PETROLEUM AND NICKEL

Evening Post, Volume CVI, Issue 108, 3 November 1923, Page 16

PETROLEUM AND NICKEL

METALS THAT OCCUR IN OILS.

In a paper recently contributed to the Liverpool section of the Society of \Chemical Industry, Mr. W. Ramsay comments on the presence of traces of nickel in almost all natural oils. It is true, as Ramsay points out, that carbon and its oxygen compounds 'tan, in the presence of catalysts, be hydrated, first into methane, and at higher temperatures and pressures into higher hydro-carbons: but the equilibria are complex, and more is known about cracking or breaking do-,vn oils than about building them up. ■Yet from experiments carried out by Sabaher, Senderens, and others, says Engineering," natural oil can be syuthetised^ with, the aid of hydrogen and catalysts from acetylene, and it has been suggested that 'the tracas of nickel found first" in Mexican petroleum are the residues of the nickel which had helped in the hydro-genation ■ process. Ramsay finds up to 82 parts in 1,000,000 of nickel in Mexican petroleum, 94 parts in some Persian petroleum, and next to. none in others, and on the whole hardly any nickel in the petroleum from Burmah and the East Indies; 1 further, there are 200 parts and more of nickel in Trinidad asphalt "and in American pitch, but none in German ozokorite. The relative richness in nickel aeems to go 'together with a richness of the oil in paraffin constituents. • . But it is rather awkward for the assumed nickel catalysts that the Mexican oils are also rich in sulphur, which is a catalytic poison, and that nickel is not-the only metal occurring in natural oils, though some metals, like copper,, are likewise capable of favouring catalysis. Mr. J. E. Hacklord discovered iron, copper, lead, nickel, vanadium, and gold in the ashes of Mexican oil, and he ascribed their presence to the infiltration of sea water, in which the metals had been dissolved. The petroleum originated, in his opinion, from seaweed. _So far the hypothesis that petroleum is formed by some hydropcenation of carbon or carbon compounds in the interior of the earth, favoured by nickel as a*catalyst, rests on a very slender basis.