Acetonitrile Shortage

[DrAgnew]

I just wanted to let you all know that I have been a victim of the Aceto shortage. VWR was our supplier and has stopped providing us with it. I looked around and found a company in MA. that has it at a VERY reasonable price of $700 /cs. They said the price was climbing but that they had a steady supply. Check them out if your in a bind:

http://www.americanbio.com/products.asp?id=AB00120

[gcguy]

Sounds expensive to me,

I just bought in 12x 2.5l HPLC grade for £5.30 per litre. Rathburn in the UK have not indicated any risk of shortage.

GCguy

[DrAgnew]

Its becoming very expensive! I just ordered another case and the price at amer. bio. has already risen to $800/cs. I'm just fortunate that they have some to buy. We have already been quote over $1000 from other vendors who have some inventories on hand.

Better stock up...!

[HAZMAT]

How many liters per case at those prices dragnew?


Our supplier also confirmed some pending supply reduction and an immediate 20% price increase. Supposedly
their supplier has guaranteed delivery of at least 80% of their blanket order.

For now we're paying just under $600/ cs or about $37 / liter for HPLC grade.

[Stryder08]

The American Bioanalytical vendor mentioned in the link above has increased the price from $700 on Nov. 12th to $888 presently. Wow.

[tom jupille]

I'd be willing to bet that the effect on the total cost of an analysis is relatively minor.

Assuming $40/liter of ACN, and assuming the average mobile phase is 50% ACN, that means that the cost of ACN is about $20/liter of mobile phase. Now assume a "conventional" column configuration of 4.x mm i.d. running at a flow rate of 2 mL/min and a 15 minute run time. Each injection will consume 30 mL of mobile phase. That's about $0.60 worth of ACN per injection.

At $25/hr, that $0.60 would pay for 1.5 minutes of technician time to log in, weigh, prep, and do the reporting on that injection.

My experience has been that labor costs are several times larger than consumables (says the old curmudgeon! ).

[wendyt]

There are solvent savers that may help out in this situation. Check out Spectrum Labs- http://www.spectrapor.com/chrom/recycler.html. Heard theirs is good. I'm going to look into it.

[DM909]

I have been informed of the acetonitrile shortage as well. We have offset it by entering into a deal with our solvents supplier for one year's supply at the price before the hike. He keeps the stock and we purchase our monthly requirement. At the end of the year we purchase the difference.

[DrAgnew]

Fisher & VWR are all out until the end of the year, and the rumor is that they do not know when their inventories will be replenished. I'll continue to order from ameri bio.

HAZMAT: those are 16L cases @ $888.08 better than every vendor that has stock available.

[Jade.Barker]

Thanks for the heads-up everyone!

I don't use any on my side - but I am gonna talk to our PhD he might need some for the research side for the new year - Yikes!

[skunked_once]

There is an article about the acetonitrile shortage in the November 24 issue of Chemical and Engineering News, p. 27.

[Kerstin]

Dear all,

it looks like my lab is going to be a victim, too.

My two suppliers are nearly out of stock and can´t tell me what will be in the future.

Now we are thinking about redistillation of our mobile phase.
Many of our applications run on UPLC, using ACN/Water and ammoniumformate as buffer.

It would be helpful to get some first-hand experience reports about redistillation - does it work well?
Do you do it in your own lab or are you working with service providers from other companys (esp. Germany?)

Thanks a lot!
Best regards,
Kerstin

[emsnyder]

An easy way to save 50% of your solvent usage is to use 3 mm ID columns. It seems like everyone likes to use the traditional 4.6 mm, typically for no good reason other than tradition. 3 mm are large enough as to not have problems with extra-column volume band broadening. With proper HPLC conditions, 2 mm columns are even better.

[Bruce Hamilton]

Gosh,

Way back in the 1970s-1980s I used to redistill CH3CN because it was expensive, and also filled with carbonyls. You have to realise that you would need to remove volatile acids and other species, possibly by pH control or passing through an Ion-X column.

Then distilling and recovering at the water azeotrope ( 83.7% mass CH3CN, BP 76.5C ), so your product would have the azeotrope composition. I used to make about 5L/day using a 3L flask and small fractionating column with splash head. If you have other solvents present, life gets much mroe messy, you need to improve the fractionating column, improve fraction collection, and recovery/hour decreases accordingly.

These days, I wouldn't bother, unless I had straight CH3CN/H2O eluents as feed.

Please keep having fun,

Bruce Hamilton

[syx]

will asia be affected by the shortage?