quote:

location
supplier and their address/phone number/website/hours:
purity (KOH is sometimes 90% or 85% pure)
Cost:
Special notes (ie is business license required, etc):

Mark

quote:

jimmeste
Member
Posted 20 September 2006 02:44 PM
You are correct the methanol prices have gone out of control. I work for a company that uses huge quantities of methanol in its process. Two very large producers have had plant shutdowns that will keep the prices high into October. Prices should come back down then.
Posts: 1 | Registered: 20 September 2006

quote:

Finally we ended up at Tilley Chemical in Baltimore to buy methanol that he’d prearranged for. Big mistake.

The chemical supplier segregated visitors to a sort of stairwell lobby, and we had to phone in our order to some peon upstairs. We asked about the assay on some KOH and ordered our barrel of methanol. The place gave us about 8 wrong answers on the KOH as different underlings kept trying to find the answer and their overlings kept changing their minds about whether or not they had it in stock. Then the parade of Methanol Questions came charging at us. We waited in the stairwell for a full hour while several different grades of company bureaucrats came out every eight minutes like clockwork to ask us what the application is. I guess we kept giving the wrong answer as they’d send their higher-ups to intorrogate us on what the application is. Now take note that Bill is an articulate, conservatively dressed middleaged engineer type (in fact he’s an engineer or something in his professional life)- the exact ‘type’ of person I’d imagine running a commercial biodiesel facility and ordering methanol by the barrel during the pilot plant stage, not the average person’s stereotype of either a terrorist or a methamphetamine producer. It was amazing to watch the bureaucratic wheels grind along.

Finally an older guy with mussed hair came downstairs and got into an argument with Bill over the fact that he didn’t understand why it is we were buying a flammable product for and that Bill shouldn’t be questioning why they kept us waiting for an hour because they had a protocol to follow. Amazing. Obviously this one was from the north end of the nearby Mason-Dixon line, judging by his New Jersey-like attitude towards customer service.
Worst of all, we knew already that we could have just driven down to the MRI racetrack (www.mridrag.com) near DC with whatever kind of fuel container we happened to have on hand and they’d have filled us up with blue dyed methanol for a cheap price. Besides, Bill IS actually professionally in an industry that uses methanol for one of it’s processes. It was weird watching the standoff that resulted as though we were trying to buy anthrax culture or something. The older guy invoked the fact that it was ‘Post-9/11’ and practically accused Bill of being a potential terrorist, and kept ranting that he had no way of knowing that Bill’s was a legitimate company. Bill kind of pointed out that he was frustrated that there was no way to prove right then and there that his company was a ‘legitimate’ one. Wow. I mean, the customer is always right, right? Wrong. I’d hate to be a hippie biodieseler who tries to deal with this place.

Well, they finally released the poor barrel of methanol to us, and off we went into Rush Hour Traffic (I think that gets a proper noun on the I-95 corridor), having wasted our precious ‘before Rush Hour’ timing on these idiots.