Dear valued customer

March 16, 2009 9:04 PM

Dear valued customer [pdf]: There is currently a global shortage of acetonitrile that is likely to last into the first half of 2009. So, er, don't wait: Tackle the acetonitrile shortage!
posted by Monday, stony Monday (49 comments total)

Not to worry, I've got a big batch of carbon monoxide and ammonia hydrogenating in the shed out back.
posted by StickyCarpet at 9:17 PM on March 16, 2009

"Mom, what happened to all the CO and NH₃ I had hyrdogenating in the shed?"

"The what you were what?"

"The carbon monoxide and ammonia!"

"Oh, I cleared all that rubbish away, I thought you were smoking out there again."
posted by turgid dahlia at 9:28 PM on March 16, 2009 [2 favorites]

And my wife wonders why I love Metafilter so much.
posted by Megafly at 9:28 PM on March 16, 2009 [1 favorite]

life's not fair - i only heard of the stuff right now and we're already out of it
posted by pyramid termite at 9:43 PM on March 16, 2009 [2 favorites]

Interesting tidbit from the second link:

So why are we going dry on the stuff? There seem to be several reasons, one of which, interestingly, is the summer Olympics. The industrial production that the Chinese government shut down to improve Beijing’s air quality seems to have included a disproportionate amount of the country’s acetonitrile production
posted by danb at 9:45 PM on March 16, 2009

Sorry about using all the Acetonitrile everyone. My bad.
posted by joelf at 9:48 PM on March 16, 2009

Colorado and New Hampshire. It's always Colorado and New Hampshire. First they get all the great ski resorts. Now this. What? Oh...
posted by netbros at 9:50 PM on March 16, 2009

I bet pricing the acetonitrile at $1 million per kilogram would take care of that global shortage and make some chemical company investors happy.
posted by crapmatic at 9:50 PM on March 16, 2009

I've run out for a while, and I thought I'd have to re-develop my HPLC methods to take into account the different hydrophobic partitioning effect of methanol and the influence the solvent change has on the pKa of my buffer system. Methanol is an inferior solvent for quick gradients due to it's viscosity (hydrogen bonding: donor and acceptor!) and generally does a shittier job, even with fancy additives such as 1,1,1,3,3,3, hexafluoroisopropanol to replace cheap old acetic acid. Even with fancy 5uM uniform particle size, amido-endcapped silane reverse phase columns, MeOH sucks. Don't even get me started on toxicity issues.


Hah-coders: now see how it feels when you're talking about ajax and sql injections and ruby on rails smut, and why we're all like whhuuuuh?
posted by lalochezia at 9:54 PM on March 16, 2009 [33 favorites]

With pdf exploits in the wild I think it a good idea to note when a link it directly to a pdf file.
posted by bz at 9:54 PM on March 16, 2009

First you get the acteonitrile, then you get the power, then you get the women.
posted by isopraxis at 9:55 PM on March 16, 2009 [7 favorites]

Hah-coders: now see how it feels when you're talking about ajax and sql injections and ruby on rails smut, and why we're all like whhuuuuh?

You used "it's" as a possessive.
posted by mdevore at 9:56 PM on March 16, 2009

You used "it's" as a possessive.

Nah, it's the "chemists' apostrophe".
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 9:58 PM on March 16, 2009 [10 favorites]

Chemist's are s'o hard'core we drop ap'ostro'phe's like Sodium drops electrons, motherfucker.
posted by lalochezia at 10:04 PM on March 16, 2009 [30 favorites]

lalochezia: so how were you able to avoid re-develop your methods? [/interested, but probably not able to actually understand.]
posted by Monday, stony Monday at 10:10 PM on March 16, 2009

re-developing. Francophones drop i-n-g's link it ain't no thing.
posted by Monday, stony Monday at 10:12 PM on March 16, 2009 [1 favorite]

Today we made nylon in my organic chemistry lab using the powers of magick durr
posted by palidor at 10:13 PM on March 16, 2009

Cycletime optimization
• Collect only the needed data into the data file – saving very large data files takes extra time!
Additional time is time you can save solvent.

I think there's something in that for all of us.
posted by tellurian at 10:16 PM on March 16, 2009

(How I came about the shortage: I was looking for these app notes [pdf, educational], but chem.agilent.com has a better pagerank than plain agilent.com. And on the front page was "Tackle the acetonitrile shortage")
posted by Monday, stony Monday at 10:28 PM on March 16, 2009

lalochezia: so how were you able to avoid re-develop your methods? [/interested, but probably not able to actually understand.]

My knowledge of this comes from trying both solvents and finding that MeCN kicks MeOH's ass for narrowpeaks (better for purification & analysis). I've found 6 precious liters of the sweet sweet HPLC grade 'nitrile and I'm going to hoard it like a cokehead keeps the first cut all for himself.

If I actually have to switch away from nitrile, a mixture of trial and error and the method development techniques that the third link suggests......
posted by lalochezia at 10:30 PM on March 16, 2009 [1 favorite]

Hah-coders: now see how it feels when you're talking about ajax and sql injections and ruby on rails smut, and why we're all like whhuuuuh?

No. Some of us coders have degrees in biochemistry. So there.
posted by grouse at 10:51 PM on March 16, 2009 [2 favorites]

Do solvent recycling systems work well enough to re-use the acetonitrile in the next run? Seems dicey.

How much of the world's supply was from China?
posted by benzenedream at 11:15 PM on March 16, 2009

lalochezia, I too studied chemical engineering in college years before becoming a coder. After a thorough sampling of this thread, I conclude that chemists of all kinds are just larval coders.

And any self respecting coder is familiar with MeOH in their EtOH, no time to go buy any of that fancy "for human consumption" booze at 3 a.m. in the morning.
posted by dirty lies at 12:22 AM on March 17, 2009

MeFi: MeOH in their EtOH
posted by Phssthpok at 1:04 AM on March 17, 2009

Hah-coders: now see how it feels when you're talking about ajax and sql injections and ruby on rails smut, and why we're all like whhuuuuh?

I lost you when you said "5uM", but if you meant "5μm" for particle size, then it all makes sense.
posted by explosion at 3:41 AM on March 17, 2009 [5 favorites]

My girlfriend's company have been short on acetonitrale for a while now, so much so that they have one person dedicated just to sourcing the stuff. Most of theirs was a byproduct of car manufacture. And that's how the failure of GM and Chrysler affects patients on dialysis. The economic meltdown manifests in the oddest of ways.
Also, this might be the post that finally gets my girlfriend to join Metafilter.
posted by minifigs at 4:35 AM on March 17, 2009

There was what may have been a scientific urban legend that something like NP-40 was a byproduct of some industrial process that wasn't done any more--hence there was a single big vat of it somewhere, and when it was gone that was going to be it.
posted by Turtles all the way down at 4:46 AM on March 17, 2009

tax cuts
posted by DU at 4:54 AM on March 17, 2009

I would like to take this opportunity to declare that anybody beginning a post in this thread with "This is just to say / " will be submitted to Agilent as a possible replacement solvent.
posted by sixswitch at 4:57 AM on March 17, 2009 [3 favorites]

I haven't been following the acetonitrale shortage but I have been stockpiling dihydrogen monoxide in the event of a run. I'm storing a large quantity of it in the upstairs bathroom at a high temperature, just to be safe.
posted by Spatch at 5:42 AM on March 17, 2009

We still have some, and are fairly worried about future supplies.

I found interesting the progression of comments in the Corante article. They start out with people concerned about shortage and how to modify their HPLC protocols and then move into people offering shady deals.

Acetonitrile: the viagra of the biochemistry world.

Or should I say Ac3t0n1tr1l3, the V14gr4 of the biochemistry world.
posted by sciencegeek at 6:53 AM on March 17, 2009

I survived the end of Albany Slip, I'll survive this.

*loads shotgun, barricades self in studio*
posted by 1f2frfbf at 7:34 AM on March 17, 2009

I have a stockpile in the lab, and I'm not sharing...until the price is right.

Maybe this is the way to get myself through the rest of grad school: become an ACN dealer. No shady deals here, just fresh HPLC-grade ACN. I can get you a 200 mL hit...for that perfect separation or synthesis.

On the other hand, since I don't do a lot of HPLC separations, I'm still curious about the HPLC-community love over this stuff. I know it works wonders, but it bleaches the hell out of the columns.
posted by rand at 7:51 AM on March 17, 2009

So if Miss Betty Logan hadn't convinced Joe Pendleton (as Mr. Leo Farnsworth) to relocate the Pagglesham acrilonitrile refinery to China, an ancient town might have been destroyed and he might not have gotten to the SuperBowl (as Tom Jarrett) but we wouldn't be having these problems?
posted by notmtwain at 9:00 AM on March 17, 2009

I lost you when you said "5uM", but if you meant "5μm" for particle size, then it all makes sense.

Correct, but I'm a chemist, Jim, not a Symbol-font pusher. (OK, maybe that was a bit ασσηολιση)
posted by lalochezia at 9:09 AM on March 17, 2009

Just write µ and you're done. Easy as π.
posted by grouse at 9:17 AM on March 17, 2009 [1 favorite]

I didn't realize they were .... insolvent? *arches eyebrow*


..fine, whatever, I'll be in the shed.
posted by Smedleyman at 12:15 PM on March 17, 2009

I would like to take this opportunity to declare that anybody beginning a post in this thread with "This is just to say / "

ooh, good idea. . .

This is just to say


I have used up
all the acetonitrile
that was in
a single big vat somewhere. . .


[The final lines of the poem are left as an exercise for the reader.]
posted by flotson at 2:26 PM on March 17, 2009

I ACCIDENTALLY THE WHOLE WORLD'S SUPPLY OF ACETONITRILE
posted by kcds at 2:55 PM on March 17, 2009 [1 favorite]

This has been brewing for some time; we were starting to see it last fall. I was laid off in October so I haven't seen the inside of a lab for a while, but for a few months there was a bizarre situation where HPLC-grade AcN was cheaper than reagent grade, presumably because of back-stock pricing. Ironically, my old company was facing vastly increased use of AcN for stringent washing of plasticware used for mass spec samples. This must hurt, although I can't say I have too much sympathy for them right now. Bastards.

Anyway, I love MeFi. 39 comments in a thoroughly esoteric thread about shortages of some solvent that most people have never heard of.
posted by Quietgal at 3:11 PM on March 17, 2009

Huh, I haven't run much on our HPLC machines recently. I hadn't really realized how dire the ACN shortage has gotten. If the shortage had struck at this time last year, on the other hand, having to redesign all of my HPLC gradients etc. would have made me Very Unhappy.

(And what's up with the helium shortage? Dealing with limited NMR availability would be way more disruptive than ACN-less HPLC...)
posted by ubersturm at 4:06 PM on March 17, 2009

So...you can make meth with this stuff?
posted by MikeMc at 8:07 PM on March 17, 2009

I don't think anyone realizes how significant the War on Chemistry is.

Coders, imagine compilers became deeply, deeply regulated -- let alone interpreted languages, the easier to code to, the better. Fast forward twenty years, nobody would know how to code.

The shortage today is chemicals. The shortage tomorrow is chemists.
posted by effugas at 10:30 PM on March 17, 2009

(For the record, I'm a hacker, with mad respect for chemists. That stuff is way more self-assembling hackage than anyone wants to admit.)
posted by effugas at 10:31 PM on March 17, 2009

Coders, imagine compilers became deeply, deeply regulated

Coders worry about this a fair amount, really. Or used to, before the open source movement got traction.
posted by hattifattener at 2:02 AM on March 18, 2009

ACN recovery was a research topic of one of my orgainc chem prof's back in college. I believe it took about 4 undergrads to get a gallon jug worth of the stuff purified, but even then no one wanted to use it for their experiments, so it just sat in the back of the lab in the fume hood.
God, that brings up memories...
posted by c13 at 1:39 PM on March 18, 2009

Seriously though, there's an ACN shortage?


Seriously?
posted by c13 at 1:45 PM on March 18, 2009

Can somebody tell me in a digestible amount of words why this is a good post for metafilter
posted by tehloki at 6:44 AM on March 19, 2009 [1 favorite]

Acetonitrile is fascinating! Did you know it's dielectric constant was 37.5 ε? Hunh? Pisses all over methanol, which has a puny 32.7 ε. This alone kwalifies this post for Mefi-dom. Kwality solvent MeCN. Show me your Nitrillious goodness baby. Vaporise for me. Groovy. Unhhhhh, vibrate that triple bond for me like that. Yeah. Now overtones. So sexy. Spin that methyl group. Show me your raman.

Can you tell I'm in the middle of grading >120 organic chemistry exams? Oh the humanity! Make it shop make it shtop make it stop make it stopmake it stopmake it stopmake it stopmake it stopmake it stopmake it stopmake it stopmake it stopmake it stopmake it stopmake it stopmake it stopmake it stopmake it stopmake it stopmake it stop....
posted by lalochezia at 10:58 AM on March 19, 2009