Sciencemadness Discussion Board

Buying calcium cyanamide in the USA?

garphield - 30-5-2021 at 18:24

Apparently calcium cyanamide is pretty commonly used as a fertilizer, and there are several people selling it for a few dollars/kg on Ebay. However, all of the sellers I have seen so far are in Europe and won't ship to the USA. Does anyone here know of any that do ship here?

Praxichys - 30-5-2021 at 20:32

I'm not sure about buying it but it can be made fairly easily -- simply roasting calcium cyanurate yields the cyanamide. I found a kilo of cyanuric acid in the pool section of the hardware store and used calcium chloride driveway de-icer. Make solutions of each, pour together, filter and dry the precipitate. Pour this into a steel quart paint can and chuck that into a campfire for an hour or so.

It comes out very well. I went on to use mine in a very successful guanidine nitrate prep.

http://www.sciencemadness.org/talk/viewthread.php?tid=8594

LabDIRECT - 3-6-2021 at 05:42

Quote: Originally posted by garphield  
Apparently calcium cyanamide is pretty commonly used as a fertilizer, and there are several people selling it for a few dollars/kg on Ebay. However, all of the sellers I have seen so far are in Europe and won't ship to the USA. Does anyone here know of any that do ship here?


The problem is that nearly all the manufacturers are in China - the ones who sell at low prices require you to buy 100's or 1000's of KG's minimum, and the suppliers who sell small amounts want steep prices to make it worthwhile. Also the Chinese manufacturers almost all use the Calcium Carbide process, and so prices have increased due to the sharp decline in CaC2 production. We can probably find a 25kg bag for reasonably cheaply if you don't mind fertilizer grade but as for reagent grade, the cheapest we can find is almost $50 per 500g

woelen - 4-6-2021 at 00:14

The fertilizer grade material is VERY impure. I purchased one of those bags. The material in the bag is black! It contains a lot of carbon and other insoluble material. It simply is too impure to have any value for my home lab.