Production
Dimethyl carbonate can be prepared by the reaction of phosgene with methanol via methyl chloroformate:
- COCl2 + CH3OH → CH3OCOCl + HCl
- CH3OCOCl + CH3OH → CH3OCO2CH3 + HCl
Overall:
- COCl2 + 2 CH3OH → CH3OCO2CH3 + 2 HCl
This historical synthesis process is undesirable because of phosgene's toxicity and has been largely replaced by other synthesis routes. It is produced industrially by a transesterification of propylene carbonate and methanol, which also affords propylene glycol. A second large scale commercial synthesis route uses a process where carbon monoxide, methanol and oxygen are reacted to form dimethyl carbonate. World production in 1997 was estimated at 1000 barrels a day. Production of dimethyl carbonate worldwide is limited to Asia and Europe.
Read more about this topic: Dimethyl Carbonate
Famous quotes containing the word production:
“Constant revolutionizing of production ... distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“From the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”
—Charles Darwin (1809–1882)
“The production of obscurity in Paris compares to the production of motor cars in Detroit in the great period of American industry.”
—Ernest Gellner (b. 1925)