FDA labs, through NOAA, have not tested for these hydrocarbons.
Sawyer told me high levels of these hydrocarbons can cause liver damage.
"The complexity of these hydrocarbons is sort of remarkable," he said.
All of these hydrocarbons are useful as gasoline additives because of their antiknock properties.
At this stage, there is no alternative to these hydrocarbons as a propellant, so there is no quick fix available that could render the aerosols safe.
Continuous outgassing of these hydrocarbons may be taking place from within Earth, and some may have accumulated as abiogenic gas deposits without having passed through an organic phase.
If reservoir pressure is allowed to decline during gas production, these hydrocarbons will condense in the reservoir to liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) and become unrecoverable.
These hydrocarbons are valuable for making plastic in petrochemicals plants or for industrial and domestic uses such as firing industrial heaters and barbecues.
Extracting these hydrocarbons would be hugely expensive using conventional means, but oil companies such as Shell are now building floating liquefied natural gas production systems which would reduce costs.
An idea of the raw materials for these hydrocarbons and a highly simplified diagram of their products are given in Figure 3. Ethylene, one of the largest volume organic chemicals, can be produced either together with acetylene or with propylene.
At least for these hydrocarbons, the duration of potential exposure was so short, compared with a typical lifetime, that "cancers from these chemicals is not something to worry about," said Dr. Stephen M. Rappaport, an author of the study and professor of environmental health at the University of North Carolina.
