Ecotane Factory Explosion: What’s Ecotane?
December 19th, 2007 by excimerI hate to be one of those bloggers who posts up-to-the-minute news stories that they basically got from someone else, but I hope I can be useful here. Today, an explosion at the T2 Labs chemical plant in Jacksonville, FL killed three workers.
The factory produced a fuel additive called Ecotane, an octane booster with “low environmental impact specialty chemicals that replace conventional toxic and dangerous industrial chemicals,” according to its website. From the looks of things, it also looks like they use a lot of terpenes as well, in particular limonene, which appears to be in a lot of their products.
If you saw this on the news and was curious as to what Ecotane is, according to the MSDS, a mixture of methylcyclopentadienylmanganesetricarbonyl, Cp’Mn(CO)3,1 and petroleum distillates. The metal complex is quite photosensitive, and is probably quite flammable, as is all those terpenes they make, too.
Sorry, I’m not much for news blogging, but I hope you all found that helpful. Condolences to the families of the lost workers.
1. I promise I won’t get sucked into Ψ*Ψ’s endless spiral of footnotes, but in case you were wondering, the shorthand for cyclopentadiene ligands in inorganic chemistry are: Cp = cyclopentadienyl; Cp* = pentamethylcyclopentadienyl; Cp’ = methylcyclopentadienyl.
They have been using this kind of Cp-Mn carbonyl stuff in Canada before, if I remember correctly. (TBME is a more benign additive, if you dont mind your well water tasting little minty).
Didn’t they cover gasoline additives on Mythbusters once?
I noticed that the flames were burning a bright purple in the footage a saw. I could have been a glitch in the color settings, but it made me curious. The only things that I know about that burn purple are potasium compounds. Maybe there was some combination of reds and blues?
IIRC, hydrogen also burns a faint purple.
Burns Faint Purple is a good name for a badass band – I mean, there was a pretty popular band in Prague named “Support Lesbians” (all male of course) and they named it after the sticker that their drummer found on his borrowed drum set when they started.
Try to uncap a bottle of tBuLi – you get instant purple flames.
Try to uncap a bottle of tBuLi
NO.
“Ecotane” boosts averaged octane numbers by 1-3 points thus allowing refineries to lower gasoline aromatic content and presumably scarf down Federal subsidies for NOT ENDING THE WORLD. Uncle Al forgets whether lowered aromatic content Officially makes gasoline less carcinogenic, less ozone-producing, less NOx-producing, or deliciously richer in smooth creamy bullshit.
Inhalation of manganese aerosols precipitates irreversible brain damage, especially parkinson’s disease (in Canada, for instance),
Google
manganese parkinson 86,600 hits
Environmental Research 104(3) 420 (2007)
“exposure to ambient Mn advances the age of diagnosis of PD, consistent with the theory that exposure to Mn adds to the natural loss of neurons attributable to the aging process.”
MTBE is an EPA priority carcinogen. To everybody’s amazement it now contaminates some 80% of US water supplies. Where could it have come from?
http://www.e-watertest.com/water-testing-60min.html
http://yosemite.epa.gov/opa/admpress.nsf/0/29468721cbfe22d7852569140055f708?OpenDocument
Enviro-whinerism: expensive, shoddy, deadly.
Ecotane? Isn’t that used for acne?
I loves me some tBuLi. Had a friend in grad school who was a complete chemophobe, but was trying to get an analytical chem master’s degree in an organometallic group. She was supposed to be preparing samples for analysis by trying to exfoliate Molybdenum disulfide using alkyl lithiums.
Oh my Lawd, what a hazard. One of our other lab buds was on the receiving end of a brilliant purple flame thrown from the end of a big syringe. It passed right in front of his face. I think he offered to do any exfoliating from that point forward.