Fueling the Air War
Development and production of 100 octane gasoline to power the Rolls Royce Merlin engine, installed in the British Hurricane and Spitfire fighters in the air defense of Great Britain.
On December 7, 1941 Professor Vladimir Ipatieff (Northwestern U.) was at his apartment in the Pearson Hotel in Chicago. In Trinidad Fred O. Newtown was a young engineer in charge of UOP operators running the new alkylation and isomerization equipment at the Trinidad Leaseholds refinery. Hugh Rodman was on an assignment at the Dow Chemical plant in Midland, MI. Processes created at Riverside and UOP manpower thrown behind the war effort were credited ultimately as technology assistance, more than any other single company.
The Dow Chemical project involved the manufacture of butadiene, a principal raw material for synthetic rubber. The amount of butadiene that could be cracked from butane was enhanced by Dow’s process, so Dow licensed UOP’s conversion process early in 1940. (Midland was the leading producer of butadiene-styrene latex in World War II.)
In the mid-1930’s UOP’s Aristid von Grosse discovered a catalyst to convert normal heptane into toluene, a key ingredient of TNT. During World War I 150 million pounds of TNT had been made from toluene via the carbonization of coal. In World War II, three billion pounds of TNT were made from petroleum-based toluene.
When Ipatieff first announced his alkylation process, the Chicago Chemical Bulletin reported that the discovery was “almost impossible to evaluate properly.” Aviation gasoline existed before this process, with steady improvement made in gasoline and engines in the decade before the war. The fuel used by Charles A, Lindbergh in his historic flight in 1927 could not even be considered second-grade automobile gasoline in 1939. In response to the war emergency the Justice Department antitrust oversight was waived; ten days after Pearl Harbor the Office of the Petroleum Coordinator for National Defense issued Recommendation 23, authorizing a half-dozen companies to pool their patents relating to sulfuric-acid alkylation. A few months later Recommendation 41 permitted seven major companies to pool patents relating to the embryonic process of fluid catalytic cracking. The pooling companies designated UOP and the M.W. Kellogg Company as their licensing agents. For the lawyers and the financial people, the exchange of information was a nightmare. “But for the technical people, it was wonderful,” recalled Clarence Gerhold. “You’d go into a meeting, and everyone would spill his guts. You could pick up a lot of new information, and you knew it was the truth. Nobody was going to lie. It was wartime.”
The UOP foreign installation considered of greatest importance were Trinidad Leaseholds, which used Shell’s sulfuric-acid process, and new isooctane facilities in England. Aside from the still limited imports from the U.S., the RAF depended on these sites as major sources for high-octane gasoline for the defense of Britain. Shipments from Trinidad seemed hexed by German submarines, until a spy network was exposed in the area. After eliminating the spies that these vital fuel supplies for the most part went through unharmed.
A startling new catalyst was hydrofluoric acid (HF), pursued by Aristid von Grosse and Carl B. Linn at UOP’s Riverside laboratory. In early 1942 the Petroleum Administration for War launched a “Quick 100-Octane” program to swell the nation’s trickle of aviation gasoline into a flood. The new processes called for were virtually untested in the field. The work fell into three stages. The UOP men who had cut their teeth on the premier alkylation-isomerization installations at Trinidad Leaseholds were slotted into key positions to pilot the chores. Recalled Curtis Sims; “every plant had to be individually designed, since each refinery had different feedstocks, and their unique performance prohibited exact duplication.” In early 1943 the first defense refineries were started at Mohawk Petroleum in Bakersfield, CA, at Wilshire Oil near Los Angeles, at Root Refining in El Dorado, KS, and at the Sun Oil Company in Marcus Hook, PA. At some plants 40 barrels of 100-octane fuel were produced for every 100 barrels of original crude charged. In one month the Sun units yielded enough super gasoline to fuel 1,000 B-17 Flying Fortresses or B-24 Liberators on 23 raids over Germany. In all, the $130 million worth UOP units would produce more than 68,000 barrels of aviation fuel every day. Nationally, the total output from all sources would reach a daily average of nearly 400,000 barrels.
C. Remsberg and H. Higdon, Ideas for Rent, UOP Publishers (1994) Des Moines, IL
Extracted from Chapter 8 “Fueling the Air War” on December 16, 2009 by Joseph Degenfelder
