In the 1960s and 1970s, the petrochemical industry with oil and natural gas as raw materials sprang up.
After a long period of technical preparation, the petrochemical industry has gone through 30-40 years, which can be traced back to the 1920s at the earliest. 1920 standard oil company of new jersey, USA, uses propylene in refinery gas to produce isopropanol, which is considered as the bud of petrochemical industry. In the mid-1920s and 1930s-40s, a large number of new chemical products and technologies appeared, some of which opened up intermediate raw materials for petrochemical industry. 19 17 was the first time to synthesize isopropanol from propylene in refinery gas, which was recognized as the first petrochemical product, marking the birth of petrochemical industry. 19 19, the United carbide company of the United States developed the technology of producing ethylene by pyrolysis of ethane and propane at high temperature, and then Linde company realized the separation of ethylene from pyrolysis gas. 1920 established the first petrochemical plant to produce ethylene.
In the production of aromatics and diolefins, 194 1 year has successfully developed a new process for producing aromatics from petroleum light fractions. In the same year, butadiene, an important monomer of synthetic rubber, was separated from hydrocarbon cracking gas. Then, a series of production technologies based on it were developed:
Indirect hydration of ethylene to ethanol (1930);
Alkylation of ethylene with benzene to produce styrene (1930);
Ethylene to ethylene oxide (1937);
Production of vinyl chloride from ethylene (1940);
Dehydrogenation of ethylene to butadiene (1943) and so on.
In terms of downstream products, in the early 1930s, under the guidance of polymer science theory represented by German staudinger and Russian Semenoff, a large number of new polymer chemical products appeared.
1930 our company uses bulk method to produce polystyrene, which is polymerized with other monomers to form a series of resins.
193 1 year, our company uses emulsion method to produce PVC.
193 1 year, polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA) is produced by bulk method in the United States.
1939, DuPont produced nylon 66 fiber.
1939, British Bunemen Company (Imperial Chemical Company) invented the high-pressure gas phase method to produce polyethylene.
1946- 1950 During the five years, oil resources were discovered in the Middle East every year on average, which was 9 times of the world oil output of about 3 billion barrels at that time. In the 1960s, the oil price was $65,438 +0.5 per barrel. In the 1950s and 1960s, the "four major items" of automobiles, televisions, refrigerators and washing machines appeared all over the world, all of which were inseparable from synthetic materials. Therefore, the world petrochemical industry has developed rapidly. In the United States, for example, during the 40 years from 1940 to 1980, ethylene increased from 400,000 tons to130,000 tons, an increase of10 times, with an average annual growth rate of 12.5%.