Chemicals from Coal

Deep in the coal country, at Institute, W. Va., 30 newsmen gathered last week to see something new in the way of a chemical plant. From a distance, the $11-million factory looked like many another--a mass of storage tanks, pipes, warehouses, and above it all a thin wisp of smoke. But close up, it was like nothing else in the world. Amid the maze of gurgling pipes and steaming valves, scarcely a worker could be seen. Staffed by only 50 men--mostly chemical engineers--the plant runs continuously, 24 hours per day, with scarcely any need of human attention.

It is different in another way. Built and operated by the huge Union Carbide & Carbon Corp., it is the only commercial plant in the world that uses coal as a direct raw material for producing chemicals. By means of hydrogenation, a method of pulverizing coal and combining it with hydrogen under extreme pressure, it produces cheap hydrocarbons.

With the new plant, Union Carbide opens the door to an infinite variety of new products. From a new abundance of such coal-hydrogenation chemicals as toluene, xylene, napthalene and phenol, predicted Union Carbide's President Morse Dial, will come an endless stream of new medicines and drugs, long-wearing and fireproof fabrics, new paints and detergents, better weed-killers and insecticides.

Saving Time. Hydrogenation of coal is not a Union Carbide invention; the Germans used a similar method to produce gasoline during World War II, and the U.S. Government is also using it at a synthetic liquid-fuel plant at Louisiana, Mo. (TIME, May 23, 1949). But Union Carbide is the first to build such a plant as a source of chemicals. After long research, it has succeeded in cutting the hydrogenation process from an hour to a few minutes, reducing the amount of high-cost hydrogen needed and boosting production of such chemicals as phenol (a base for plastics) and aniline (a base for dyestuffs) as much as 500 times the output by previous methods based on coke.

More Expansion. Until now, these and other "aromatic" chemicals (also used in perfumes, synthetic rubber, explosives and drugs) have been based on raw materials drawn from byproducts of the steel indus. try's coke ovens. Yet demand for them is growing at an average rate of 30% a year, while the supply has been growing by less than 5%. With the information gained from the new pilot plant, Union Carbide hopes soon to build a full-scale hydrogenation plant which will help solve this raw-materials problem for good.

President Dial, who came up through the ranks as a star salesman, and took command only three weeks ago (TIME,

April 28), is not worried by the fact that not even his own chemical engineers know what new products may come from hydrogenation. They had the same problem when they produced chemicals from petroleum gases which had no known use, but which now sell in quantities totaling more than 2 billion Ibs. a year, and go into everything from an antifreeze (ethylene glycol) to cigarettes, aspirin, and synthetic Vitamin Blt More than a third of Carbide's earnings ($104 million in 1951) comes from products and processes that did not even exist in 1939. Among them: the process for making butadiene from alcohol which provided 90% of all U.S. World War II synthetic rubber; synthetic gems which outshine the original; polyethylene plastics whose uses range from radar insulation to flexible bottles. "Research," says Morse Dial, whose company has spent upwards of $100 million on it in five years and will spend $30 million more this year, "is our lifeblood."

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