What compounds should be considered impurities in extraction gasses?

What? Huh? What?

“99.99% pure for hydrocarbons that would not be considered impurities”??

Unlike beauty, purity is not in the eye of the beholder. It’s qualifiable and quantifiable. Completely objective.

So what I gather from that is that you’re asking what hydrocarbons would not be considered impurities?

Adam, not every critical thing I write is aimed at you. A couple recent references were and I think we’ll continue to disagree on analyticaks and reporting protocol.

Sorry. I’m getting tired and more grumpy than usual.

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This is a great topic that deserves it’s own thread in my opinion. When I look at a butane coa I see a bunch of other things I don’t know shit about testing at levels that seem high. This would be an excellent standard across suppliers.
Any way someone can split this into it’s own thread?
@Killa12345 @StoneD @FicklePickle

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Fair enough. I don’t take it personally even when they are—I just don’t like to leave loose ends and what I clarified needed to be clarified regardless. Enjoy the rest of your evening bud.

I’m on mobile for the rest of the evening so I’m not going to put my full thoughts together tonight but either here or in the split off I’ll put together some info from my perspective together for you at some point tomorrow.

If you ever have a question about something you’re seeing on a COA (from us or otherwise) don’t hesitate to reach out.

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Thanks @StoneD!

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Change the title to see fit

:green_heart::facepunch:

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Done. Cheers :call_me_hand:

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T=Some states make a difference I don’t have the rules and regs for every state on hand

Colorado specifies:

Butanes < 800 Parts Per Million (PPM)

Solvent-Based Concentrates
Heptanes < 500 Parts Per Million (PPM)
Benzene** < 1 Parts Per Million (PPM)
Toluene** < 1 Parts Per Million (PPM)
Hexane** < 10 Parts Per Million (PPM)
Total Xylenes (m,p, o-xylenes)** < 1 Parts Per Million (PPM)

Michigan is the same on Benzene, but is much less strict on the toluene and xylene at 150 ppm each.
Cali specifies benzene at 1 ppm. Colo at 2 ppm.
Up in Michigan, the problematic residual solvent with the lowest acceptable concentration is benzene at 1 ppm for inhaled product and 2 ppm for other infused products. Toluene is 150 / 890 ppm. Xylenes (all isomers) at 150 / 1270 ppm.

Formalized testing should / will encompass all problematic hydrocarbons, certainly the BTEX family. As a supplier, it makes sense to me that they should be tested to as low a level as possible so that the product can be confirmed to clear residual hurdles through the US. Not necessary for hydrocarbon supplier to test for molecules that are not present in crude oil to ensure acceptability of the solvent. For example, halogenated hydrocarbons should not be tested because they are not present in crude and have no business being in hydrocarbon solvents. Methylene chloride, dichloroethane, fluoroethane, etc should rightfully be excluded from testing.

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Problematic hydrocarbon contaminants fall into two two categories. Ones that could cause you to fail testing and one that could change the nature of the extraction. I think testing needs to be expanded on top of what you said quite a bit. It’s not only enough to test for impurities from crude. The entire process needs to be examined and any critical control point needs to be examined extremely thoroughly. There is far more possibility for contamination than simply impurities from the crude. What ever is used to clean the tanks, what ever is used to transfer between vessels, nothing seems to be being tracked with the diligence necessary for the application at hand. I understand obviously you can’t test for everything every single time but I would love to see a far more comprehensive chain of custody for gas. I mean can any distributor tell me they for sure would catch it if their supplier gave them a bad batch? What if a pissed off employee decides to contaminate stuff with benzene, what if he decides to do it with cyclopentane or something else that isn’t tested for on any gas company COA. What if he decides to take a shit in the transfer tube and tops your tank off.

The reality is I scrutinise the shit out of the material I’m extracting in several different ways and there is the potential for impurities in hydrocarbons to be concentrates far more than impurities in my biomass just based off the fact there is at least 5x as much solvent going into a run than biomass by weight.

I still think what ever is causing the chalky crystals is some impurity that gas companies and cannabis testing labs just are not testing for yet.

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Valid points.

Once the Feds approve the industry, rules and regs will be adopted for solvent testing. I figure the FDA will be the ruling body.

True but I’m not the type of guy to expect government oversight to be fast or effective. We can figure these things out now.

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Not that I disagree with your points in the least, but I think you also need to consider what the market will accept. For instance, we consistently lose customers because a major will come in and undercut us by a few pennies per pound of gas. While I’d love to save my customers money, the margins we’re talking about here are fairly slim to begin with. So while you, @johnbigoilco, I’d assume most of the extractors here, and other labs that truly care about the quality of what they’re producing may have the appetite for the increased cost of gas that the above measures would cause, the ugly truth is that a large majority of labs do not.

The internal struggle is: Do we spend the time, money, and energy that would be necessary to fully secure our supply chain, increase testing frequency, expand testing methodologies, improve cylinder tracing, tracking, and security? We can do it, but the price of gas will double, we’ll alienate a majority of our client base, and we’ll go out of business. Do we create two lines of gas? How do we educate the consumer on that properly? Keeping in mind that a large percentage of extractors aren’t on this forum. In addition to those considerations, how do we safeguard against the risk that that investment will be for naught if we are regulated in manner inconsistent with our expectations?

@GasGuy-QEG is absolutely correct about all of this being regulated eventually. So I think we get ahead of the curve by conforming to the existing standards for other similarly situated regulated industries. Then we have to decide how gas is most likely to be classified for this application. As I’ve mentioned on another thread, I believe the FDA will categorize extractions gases as drug components rather than API’s. If that’s accurate, then the standards actually imposed on the gas suppliers is shockingly low and in fact place the onus on the end user to verify whether or not the gas supplied meets the standard for their application (a standard that currently doesn’t actually exist). I am not arguing that that’s acceptable, but its the current reality from a statutory perspective.

It’s all a difficult moving target. I don’t see the majors changing their practices without legislation and regulation (or litigation). That doesn’t mean we can’t hold ourselves to a higher standard, as we do, but there is always the limiting factor of cost that is acceptable to the customer. I clearly don’t have all the answers, just thinking out loud in hopes of furthering the discussion so we can serve y’all better.

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What is price difference between instrument grade and research grade? I definitely believe there needs to be a sweet spot in the middle. I’ve done the math, butane doesn’t amount to much of the cost in concentrate on the slightest. There is room to pay more to never have these issues. Most extractors are not on this forum but it’s knowledge does get spread to just about every one sooner or later.

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It wouldn’t surprise me if butane extraction got entirely banned. And maybe it should, until a USP standard is established…

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We don’t source or make research grade so I couldn’t tell you with any certainty. @GasGuy-QEG? (Or ask they who shall not be tagged in the other thread since they’re offering to deliver it?)

Definitely a sweet spot in between. It’s just systematically working through the whole supply chain, analyzing potential points of improvement, assessing costs and benefits, and implementing the changes that make sense under that analyses. I’m in the middle of this project for our products as we speak. Before I started, I considered documenting the process here to gather input from the community. I ultimately decided it would be more valuable to the community to put up a summary when we feel like we’ve made improvements. Maybe I was wrong there but there are proprietary concerns as well.

This is also somewhere we need to hear from extractors. What causes you problems with gas outside of the obvious? I know we’re looking to answer that in this thread and it will be useful information for all. But when I first got started here I asked the community what they looked for in a gas supplier and the resounding answer was, in sum, “All gas is the same, we want good customer service, do the opposite of SD.” Hindsight being 20/20, I really wish this discussion would’ve started way back then.

From the extractors side, I would also think it wise to acknowledge exactly what you said, this product is far from the bulk of your costs and look at what it can cost you when it goes wrong. If the demand for a higher standard is demonstrated and there is appetite for the increased costs, more changes will become possible and new “standards” will be developed across all suppliers (or they’ll die, as is the nature of business in general).

Where we can start is finding an agreement on what the “standard” needs to be. We know it should be unacceptable for extraction gas to contain BTEX aromatics so we can start there. Jim and I disagree on the viability and necessity for ppb detection limits and ASTM/GPA guidelines only call for a ppm level of scrutiny for initial testing. So can we safely say our standard needs to include that all gas should have 0 ppm of BTEX compounds? We have some brilliant chemists here that could share their thoughts as well. Well worth our time and attention

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research grade n-but is 99.99%. Our buy in bulk is > $10 a pound. We fill for resellers, add in profit for 2 parties and shipping, and the $ to the end-user is easily >$20 a pound. It’s not marketable at that price.

I even approached the concept of blending to get 99.9% as an upgraded offering. We offered to several interested parties and the phone never rang back. The gamble of bringing in 20,000 pounds in hopes it sells didn’t make sense to me.

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I don’t know about elements but

2-methylhexane
Ethylcyclopentane
2,3-dimethylheptane
3-methylhexane
3-ethylpentane
2,2-dimethylhexane
Methylcyclohexane

Then on the tail end you can probably expect a bunch of totally random nonvolatile junk that ends in decane and cosane. No point in trying to ID them.

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So it’d be helpful to have these listed on your COA? And would the threshold be 0 ppm?

Edit: Like we do test for those but they are grouped as Hexanes+. If that grouping shows 0.00 ppm, is that sufficient?

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