Ethylene, 30 Table industrial chemicals from

As we learned in Chapter 8, the official production of propylene is usually about half that of ethylene, only because a large part of the propylene is used by petroleum refineries internally to alkylate gasolines. This captive use is not reported. Of the propylene used for chemical manufacture, nearly 40% is polymerized to polypropylene, to be discussed in a later chapter. Of the remaining amount of propylene, seven chemicals from the top 50 are manufactured. These are listed in Table 10.1. Their industrial manufacturing methods are summarized in Fig. 10.1. Note that four of these chemicals, cumene, phenol, acetone, and bisphenol A, are also derived from a second basic organic chemical, benzene. 

Ethylene. Ayres has reported 2) on the costs of ethylene production (based on 1950 construction costs) from propane at four cents per gallon, as shown in Table XV. The consumption of ethylene by the chemical industry has been reviewed by Aries and Copulsky ). 

The monomers used most commonly in chain-growth polymerization are ethylene (ethene) and substituted ethylenes. In the chemical industry, monosubstituted ethylenes are known as alpha olefins. Polymers formed from ethylene or substituted ethylenes are called vinyl polymers. Some of the many vinyl polymers synthesized by chain-growth polymerization are listed in Table 28.1. 

Ethoxylation of alkyl amine ethoxylates is an economical route to obtain the variety of properties required by numerous and sometimes smaH-volume industrial uses of cationic surfactants. Commercial amine ethoxylates shown in Tables 27 and 28 are derived from linear alkyl amines, ahphatic /-alkyl amines, and rosin (dehydroabietyl) amines. Despite the variety of chemical stmctures, the amine ethoxylates tend to have similar properties. In general, they are yellow or amber Hquids or yellowish low melting soHds. Specific gravity at room temperature ranges from 0.9 to 1.15, and they are soluble in acidic media. Higher ethoxylation promotes solubiUty in neutral and alkaline media. The lower ethoxylates form insoluble salts with fatty acids and other anionic surfactants. Salts of higher ethoxylates are soluble, however. Oil solubiUty decreases with increasing ethylene oxide content but many ethoxylates with a fairly even hydrophilic—hydrophobic balance show appreciable oil solubiUty and are used as solutes in the oil phase. 

Manufacturing (NAICS 326), Rubber Products (NAICS 3262) totals 35.3 billion, of which Tires (NAICS 32621) makes up 15.4 billion, showing the dominance of the automobile tire market in this sector of the chemical industry. The top polymer production summary in Table 1.16 gives a numerical list of important synthetic elastomers. Styrene-butadiene rubber (SBR) dominates the list at 1.93 billion lb for U.S. production. All other synthetic elastomers are much smaller. While elastomers had a slight increase in production from 1980-1990, only 0.5% annually, SBR was down 2.3% per year. From 1990-2000 it was up 1.0% per year. The fastest growing elastomer is ethylene-propylene, up 5.2% annually for 1990-2000. Table 18.1 gives a breakdown in percent production of synthetic elastomers and consumption of natural rubber in the U.S. 

Table 10.7 presents the stream table around the chemical reactor. As mentioned above, the inlet mixture is fixed because of control requirements. In this way, the outlet reflects the transformation of composition due to the chemical reactor. The molar conversions for ethylene and acetic acid are in agreement with industrial data. The amount of C02 formed by reaction is quite limited, denoting good catalyst selectivity only about 11% from ethylene is consumed by combustion, the rest, 89%, going into vinyl acetate. Finally, the computation gives a catalyst productivity of 326.6kgVAM/m3-catalyst h. 

Oxidation is extremely important both from a scientific and a practical point of view. Without oxidation life would not exist. In the chemical industry, too, oxidation is probably the most important process. A major example is the combustion of fossil fuels. This process is usually uncatalyzed, but sophisticated catalytic processes do exist. Examples in the inorganic industry are the oxidation of sulphur dioxide and ammonia in the manufacture of sulphuric acid and nitric acid, respectively. In the petrochemical industry many catalytic synthesis processes are carried out, for example the production of ethylene and propene epoxide, phthalic acid anhydride. An example which has recently also become important is the catalytic combustion of hydrocarbons in flue gases. Table 5.2 gives a list of examples of oxidation catalysis in industry [93]. 

A recent study indicates that if the Wacker process proves to be substantially cheaper than the acetylene route, no more vinyl acetate plants will be built in the United States, based on the latter process (38). Table XV gives estimated production costs for manufacturing vinyl acetate. Several companies are building or have already built plants to manufacture vinyl acetate from ethylene. These include Distillers Co., Ltd., British Celanese, Imperial Chemical Industries, and Celanese Corp., to name only a few. 

The pretax profit margin declined from 14.9% in 1997 to 11.0% in 1998 as a result of declines in polyethylene and ethylene glycol margins, new ethylene industry capacity, and the Asian economic crisis (Table 7.21). In 1998 the company s returns on assets and equity (Tables 7.21 and 7.24) were about the same as the median values for 37 chemical companies. Table 7.22 is a summary of balance sheet and income statement statistics. 

The major part of these catalytic processes is carried out in fixed bed reactors. Some of the main fixed bed catalytic processes are listed in Table 11.1-1. Except for the catalytic cracking of gas oil, which is carried out in a fluidized bed to enable the continuous regeneration of the catalyst, the main solid catalyzed processes of today s chemical and petroleum refining industry appear in Table 11.1-1. However, there are also fluidized bed alternatives for phthalic anhydride— and ethylene dichloride synthesis. Furthermore, Table 11.1-1 is limited to fixed bed processes with only one fluid phase trickle bed process (e.g., encountered in the hydrodesulfurization of heavier petroleum fractions) are not included in the present discussion. Finally, important processes like ammonia oxidation for nitric acid production or hydrogen cyanide synthesis, in which the catalyst is used in the form of a few layers of gauze are also omitted from Table 11.1-1. 

Polyester is the category of polymers with ester functional group on the main chain, although there are many types of polyester, the term polyester in industries specifically refers to poly(ethylene terephthalate) (PET) and poly(butylene terephthalate) (PBT). Polyesters can be classified as thermoplastic or thermosetting depending on the chemical stmctures. Table 1 shows the industrial production of polyesters, and it is estimated that the production will exceed 50 million tonnes by the year of 2015. Polyesters are made from chemical substances found mainly in petroleum and are mainly manufactured into fibers, films, and plastics. These polyesters are abbreviated as wiGT, where m denotes the number of methylene groups for example, PET, PTT, and PBT are abbreviated as 2GT, 3GT, and 4GT, respectively. 

The characteristics of the process wastewaters from the manufacture of plastic and synthetic materials are shown in Table 17. The plastic and synthetic materials industry is typically a continuous year-round operation. Because it is technically and economically advantageous, many hrms manufacture several different, but related chemical products at one location. For example, a typical complex makes ethylene, polyethylene, sulfuric acid, ethyl chloride, ammonia, nitric-acid and phosphoric acid. 

Fossil resources, which include oil, natural gas, and coal, are the major sources of chemical products impacting our modem lives. Hydrocarbons, the principal components of fossil resources, can be transformed through a number of refining processes to more valuable products. One of these processes is called cracking, in which the long carbon chains are cracked (broken down) into smaller and more useful fractions. After these fractions are sorted out, they become the building blocks of the petrochemical industry such as olefins (ethylene, propylene, and butadiene) and aromatics (benzene, toluene, and xylenes). These new hydrocarbon products are then transformed into the final consumer products. Table 1.1 gives examples of some end products made from hydrocarbons. 

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