Jersey Standard

Ill 1923, GM set up a special chemical division, the GM Chemical Co., to market the new additive. However, GM became dissatisfied with DuPont s progress at the plant. In order to augment its TEL supply, and to push DuPont into accelerating its pace of production, GM called upon the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey (later Esso/Exxon) to set up its own process independently of DuPont. In fact, Jersey Standard had obtained the rights to an ethyl chloride route to TEL. This turned out to be a far cheaper process than the bromide technology. By the niid-1920s, both DuPont and Jersey were producing TEL. 

Soon after production began, TEL was held responsible for a high incidence of illness and deaths among production workers at both the DuPont and Jersey Standard plants. The substance penetrated the skin to cause lead poisoning. Starting in late 1924, there were forty-five cases of lead poisoning and four fatalities at Jersey Standard s Bayway production plant. Additional deaths occurred at the DuPont Plant and at the Dayton Laboratory. This forced the suspension of the sale of TEL ill 1925 and the first half of 1926. 

Ironically, this episode proved beneficial to DuPont. DuPont became the dominant source of TEL after the niid-1920s because they perfected the chloride process and were far more experienced than Jersey Standard in producing and handling toxic substances. 

TEL was not the only way to increase octane number. Those few companies who did not wish to do business with Jersey Standard, sought other means to produce a viable premium gasoline. TEL represented the most serious threat to the traditional gasoline product. It was cheap, vei y effective, and only 0.1 percent of TEL was required to increase the octane number 10 to 15 points. In contrast, between 50 to 100 times this concentration was required of alternative octane enhancers to achieve the same effect. 

One of Lewis first assignments was to make the distillation process more precise and continuous. By the early 1920s, Lewis introduced to Jersey Standard the use of vacuum stills. These were able to operate at lower temperatures that limited coking and fouling of equipment. Thus production engineers did not have to periodically clean out and repair equipment, which in turn facilitated the transformation of distillation from batch to continuous operations. 

This activity expanded greatly during World War II. Refiners, snch as Jersey Standard, Sun Oil, Shell, and Sacony-Vacuum, pioneered the mass production of advanced and strategically critical petrochemicals including butadiene for use as raw-material for synthetic rubber, toluene for m advanced explosives, as well as high-octane motor fuel and aviation gasoline. 

By the early 1930s, thermal cracking had achieved a fairly high level of operation. Both the Dubbs (UOP) and Tube-and-Tank (Jersey Standard) Processes represented the state of the art in the field. Between the end of World War I, when the Burton Process was still revolutionary, and the early 1930s, octane ratings of gasoline increased 36 percent. This improvement resulted from the existence of more advanced thermal plants and the increasing use of additives, espe-... 

Harold F. Williamson et at.. The American Petroleum Industry. The Age of Energy 1899-1959, Northwestern University Press, Evanston, 111., 1963, in particular Chapter 4, Refining in Transition. On the situation in Jersey Standard and the postwar creation of the department that became Standard Oil Development Co., see Edward J. Gomowski, The History of Chemical Engineering at Exxon, pp. 303-311 in W. F. Furter, ed., History of Chemical Engineering [3],... 

P. H. Spitz, Petrochemicals The Rise of an Industry [7], pp. 69-115 (covering early developments by Dow Chemical and Standard Oil Company of New Jersey-Jersey Standard-besides Union Carbide and Shell). 

In the fall of 1938, eight companies (Standard Oil of New Jersey, Standard of Indiana, Texas Company, Shell, Anglo-Iranian, M. W. Kellogg, Universal Oil Products, and I. G. Farben) organized a consortium, Catalytic Research... 

Jersey Standard s patent department was slower than Kellogg s in preparing a patent application that read on oil cracking in a fast bed. On January 3, 1940, Jersey Standard filed an application that matured as Lewis and Gilliland (1950). 

Four of these dozen companies—the forerunners of Exxon (Jersey Standard) and Chevron (Standard of California or Socal) and Shell and Phillips— began to lay the foundation of the petrochemical industry before the outbreak of World War II. These long-established petrochemical companies were very much pioneers among their competitors. As Williams Haynes, the chemical industry s historian, observed in the early 1940s, Production of chemicals by the petroleum industry appeared to be economically and technically sound, but most petroleum executives could not see what appeared to them to be a tiny market for a multitude of chemicals produced by a complexity of operations and sold to a long and diversified list of customers, tasks for which they had neither the technical nor the sales staff. ... 

The entry of the petroleum companies into the polymer/petrochemical revolution proved a critically important development and required significant upgrading of their technological capabilities. The entry can be dated by the delivery of experimental high-octane gasoline in 1934 by Shell to the Army Air Force at Wright Field. Within a year. Shell, Jersey Standard, and Phillips... 

In 1960, at the height of the polymer/petrochemical boom, Rathbone became Jersey Standard s CEO and chairman of the executive committee. De-... 

During the 1970s Jersey Standard s chemical product portfolio had been reduced to resemble that in 1960. Its primary chemical business remained the production of ethylene, basic polymers (including LDPE, linear low-density polyethylene (LLDPE) using the Unipol process, licensed from Union Carbide, PP, and polyvinyl chloride (PVC), plasticizers (particularly for vinyl production), elastomers, and synthetic rubbers. Profits returned. The 1974 balance sheet listed earnings of 456 million on revenue of 3.3 billion, making Exxon Chemical one of the five most profitable chemical companies worldwide. 

Prewar First Movers Follow Jersey Standard s Lead... 

The corporate paths of learning of two other prewar first movers—Shell and Phillips—were similar to that of Jersey Standard and defined the boundaries of these enterprises in a comparable manner. A third prewar first mover, Standard Oil of California, followed a somewhat different path by expanding its earlier move into agricultural chemicals. In the following brief reviews, 1 make no attempt to list the end-products these companies delivered to the market. 

The initial entry of the oil and gas companies came in the 1920s when four competitors—Socal, Shell, Jersey Standard, and Phillips—began to produce chemicals. The first two commercialized agricultural chemicals. The other two, Jersey Standard and Phillips, concentrated on commercializing petroleum-based gasoline. However, it was the totally unpredictable and extraordinary demand of World War II that created the petroleum side of the polymer/petrochemical revolution. The four companies that had created their learning bases in the 1930s became the first movers in this new industry. 

After the war the oil companies followed the example of their industry s leading enterprise, Jersey Standard, and began to redefine their strategic boundaries to include fabrics, specialized plastics, fertilizers, and other businesses. By the 1970s these petrochemical enterprises realized that the barriers to entry created by the long-established chemical companies were too high to overcome. So they retreated and instead concentrated on feedstocks, intermediates, and commodity polymers. The oil companies that successfully redefined their boundaries received a quarter of their revenues from petrochemicals. 

The section in Beaton, Enterprise in Oil, entitled Development of 100 Octanes, pp. 560-574, provides an excellent detailed review of the introduction of the polymerization process and resulting catalytic cracking techniques, including references to the roles of Jersey Standard and Phillips. Useful, too, is Spitz, Petrochemicals, pp. 82-89. 

Beaton, Enterprise in Oil, p. 575. The synthetic rubber Buna program based on butadiene was much smaller than the 100-octane project. See ibid., pp. 592-598 Larson and Porter, History of Humble Oil, pp. 597-600. Again, Shell, Jersey Standard, and Phillips were the leading players. 

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