Alcohol, its production, properties, chemistry, and industrial applications; with chapters on methyl alcohol, fusel oil, and spirituous beverages by Simmonds Charles 1861-1922

Author:Simmonds, Charles, 1861-1922
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Alcohol
Publisher: London, Macmillan
Published: 1919-03-25T05:00:00+00:00

ALCOHOL

CHAP.

the art or manufacture, and for no other purpose, and the spirits so used shall be exempt from duty. . . .

" (2).—The authority shall only be granted subject to a compliance with such regulations as the Commissioners may require the applicant to observe for the security of the revenue, and upon condition that he will, to the satisfaction of the Commissioners if so required by them, render the spirits unpotable before and during use. . . ."

It will be seen that the Commissioners of Customs and Excise have absolute discretion in the matter of sanctioning the use of this variety of alcohol. A condition sine qua non is that methylated spirit must be " unsuitable or detrimental " for the particular purpose to which it is proposed to put the alcohol. Of course, the Commissioners must themselves be the judges of what constitutes unsuitability in the sense of the enactment. That it must be a bona fide unsuitability need scarcely be said. It has to be borne in mind that for the great majority of uses to which industrial alcohol is put, the methyl alcohol in methylated spirit is just as serviceable as the ethyl alcohol ; and that although iadustrial methylated spirit, for instance, is denatured with 5 per cent, of " wood naphtha," yet four-fifths of this is methyl alcohol. In fact, as a glance at its composition (p. 296) will show, the substances other than alcohols and water in industrial methylated spirit are very small in amount, totalling to about 0 6 per cent. only. Hence there are, relatively, not a great many manufacturing requirements for which this form of industrial alcohol is in any substantial sense detrimental.

Some such requirements, however, there are. In these cases, arrangements are made for applicants to receive alcohol under bond, to be denatured at the place of use with some special denaturant suitable to the manufacture in question. The de-naturant may have no particular relation to the manufacture, but may be chosen simply to render the alcohol unpotable during use— for example, bone oil in the making of fulminates. On the other hand the denaturant may be, and often is, some substance which is employed in the manufacture itself, such as aniline in the preparation of aniline dyestuffs.

Thus there is considerable latitude possible in the choice of denaturants to suit special circumstances. In fact, one of the conclusions of the Industrial Alcohol Committee^ is that " Where spirit is used for industrial purposes, the Finance Act of 1902 provides adequate and entirely satisfactory machinery for securing

^ Report, p. 9.

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