Pharmacist to Catalyst

In 1922 Eugene Houdry was the fils in Houdry & Fils, Parisian steelmakers. His hobby was auto racing. One day a racing driver excitedly showed him a bottle of gasoline which he said a pharmacist in Nice had derived from lignite ("brown coal"). France, which has lignite but little petroleum, was then in the throes of an oil-shortage scare, and 29-year-old Eugene Houdry caught the driver's excitement.

The end product of that excitement, fully described for the first time this week in FORTUNE, is a new process for deriving gasoline from crude oil rather than from lignite. It will not insure France's fuel supply but it seems likely to crack the oil-refining industry as wide open as oil refiners crack crude oil.

Most present oil refining is done by thermal cracking--breaking crude oil's heavy molecules into lighter components by great pressure and heat. This process yields only 44% gasoline (the money-making product), leaves refiners with a great bulk of fuel oil and other by-products to dispose of. Phillips Petroleum Co. has lately found a way to convert some of these by-products into gasoline--through polymerization, which compresses wasted gaseous fractions of crude oil into the heavier molecules of gasoline.

Inventor Houdry has an entirely new approach. In his arduous attempts to make gasoline from lignite, he happened on a catalyst (an agent that accelerates chemical action without becoming part of the product it activates) which converted crude to gasoline without the great pressure or heat required in thermal cracking. Unable to get backing in France, he found it in the U. S.

Here is what the Houdry process can do:

On March 31, 1937, at Sun Oil's Marcus Hook plant hard by the Delaware River, engineers charged Houdry Unit 11-4 with 15,000 barrels of sloppy residuum after Sun's thermal cracking refiners had squeezed every drop of gasoline they could from the crude. Up went the heat to 900DEG. Pressure was applied. And as still men and panel men anxiously watched the gauges, the vaporized residuum was forced through the macaroni-shaped catalyst of silica and alumina. When 11-4 had done its work, yield sheets showed that the waste oil had given 7,200 barrels of gasoline. Furthermore, the gasoline had an octane (antiknock) rating of 81, compared with the octane-60 which average crudes yield under present processes.

Offered for licensing by Houdry Process Corp., the new process may revolutionize refining. At present only Sun and Socony-Vacuum are using it, and they mix the result with ordinary gas to improve the octane rating. If Houdry refining becomes general, it may: 1) reduce the need for the tetraethyl lead which now makes most gasoline satisfactory in modern high-compression engines; 2) conserve U. S. oil reserves by yielding more gasoline per barrel of crude; 3) help stabilize prices by stabilizing stocks, now badly unbalanced because gasoline and fuel oil must be produced simultaneously though one is most used in summer, the other in winter.

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