Sources and Uses of Alkanes

Distillation separates alkanes into fractions with similar boiling points. These fractions are suited for different uses based on their physical properties, such as volatility and viscosity. 

C1-C2 The first four alkanes (methane, ethane, propane, and butane) are gases at room temperature and atmospheric pressure. Methane and ethane are difficult to liquefy, so they are usually handled as compressed gases. Upon cooling to cryogenic (very low) temperatures, however, methane and ethane become liquids. Liquefied natural gas, mostly methane, can be transported in special refrigerated tankers more easily than it can be transported as a compressed gas. 

Clean-burning propane-powered vehicle.s help to reduce air pollution in urban areas. 

Diesel fuel is not very volatile, so it does not evaporate in the intake air. In a diesel engine, the fuel is sprayed directly into the cylinder right at the top of the compression stroke. The hot, highly compressed air in the cylinder causes the fuel to burn quickly, swirling and vaporizing as it burns. Some of the alkanes in diesel fuel have fairly high freezing points, and they may solidify in cold weather. This partial 

Incomplete combustion of gasoline and other motor fuels releases significant quantities of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) into the atmosphere. VOCs are composed of short-chained alkanes, alkenes, aromatic compounds, and a variety of other hydrocarbons. VOCs are components of air pollution and contribute to cardiac and respiratory diseases. 

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Summary Rules for Naming Alkanes 94 3-4 Physical Properties of Alkanes 95 3-5 Uses and Sources of Alkanes 97 3-6 Reactions of Alkanes 99 3-7 Structure and Conformations of Alkanes 100 3-8 Conformations of Butane 104 3-9 Conformations of Higher Alkanes 106 3-10 Cycloalkanes 107 3-11 Cis-trans Isomerism in Cycloalkanes 109 3-12 Stabilities of Cycloalkanes Ring Strain 109 3-13 Cyclohexane Conformations 113... 

British Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin once said that "The Kingdom of Heaven runs on righteousness, but the Kingdom of Earth tuns on alkanes." Well, actually he said "tuns on oil" not "runs on alkanes," but they re essentially the same. By far, the major sources of alkanes are the world s natural gas and petroleum deposits. Laid down eons ago, these deposits are thought to be derived from the decomposition of plant and animal matter, primarily of marine origin. Natural gas consists chiefly of methane but also contains ethane, propane, and butane. Petroleum is a complex mixture of hydrocarbons that must be separated into fractions and then further refined before it can be used. 

Petroleum, a complex mixture of many different hydrocarbons, is the main source of alkanes. Petroleum can be processed into various fractions by boiling a mixture in huge distilling towers. Each fraction contains alkanes with a relatively narrow range of molar masses. Table lists these major fractions of petroleum and some of their uses. As the table shows, these compounds are the principal sources of energy in our society. 

Problem 12.17. Methane, octane, and polyethylene are members of the alkane family. Combustion of methane (gas heating) and octane (liquid-burning engines) are used as sources of energy. In eontrast polyethylene is used for producing objects such as milk, food, and detergent bottles. What macroscopic property is responsible for this difference What molecular-level property determines this difference ... 

Metal salts of alkanes, e.g. RLi, have long been used as sources of carbanions R in synthetic organic chemistry and metalation of a carbon acid R H by an organo-lithium compound RLi gives a measure of the relative acidities of alkanes RH and RH (equation 21). Unfortunately this metalation reaction is not quite so simple because both RLi and R Li usually exist as aggregates, even in coordinating solvents and in the gas phase... 

Cycloalkanes have similar properties to those of alkanes, and they can also be used as sources of energy by burning them with O2. 

The two most important natural sources of alkanes are petroleum and natural gas. Petroleum is a complex liquid mixture of organic compounds, many of which are alkanes or cycloalkanes. For more details about how petroleum is refined to obtain gasoline, fuel oil, and other useful substances, read A Word about Petroleum, Gasoline, and Octane Number on pages 102-103. 

The three major sources of alkanes throughout the world are the fossil fuels, namely natural gas, petroleum, and coal. Fossil fuels accoimt for approximately 85% of the total energy consumed in the United States. Nuclear electric power, hydroelectric power, and renewable energy sources such as solar and wind power make up most of the remaining 15%. In addition, fossil fuels provide the bulk of the raw materials used to make organic chemicals. 

In this section you have seen how heats of com bustion can be used to determine relative stabilities of isomeric alkanes In later sections we shall expand our scope to include the experimentally determined heats of certain other reactions such as bond dissociation energies (Section 4 16) and heats of hydrogenation (Section 6 2) to see how AH° values from various sources can aid our understanding of structure and reactivity... 

The principal sources of feedstocks in the United States are the decant oils from petroleum refining operations. These are clarified heavy distillates from the catalytic cracking of gas oils. About 95% of U.S. feedstock use is decant oil. Another source of feedstock is ethylene process tars obtained as the heavy byproducts from the production of ethylene by steam cracking of alkanes, naphthas, and gas oils. There is a wide use of these feedstocks in European production. European and Asian operations also use significant quantities of coal tars, creosote oils, and anthracene oils, the distillates from the high temperature coking of coal. European feedstock sources are 50% decant oils and 50% ethylene tars and creosote oils. 

In fact, this procedure can be used for any aliphatic series such as alcohols, amines, etc. Consequently, before dealing with a specific homologous series, the validity of using the methylene group as the reference group needs to be established. The source of retention data that will be used to demonstrate this procedure is that published by Martire and his group [5-10] at Georgetown University and are included in the thesis of many of his students. The stationary phases used were all n-alkanes and there was extensive data available from the stationary phase n-octadecane. The specific data included the specific retention volumes of the different solutes at 0°C (V r(To)) thus, (V r(T)) was calculated for any temperature (Ti) as follows. 

Sophorolipid is a glycolipid, ie it is composed of carbohydrate and lipid. It therefore contains moieties of widely different oxidation levels and its synthesis from single demand carbon sources has a high ATP demand. However, the demand for ATP is reduced if a mixture of glucose and C-18 alkane is used. If glucose and fatty add is used the ATP demand is reduced further and relatively high spedfic production rates can be achieved. 

Alkanes and Alkenes. For this study, C150-1-01 and C150-1-03 were tested under primary wet gas conditions with ethylene, ethane, propylene, and propane being added to the feed gas. This study was made in order to determine whether these hydrocarbons would deposit carbon on the catalyst, would reform, or would pass through without reaction. The test was conducted using the dual-reactor heat sink unit with a water pump and vaporizer as the source of steam. All gas analyses were performed by gas chromatography. The test was stopped with the poisons still in the feed gas in order to preserve any carbon buildup which may have occurred on the catalysts. 

Recently, Nam, Fukuzumi, and coworkers succeed in an iron-catalyzed oxidation of alkanes using Ce(IV) and water. Here, the generation of the reactive nonheme iron (IV) 0x0 complex is proposed, which subsequently oxidized the respective alkane (Scheme 16) [104]. With the corresponding iron(II) complex of the pentadentate ligand 31, it was possible to achieve oxidation of ethylbenzene to acetophenone (9 TON). 0 labeling studies indicated that water is the oxygen source. 

Various secondary sources of safety data are now listing this as an explosive. I can find no primaiy source for this classification, which seems very improbable. Simple minded use of many computational hazard prediction procedures would show thermodynamically that this compound, like most lower amines, could hypothetically convert to alkane, ammonia and nitrogen with sufficient energy (about 3 kJ/g) to count as an explosion hazard. This reaction is not known to happen. (Simple minded thermodynamicists would rate this book, or computer, and its reader as a severe hazard in an air environment.) Like other bases, iminobispropylamine certainly sensitises many nitro-explosives to detonation. It is used experimentally to study the effect, which may have found technical exploitation and, garbled, could have led to description of the amine as itself an explosive. 

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