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From: Lynn McGuire <lynnmcguire5@gmail.com>
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.written,rec.arts.comics.strips
Subject: Re: xkcd: Good and Bad Ideas
Date: Wed, 8 May 2024 17:36:18 -0500
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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.
> --scott

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 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.

Using my software, the customer developed a new reactor to sell to 
refineries that converted asphalt with hydrogen injection to gasoline. 
It was a variant on the Fischer-Tropsch process.

Lynn