The Bottom

When "Bull Bill" Jeffers bowed out of Washington as Rubber Czar last September, he flatly announced: "The big job is done." In the long months that followed, optimism flowed from the Rubber Director's office; full-page, breast-beating advertisements of many an oil company happily assured the U.S. that the Battle of Rubber had been won. But last week, a sheaf of ominous straws fluttered out of Washington:

P: The allotment of synthetic rubber previously scheduled for civilian tires in the next five months has been halved.

P: OPA drastically screwed down tire rationing, shifted the rationing basis from mileage to essential occupations.

P: Rubber Boss Bradley Dewey slapped a ban on the use of synthetic rubber in many a civilian item, even nipped plans for girdle manufacture.

What did these straws mean? The answer lay in the suddenly scary realities of rubber production. The rubber program was in trouble, all across the board. U.S. rubber production was choked by a brand-new row of bottlenecks, and beset by production "bugs."

Out of Alcohol. The famed Baruch rubber report handed oilmen the big job of butadiene production for Buna S (75% butadiene plus 25% styrene equals Buna S.) Oilmen were to turn out 65% of all U.S. butadiene production. The remainder was to come from the alcohol process, which was loudly damned as a farm-bloc plot to use up surplus grain.

But by last week the alcohol process was the brightest spot in the picture. Paced by Carbide & Carbon's plants at Institute, W. Va. and Louisville, Ky., butadiene from alcohol is now actually furnishing 75% of all butadiene. Built last year to produce only 220,000 tons, the plants have been geared up to 150% of capacity, and can turn out an unbelievable 330,000 tons a year. Thus, the alcohol process has shouldered in to take over the big job. Even by the end of the year, when all petroleum butadiene plants will presumably be in production, alcohol will still furnish half the butadiene.

But even this successful program will probably run afoul of shortages of 1) alcohol, 2) grain. Fortnight ago, WPB wangled another 38,000,000 bu. of grain from the War Food Administration, is now furiously working to finish three alcohol distilling plants at Omaha, Kansas City and Muscatine, Iowa. But WPB can get no more grain without cutting into the U.S. food and feed supply. Petroleum must do the rest.

Plenty of Kinks. But the petroleum process is not pulling its weight. The plants are from six to nine months behind construction schedule, are still only 85% completed. The flow of butadiene from them is discouragingly small. Oilmen wrathfully blame the delay on ex-Rubber Boss Jeffers, who gave the alcohol-processing plants a long head start by handing out super-duper priorities to all of them. The oilmen got what was left.

But Rubber Boss Dewey calmly points to the glowing alcohol-production record to prove that the program was right, the oilmen wrong. The hard fact is that the much simpler alcohol process ran into fewer production kinks than those which knotted up petroleum butadiene production, split as it is among 13 companies, tinkering with five different processes. What worked like a dream in the laboratory is turning out to have some nightmarish bursts in big-scale production. Best example: the Houdry Process, widely publicized a year and a half ago, has yet to get into satisfactory production in Sun Oil's plant at Toledo and the plant of Standard Oil of California at El Segundo, Calif.

Out of Butylene? Furthermore, many oil companies have consistently counted production chickens before they were hatched, and thus lulled U.S. citizens. Fortnight ago, five oil companies proudly announced that the biggest petroleum-butadiene plant in the world, at Port Neches, Tex., was "running," implied it would soon be turning out one-seventh of the U.S. butadiene. Actually only half the plant has been completed. The remainder will not be finished until April. And getting a butadiene plant into peak production may easily take six months, with each new production kink a complex problem that may shut the entire plant for days.

But the threatening bottleneck for practically all petroleum-butadiene production is raw materials, i.e., the "feed stock" from 100-octane cracking plants. Both 100-octane and butadiene use the same petroleum component, butylene. But 100-octane production is far behind the aviation demands caused by the stepped-up bombing of Germany, despite a frantic expansion program. If airplane needs get too far ahead of the expansion, then "feed stocks" will have to be cut back, and the petroleum-butadiene program hobbled again.

Out of Tubes. But the biggest "if" of all in the rubber program is butyl, the synthetic from which inner tubes were to come. Ex-Trust-Buster Thurman Arnold once hailed butyl as the king of all rubber synthetics, and roundly denounced Standard Oil (N.J.) for not putting it on the market. Standard's prompt protests that butyl was not perfected went unheard. But butyl, which was once programmed to supply 75,000 tons a year, proved Standard right, Arnold wrong. It is strangled in the intricacies of manufacture.

Item: the reaction must occur at 150DEG below zero, the next processing at 150DEG above. This type of process, which may be successful in a test tube, becomes fantastically difficult in a skyscraper-size plant. Butyl production is still negligible. The U.S. can still use Du Pont's neoprene (production: 49,000 tons yearly) for tubes. But the military long ago grabbed the lion's share of that. This left, as the only tube alternative, Buna S, mixed with the priceless crude rubber from the shrinking stockpile. On this basis the U.S. can afford few tubes.

Out of Tires. All this makes the rubber outlook dark, and the prospect Stygian for large-scale manufacture of civilian tires and tubes. If all the ifs & buts tangling synthetic production are miraculously solved, U.S. rubber production this year, now 50,000 tons a month, may yet top the 818,000 tons which Rubber Boss Dewey stanchly predicts. But military requirements for thousands of rubber boats, rafts, etc., have rocketed. The armed services will take a larger chunk of production than anyone foresaw. Result: the "starvation diet" of 30,000,000 civilian tires, which Dewey once firmly predicted was the absolute minimum to keep U.S. cars rolling, will not be supplied.

Haunted by all this and by the still tricky problem of fabricating synthetic (TIME, Oct. 18), tiremakers will do well to turn out 24,000,000 tires, may even drop to 20,000,000. And the stockpile of some 10,000,000 prewar tires that eased the bumps has been either used up or tagged for essential use. Truck tires are an even more critical problem. Truckers actually talk of a transportation collapse.

More, all the fat is likewise gone from the crude-rubber stockpile. Within months it may be below the "irreducible minimum" of 100,000 tons. Totaled up, all this has only one meaning: the crisis in rubber, which the U.S. thought it had slid past months ago, has finally arrived.

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