock of western economics is manufacturing. I hope the EU doesn’t chase away to much of its manufacturing base.

Becoming a Major Player: The Chinese Lanthanide Industry

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It is interesting to note how certain countries dominate particular parts of the periodic table.  South Africa has a large lock on the Platinum Group Metals (PGM’s) and crystalline carbon (diamonds).  According to the South African Department of Minerals and Energy, South Africa has 62 % of the worlds supply of PGM’s.  The ore bodies are located in the Bushveld complex in the northeastern section of the country. 

China finds itself flush with perhaps the largest reserves of rare earths- scandium, yttrium, and the lanthanides.  In my travels I see that a good bit of applied research is being done with rare earths in China, some of which is being reported in publications that I only see from a Google search. OK, I don’t have a matrix of data to prove this.  But it appears that SciFinder hasn’t covered Chinese research as well as I thought.  Not too surprising I suppose, given the language and distance barriers.

It is very clear that China has a thriving, though unruly, rare earth metals industry.  The value of this natural resource is not lost on them. They are not content to export tech grade products so that others can squeeze the value added from refinement. They are busy trying to extract that other natural resource- the value of skillful application.