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Posted by David Sherman [72.47.9.228] on Saturday, April 02, 2011 at 13:37:35 :
In Reply to: Acetylene shortage posted by chuck [107.4.129.49] on Saturday, April 02, 2011 at 06:05:34 :
If the gas bottlers want to import it by the container load, they can. The first outfit listed on Alibaba has it at $600 per ton, 22 ton minimum order.
My bigger worry is that the industry and government will use this as an excuse to quit bottling acetylene. It would probably never be allowed for public use if it was invented nowadays (same with electricity and gasoline), and the demand is dropping off since very few people are still doing gas welding, and those who are doing a lot of cutting are using propane instead. The trouble is there is NO gas that has anywhere near the energy content of acetylene. It makes the hottest flame you can get and everything else is a poor substitute.
I will ask my supplier next week if it's getting scarce or expensive here. I know the gas here is made and bottled by Oxarc in Spokane. I don't know where they get their carbide. Carbide is made by cooking coke and limestone together in an electric furnace, so I think the plants are all near the coal and limestone, which isn't anywhere around here. I know the price of acetylene took a big jump a few years ago when Oxarc was told that they couldn't sell their byproduct lime to farmers to put on their fields any more but must dispose of it as toxic waste. When you make acetylene, you mix the carbide with water. After all the gas comes out, what's left is lime, but for some reason the EPA decided that lime that's made that way is different from lime that's made by baking limestone in a lime kiln, and it's now toxic. The last I heard, there was just a big heap of lime piling up behind the Oxarc plant and they hadn't figured out what to do with it yet.
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