Your Acetonitrile Now Has a Nameplate

In June 2009, Ronald Majors wrote up the acetonitrile shortage for LCGC and put a number on what had happened to the price of a 4 x 4-litre case. Over $1,000. Prices had gone up by a factor of six to eight since the summer of 2008, distributors were allocating to favoured customers, some suppliers had stopped taking new accounts outright, and in places the delivery delay had reached six months.

Nothing had happened to acetonitrile. What had happened was that Chinese plants went down around the Olympics, Hurricane Ike stopped a Gulf Coast producer in September, one more plant took a planned outage in January, and then the recession knocked the legs out from under acrylonitrile demand.

Every one of those is an event in somebody else's business.

"What does it change when the thing you buy finally has a capacity of its own?"

Two weeks ago Balaji Amines filed a Regulation 30 intimation with BSE and the NSE that answers that question for the first time in a while.

Two to Four Percent of Somebody Else's Reactor

Acetonitrile is a minor by-product of making acrylonitrile by the Sohio route. Majors put the co-product yield at 2 to 4 percent, and noted that most acrylonitrile producers burn it as fuel rather than recover it.

So the merchant supply of the solvent your QC lab runs on has two gates. Somebody has to be running an acrylonitrile reactor, and that somebody has to have decided it is worth the distillation train to keep the light ends instead of sending them to the flare.

In the United States, the published record of who has made that second decision is short. INEOS Nitriles lists acetonitrile as a product at exactly two sites, Green Lake in Texas and Lima in Ohio, and those two sites carry 545,000 and 190,000 tonnes a year of acrylonitrile nameplate respectively (chart above).

That is 735,000 tonnes a year of acrylonitrile standing behind the American recovery. Run the 2 to 4 percent band across it and you get 14,700 to 29,400 tonnes a year of crude acetonitrile that could in principle be pulled off, before purification losses and before anyone asks whether the reactors are at nameplate.

Here is the part that matters for a sourcing file. Neither site publishes an acetonitrile capacity, and neither does Ascend.

There is no number to put in a dual-source memo, because for sixty years the quantity has been an output of a decision about something else.