Processing Materials from Petroleum

THIS article is a discussion of a little 1 known phase of the oil business—the use of petroleum as a processing material. If one looks about, he will be able to find very few articles which do not utilize a petroleum product somewhere in manufacture. The clothes and shoes one wears, the furniture one sits on, the paper one sees, and a host of other everyday articles either contain petroleum, or used it while being made. It has never been determined accurately how much petroleum is so employed, but it is known that the quantities run into millions of barrels per year. The scope of petroleum's utility as a processing material is virtually unlimited. At present over 30 basic industries employ petroleum in their manufacturing processes, and the individual applications are numbered in the thousands. Obviously it is possible to give but a bird'seye view of the subject in so short a time, and for ...