Re: xkcd: Good and Bad Ideas

Lynn McGuire  <lynnmcguire5@gmail.com> wrote:

On 5/8/2024 4:14 PM, Scott Dorsey wrote:

Robert Woodward  <robertaw@drizzle.com> wrote:

>
What about the processes of cracking longer hydrocarbon chains down to 8
carbon chains?

>
Houdry Process, 1937, although it didn't become usable until the fifties.
The ex-petrolero across the hall from my office says it was developed out of
German coal gasification research.

>
Ah, I did not know the name of the process.  I know the type of column,
the cat-cracker, short for catalytic cracker, that uses a fluidized bed
to break the long carbon chain molecules.  Getting compressors to run at
1,300 F was quite a impressive trick on materials.

 I didn't either, but the guy across the hall from me today was a petroleum
engineering grad from LSU before he got into aero work and he knew more
than I really wanted to hear.
 Like a lot of great technical advances in the thirties it relied a lot on
improved metallurgy, and the Germans and Swedes were top of the heap at
that time.
 

I went down in the old below ground coal-to-gasoline refinery in
Gelsenkirchen back in 1995 or so.  That refinery could make almost a
million gallons of gasoline a day and was never bombed since the Allies
did not know about it.  There were six flights of stairs bolted to the
wall of the deep pit with the refinery at the bottom.  I suddenly
realized that the stairways were built in the early 1940s when we hit
the first landing and told my guide that I had seen enough.  He assured
me that they were in good shape but, 50 year old stairs bolted to a wall
were unnerving.  We went back up to the office building.

 Is this open as a tourist attraction or is it still an operating facility?
I would love to see it!