History and Development

Petrochemicals industry and the products it makes play an enormous role in our daily lives. Imagine life without gasoline, cosmetics, fertilizers, detergents, synthetic fabrics, asphalt, and plastics. All of these productsand many moreare made from petrochemicalschemicals derived from petroleum or natural gas. Crude oil, or petroleum fresh out of the ground, has been used sporadically throughout history. Many hundreds of years ago, Native Americans used crude oil for fuel and medicine. But the start of the oil industry as it is known today can be traced back to 1859. In that year, retired railroad conductor Edwin L. Drake drilled a well near Titusville, Pennsylvania. The well, powered by an old steam engine, soon produced oil and sparked an oil boom. By the 1860s, wooden derricks covered the hills of western Pennsylvania. In 1865, the first successful oil pipeline was built from an oil field near Titusville to a railroad station five miles away. From there, railcars transported oil to refineries on the Atlantic coast. The business of refining oil was largely the domain of John D. Rockefeller. The New Yorkborn industrialist financed his first refinery in 1862. He then went on to buy out competitors, and, along with his brother, William, and several associates, he created Standard Oil Company. By 1878, Rockefeller controlled 90 percent of the oil refineries in the United States. Drilling for oil quickly spread beyond Pennsylvania. By 1900, Texas, California, and Oklahoma had taken the lead in oil production, and eleven other states had active oil deposits. Annual U.S. oil production climbed from two thousand barrels in 1859 to 64 million barrels in 1900. Other countries were also getting into the oil business. Russia was producing slightly more than the United States around the beginning of the twentieth century. Smaller producers included Italy, Canada, Poland, Peru, Venezuela, Mexico, and Argentina.

The first major oil discovery in the Middle East occurred in Iran in 1908. Prospectors struck oil in Iraq in 1927 and in Saudi Arabia in 1938. The Petrochemical Industry Kerosene, a fuel for heating and cooking, was the primary product of the petroleum industry in the 1800s. Rockefeller and other refinery owners considered gasoline a useless by product of the distillation process. But all of that changed around 1900 when electric lights began to replace kerosene lamps, and automobiles came on the scene. New petroleum fuels were also needed to power the ships and airplanes used in World War I. After the war, an increasing number of farmers began to operate tractors and other equipment powered by oil. The growing demand for petrochemicals and the availability of petroleum and natural gas caused the industry to quickly expand in the 1920s and 1930s. Many chemical companies, including Dow and Monsanto, joined the industry. In 1925, annual crude oil production surpassed a billion barrels. During World War II, vast amounts of oil were produced and made into fuels and lubricants. The United States supplied more than 80 percent of the aviation gasoline used by the Allies during the war. American oil refineries also manufactured synthetic rubber, toluene (an ingredient in TNT), medicinal oils, and other key military supplies. The history of petrochemical products actually dates back to ancient Egypt. Products we know today as ethylene an polyethylene were made the ancient Egyptians, that ethylene was produced organically in the plant. In 1872 the first chemical to be made from petroleum, carbon black, was formed by the partial combustion of natural gas in air. Carbon black is used primarily in the production of synthetic rubber. Cracking was introduced into crude oil refineries in 1913. ("Cracking" is the second state in the refinery process, called Conversion, where the molecules are re-arranged). Widespread production of petrochemicals grew out of efforts to recover and use the chemical by-products of the cracking process. The modern petrochemical industry

started in 1920 with the opening of the Standard Oil Company plant in New Jersey. Propylene, the original petrochemical feedstock, is a by-product of refinery cracking for gasoline. The Geography of Petrochemicals By the last decade of the twentieth century, there were almost a million oil wells in more than one hundred countries producing more than 20 billion barrels per year. Most experts give Saudi Arabia credit for having the largest original oil endowment of any country, and the Middle East as a whole is believed to have about 41 percent of the world's total oil reserve. North America is a distant second. Because of the large deposits in Russia, Eastern Europe is also well endowed with oil. Most of Western Europe's oil lies below the North Sea. Many believe that an estimated 77 percent of the world's total recoverable oil has already been discovered. If so, the remaining 23 percent, mostly located in smaller fields or in more difficult environments, may be more expensive to find and to recover. Petrochemicals are chemical products made from raw materials of petroleum or other hydrocarbon origin. Although some of the chemical compounds that originate from petroleum may also be derived from coal and natural gas, petroleum is the major source. The largest petrochemical industries are to be found in the USA and Western Europe, though the major growth in new production capacity is in the Middle East and Asia. There is a substantial inter-regional trade in petrochemicals of all kinds. World production of ethylene is around 110 million tons per year, of propylene 65 million tons, and of aromatic raw materials 70 million tons. Petrochemicals, as the name suggests, are chemicals obtained from the cracking of petroleum feedstock. Petrochemicals are used in many manufacturing fields. The industry is built on small number of basic commodity chemicals, also known as building blocks such as ethylene, propylene, butadiene, benzene, toluene and xylene.