About Industrial Chemicals

Let us suppose that last night you experienced a very romantic interlude. A candlelit dinner for two preceded by a very dry martini. Soft background music on the stereo and finally, total intimacy for you and your companion. A chemical analysis of your activities would reveal that the candles, the alcohol in your drink, the record you listened to, the clothing you wore, the paint on your walls, the soft carpet underfoot, and even the aspirin you took the following morning were all petroleum derivatives.

Bill D. Berger and Kenneth E. Anderson, Modern Petroleum, 1978

You see, we were makers and doers—and proud of it. We synthesized any number of products to sell to each other. Our favorite chemical feedstocks were hydrocarbons.

Here is a picture I took at the Phillips Petroleum Company Museum in Oklahoma. All items depicted are plastic, derived from natural gas.

They could as well have been fashioned out of coal or oil.* Our fossil fuels lay so ready not just for burning but also for reshaping! It was a wonder what they made possible—and you from the future, sourly preparing for the next meter of sea-rise, have reason to condemn us because you’ve paid more than we for the products that sustained, entertained, nourished, poisoned and defined us.

In case you are wondering what proportion of our fossil fuels became chemicals instead of smoke, here are two statistics from 2014: in France, a mere 14%; in the Netherlands: 49% of all petroleum, and an unspecified fraction of natural gas and coal.

I wish that you could have gazed back with me upon our fabrication processes with their vast economies of scale—which, again, reduced our costs and increased yours. (U.S.A., 1978: A single $15 barrel of crude may be turned into consumer products worth almost $300.) For that matter, I would have liked to flit from vat to vat, in order to describe for you the strangest acts of creation.—Did you know that we could refine propylene, not to mention detergents, out of crude oil—antifreeze from ethene—rubbing alcohol from propane? Improving petroleum into ethylene gas which we next bubbled through a solvent, then catalyzed, we made polyethylene, which was familiar to most of us as the plastic material of packaging films.* Kind souls affixed chlorine atoms to that stuff, so that I could have my polyvinyl chloride shower curtain. (It was getting grubby; my guests kept advising me to throw it out and buy another one.) Other wonder-mongers switched out ethylene’s hydrogen atoms for fluorine atoms, and here came Teflon!

These transmutations remained as unseen to me—and most of my neighbors—as the carbon dioxide we exhaled. By the time I wrote Carbon Ideologies, industrial security officers tended to frown on public tours, thanks to terrorism, journalism, activism and corporate espionage. So this brief “About” section will retail no vivid descriptions. Instead, let me touch on the greenhouse gas emissions of a few of our favorite petrochemical processes:

The oil derrick and “horse head” on this sign near Cushing, Oklahoma, make vivid the fungibility of fossil fuels

When, for instance, we synthesized ammonia for our fertilizers and other techno-necessities, the reaction liberated carbon dioxide: 3,630 pounds of it for every ton of nitrogen we threw in. Thus half a percent of Germany’s greenhouse emissions for 2007—only half a percent! (What this “primer” section of Carbon Ideologies intends—to shine its wavering light across global warming’s dark mountain of hydra-heads—is more necessary than possible. How many half-percents would you find it tolerable, much less useful, for me to picture? While we fretted about power plants, German ammonia manufacturies, hidden behind more frightening monster-heads, exhaled their discreetly baleful half-percent.) They employed both heavy fuel oil and natural gas as their feedstocks. The Austrians, who used natural gas only, emitted less than half as much CO2 per unit weight of ammonia. The British, who started from hydrogen, were even easier on the atmosphere.—But surely we could make ammonia however we wished!* In Kansas and in various localities of India (circa 1979), the high-emissions petroleum route had pencilled out best. Such choices represented what we meant by “the free world.”

Another “for instance”: Our hydrogen plants incidentally released carbon dioxide—and how could we get by without hydrogen, which was so convenient for making nitric acid?

Had I asked my neighbors what we needed nitric acid for—or ammonia—99% of them would have gone blank. They bought what they wanted when they wanted it. Its origin did not interest them. Why, just the other morning I sat on the edge of the bed while a woman rolled on her nylon stockings and neither one of us thought about nitric acid!

In 2007, production of that stinging-smelling liquid donated 0.94% of Germany’s nitrous oxide. Since the planet wasn’t warm enough to suit us, nor our chemical plants as profitable as in best-case projections, we helped Germany—and looking back on those years, I take inexpressible comfort in the fact that humans kept right on being human. In 2012, Greece emitted 35 times more nitrous oxide per unit volume of nitric acid than did the United Kingdom—in other words, the Greeks were 35 times more wasteful than the British—while we Americans, not quite in the vanguard, were merely 27 times worse. Nobody thought to centralize or rationalize nitric acid production.

Meanwhile, synthetic natural gas proved as practical to make as it was convenient to burn. So we did both, not worrying about a little carbon dioxide along the way.

Sometimes we felt like mixing sulfuric acid with dolomite. (Has that desire ever overcome you?) Up came carbon dioxide.

What next? We put our heads together. One of our favorite corporate slogans was innovation.* So through which new means could we excrete carbon gases into the atmosphere?

As our technocrats realized, carbon dioxide provides soft drinks with a pungent taste, acidic bite, and sparkling fizz.* Well, let’s fizz them up, then!—In 1860 the annual American per capita soft drink consumption was 16 ounces; by 1990 we had gotten it up to 47.5 gallons! That was “creating a demand” for you! In our vending machines and supermarkets, hordes of soft drinks waited fizzily for thirsty customers. The average 2-L soda bottle maintains an internal pressure of roughly . . . 5 atm[ospheres] of CO2.* Once some “consumer” unsealed that bottle, out went the carbon dioxide, and up into the atmosphere!

Let a dye chemist in Madras have the last word: The economics of scale provided the great advantage of reduced cost, which in turn stimulated more applications and demands, thus advancing petrochemical production to ever greater heights.