My understanding is the amines… and not ethylamine amongst them, plus there really wasn’t anything suggesting it could form as a degradation product of one of the commonly used amines… MEA, MDEA, and DEA all of which are used to remove acid gases, such as carbon dioxide, hydrogen sulfide, and carbonyl sulfide from the stream. I don’t think I’ve read anything about methanol use in gas refining, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t overlooked it since I’ve been researching sour gases specifically.
There is quite a bit of data showing ammonia is a common impurity in crude oil streams and a degradation product of amine use, but gases are tested from ammonia, and there’s that odor threshold.
… Well I did link 6 posts that have the sum total of the theory explained. I’m just paraphrasing, which you know is a game of telephone. Just read the posts, bro…
Either way, here’s the TL;DR (Pending correction from the persons on our forum that put forth this theory):
Heavily sour gas, particularly with the Co2 side of the sourness, may result in amine carryover, as I read in the exact posts I link above. If additional measures are not undertaken to deal with this carryover, well, potentially you have this situation.
It’s a known, undeniable fact that covid had significant effects on the refining industry. We had a Co2 shortage only 6 months ago.
Why is it hard to conceive that COVID and supply chain collapse also had an effect on our side of the industry? I’ll use your words.
“You’re right we’re so small they don’t care about us.”
Especially when the product works for 99% of consumers that are not using it for botanical extraction. I’m sure the suppliers even have their contacts worked out that there is an acceptable amount of amine in the solvent depending on production factors, which may mean there is no recourse for this widespread contamination.
I can kill this right now and tell you several extremely problematic things HAVE BEEN CONFIRMED to be in the butane. Stay tuned for more information but I can tell you with full certainty the gas is not “more pure” and in fact definely does have problematic ingredients that have been identified by those who are actively looking.
Stay tuned but I can tell you it will not be a mystery for much longer and it is a terrible time to double down on the “it’s not the gas argument” haha
I think the biggest area I can highlight something is wrong is in shatter production. You have made some beautiful slabs I’ve seen @Waxplug1 over the years on your IG. If you try to do that with gas that is quick crashing you will get a bunch of sugar in your slab no matter what.
Second would be cold crashing. We used to be able to cold crash a jar and then let it warm up wet and the cold crashed THCa would melt and stay at the bottom. Now if you cold crash a super wet jar you won’t be able to melt that cold crash thca unless you were to add pounds of extra butane and get it very hot.
Have you not noticed either of these things in your lab?
I can make shatter the same still. Only thing I see is that it got purer. Here’s why I think that:
Let’s say the gas did get purer. If so then a few factors change. That means that it’s going to gas off faster and also get colder quicker because the gas is exchanging energy quicker as it gases off. Second, we as technicians have evolved from paper filters, to 5 micron all the way to 0.22 now. We have gotten better at purifying and now have better equipment and access to a whole variety of adsorbents to match with our systems design. This makes the oil easier to crash out and that’s how the oil contributes to the problem. On the gas side and what it contributes, it’s getting colder and gassing off faster due to its purity now.
Now I have to take those factors into consideration and control my off gas and also raise the temps at which I handle the extract in order to mimic the same parameters that I would be in back when the gas had more cosolvents slowing down the process discussed above
The reason for the fast crash is because there is an imbalance in heat exchange when dealing with gases that boil at such low temps. The butane doesn’t have to be necessarily purer it could also have cosolvents that boil off at even lower temps like propane. I notice my runs recover faster now so that tells me there’s gases with lower boiling points in there. This also means the heat exchange needs to be adjusted
We are actively testing for it, and finding all sorts of irregular peaks that shouldn’t be there. The issue is how do you take an unknown contaminate and start identifying it and then quantifying it? We do not have an NMR or a mass spec with a library of compound to test against. But we are finding more impurities than we should be in our gas stream.
Take a PPB or PPM level contaminate and toss it in an already impure solution and you aren’t just going to be able to test and identify something without a stupid amount of analytical tools and knowledge skill and also some luck.
This isn’t like testing for potency or even pesticides it’s far more challenging.
Without being able to identify the peaks yet, how do we know if they’re not just other gases with similar or lower boiling points? From what I understand we are always dealing with a “blend” of some sort. The difference would just be boiling points wouldn’t it