Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

Hello! I need help with organic chemistry..

My chemistry teacher at our school did not know organic chemistry very well and suggested Science Buddies AAA!
I am doing an experiment on bioremediation.

OK so here is what I am trying to do:

I have three electron acceptors. Calcium chlorate, calcium sulfate, and calcium phosphate.

Each of them is going to react with C22H46, which is a hydrocarbon.

It produces CO2, H2O, and waste product.

Finding the waste product is the trickiest part. Calcium chlorate does not just become CaCl2. We tried it and it can’t be balanced. This means that the waste product is an ion. Cl-, ClO2-, CLO- OR it can be a combination!

We were looking at oxidation numbers… but we couldn’t figure it out.
My teacher said this problem would be a piece of cake for an organic chemist…

Can someone help me??? I am trying to make an equation and balance it…. How do I do it?

Thank you so much!!

Hi saehul,

I’m a physical chemist but I’ll try to help anyway.

Complete combustion of a hydrocarbon yields carbon dioxide and water. There is a general formula for balancing hydrocarbon combustion equations. See the following link under the heading “Chemical equations”.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combustion

You might want to take a look at the following video to see another approach.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCfc4swkILk

When heated, calcium chlorate decomposes (maybe explosively) to oxygen and calcium chloride. Therefore I suppose that calcium chlorate could be used as an oxygen source in a hydrocarbon combustion reaction. Regardless it is possible to write a balanced equation with C22H46 and Ca(ClO3)2 as reactants and CO2, H2O and CaCl2 as the products.

I hope this helps. Please post again if you have more questions.

A. Norman