Chromatography Forum

HW Mueller - your story reminds me of Kary Mullis's autobiography (the guy commonly, if not completely accurately, credited with discovering PCR). In it, if I remember correctly, he wrote about how he would synthesize analogs to illegal drugs for personal use because the laws at the time only banned specific drugs, and didn't include 'analog' language, and his supervisors at Berkeley at one point notified him that if he had any 'experiments' he didn't want anyone to know about, he should probably get them out of the lab because the police were going to be stopping by.

I don't know the rules in your country, but in my country if you use ethanol in big scale, than you get control from the Authorities...

what do you think?

I think in the US it depends on your industry, and the end-use of the ethanol. If it's going into a beverage (wine fortification, etc.), then I think you pay the tax; if it isn't, then you have to get a permit stating what you're using it for before you can buy tax-free.

http://www.deconlabs.com/lit_pdfs/AA200 ... er6.09.pdf

http://www.sigmaaldrich.com/chemistry/s ... e=14577624

http://www.atf.gov/publications/downloa ... -sub-a.pdf

http://www.ttb.gov/tax_audit/p51504.pdf

I recently went through a lot of trouble to purchase a good grade of ethanol as a diluent... we do have access to Canadian-made anhydrous, 100% ethanol, but I found the purity and consistency from lot to lot to be not great, and I was sometimes getting an interfering peak in my analysis clearly attributable to the ethanol. So I had to hunt for an alternative, and I finally managed to get a very nice denatured alcohol from J. T. Baker with excellent properties for my analysis.

My experience of trying to source ethanol here in Canada is that it is somewhat of a hassle. I don't think I would be interested in trying it as a mobile phase unless the benefit over every other alternative was very clear and compelling, or there was simply no other alternative (i.e., I would have to be pushed into it by an outside lab ). It is not worth the hassle and expense, and I would not feel 100% confident in the stability of my supply.

In a perfect world, ethanol should be a cheap and safe option for developing HPLC methods and therefore something we would probably use commonly - the problems are man-made, but not less significant because of that.

I use considerable quantities of ethanol gradient HPLC grade ( Merck ) for normal phase chiral chromatography, it can have different selectivity to 2-propanol. Price here is about the same as an equivalent grade of methanol or 2-propanol.

I've never had issues with quality, but I always become a little confused about the relative UV transparency of Ethanol and 2-Propanol at lower ( 220-240 nm wavelength ), as specifications can be contradictory from different suppliers.