Inland Northwest ACS Newsletter

Spring 1999

Our next ACS Local Section meeting is Wednesday, April 7, 1999. The speaker is Dr. Warren V. Bush, Shell Development Company (Ret.), Houston, TX. His title is "Sweetening Sour Gas, or Economic Advantage is the Mother of Invention."

The talk will be in Room 105, Hughes Hall, Gonzaga University, Spokane, WA, at 7:00pm. For those of you who don't know where this is, find the big church, go around the left side, keep on heading into the campus, past the Crosby something or other, across some grassy area, and you will come up on Hughes Hall on your right. So far as I know, it isn't labeled anywhere on that side. The lecture room is the first room on the left as you go in the building.

As you can maybe tell, there is a new newsletter author. Actually, I was supposed to be the old newsletter author, but I never got around to it. Some of you may remember that we had an election recently, recently being defined as since the last local section meeting last October. There were not a lot of people who stepped up to the plate and asked to run for offices, so we have the same bunch of people again this year, but in slightly different offices.

Dave Cleary is now the Section Chairman.

Tony Mazzeo is now the Chairman Elect, and also Past Chairman, and so next year maybe gets to be Chairman again.

Your humble author, Dennis DeMattia, is once again the secretary treasurer, and this year will actually be doing some of the secretarial stuff that I was supposed to do last year but which Tony seemed to do most of last year.

If anybody wants to throw us bums out next year, please send one of us an email or a letter (with or without brick attached) or drop a dime and phone us or send a telegram or burn a fax or .... I am sure that we can find a spot on the ballot for you. Mine would be good.

Anyway, we did a survey, as some of you may also remember. The short story is: About 30% of the members responded. Important findings are: The member's most often cited reasons for being a member are to enhance their career with information about the chemical world and to receive C&E News. The projects they think are most important for the Inland Northwest local section to pursue are Public Relations, Short Courses, and Student affiliate groups. The largest reasons for not participating in local section activities is time constraints. About 12% of those polled have no real interest in participation in local section activities, 58% have some desire to participate and 27% have a strong desire to participate. There was wide support for the local section to host the NORM 2002 meeting. Full results are at the end of this newsletter.

For those of you who may have forgot, the NORM 2002 meeting is our chance to hold a regional ACS convention, complete with papers, booths, exhibits, speakers, and everything but a trip to someplace expensive. This will take a bunch of work to set up, and we (you, actually) have to be the workers.

Since a student affiliate group was such a good idea, Gonzaga at least jumped on the bandwagon, and started one up. Professor Joanne Smieja, a former local section officer and councilor, helped form the group and is serving as its mentor.

We also had a good session at National Chemistry Day in November at the Children's Museum. Professor David Cleary organized this year's exciting, entertaining, and highly successful National Chemistry Week Activities. This year the demonstrations and hands-on activities for children and their parents were held at the new Spokane Children's Museum. Attendees, numbering in the hundreds, treated to hands-on chemistry demonstrations and ACS 'free-bees'. The American Chemical Society and National Chemistry Week were listed in the Children's Museum Newsletter which is circulated to the movers and shakers of the Spokane area education.

Our speaker this time sends the following abstract:

Every one invents, even though not all receive patents for their inventions. In every industry problems are solved - inventions are made - by many people daily, in order to save time or materials or energy, that is, to improve profitability. During the past half century, several discoveries have led to the invention of removing sulfur compounds ("sweetening") from sour gasses to very low concentrations, so that the treated gas is suitable for use as fuel in homes and public buildings as well as to generate electricity, with little environmental effect. However, the earliest processes were not environmentally benign, and they had high material consumption, high energy requirements, and correspondingly high cost. Starting from the economic basis of the need for several successive inventions, the practical aspects of the chemistry behind each of the historic improvements in sour gas treating is illustrated using audience participation.

I am not too sure what that audience participation part will be. Maybe making sulfur smoke come out of our ears or something. But it sounds interesting. I like industrial stuff, having been in industry all of my working life. There is nothing on television on Wednesday nights anyway, so bop on down to Gonzaga's Chemistry building, first floor, first classroom to the left as you come in the east door.