SYNTHETIC BENZINE

Greymouth Evening Star, 16 April 1927, Page 10

SYNTHETIC BENZINE

THE BERGIUS PROCESS.

While the name of Dr. Bergius is being connected in the world’s Press with negotiations between himself anil his colleagues and the Standard Oil Company, Germany is at present far more interested in the latest results of his process for getting a substitute for benzine from coal (writes the Berlin correspondent of “The Observer”). This is a system of making gas for city supply direct at the mine’s head and leading it in long conduit pipes to its destination. This means a reduction of the supplies of more of less worthless coke ordinarily left as residue from gas-making. Instead of making gas at the works and synthetic benzine, oil, methanol, or synthol, as the case may be. in the particular plant, a combined system has beeii discovered which will apply to coal both processes at one and the same time. Instead of gas and coke, gas and synthetic benzine will be. made. But in regard to the commercialisation of Dr. Bergius’s synthetic benzine process, now reported from America, there appears to be no doubt in Germany that the world’s supply of real benzine is in no danger of being exhausted within any date likely to affect this generation or the next. News, therefore, of the German Dye Trust beginning to build two big plants for making synthetic benzine implies that the inventors have hit upon a method of cheapening production likely to make it a really serious rival to the genuine article. One of these is in the Ruhr, the other at Leuna, in Central Germany, where all the more important plant is being put up. How the process is to be cheapened in view of the probable sinking of real benzine prices is still a mystery, but the great Dye Trust combine is renowned for dealing in mysteries and keeping its secrets, both theoretical and comInercial, till the right moment. Germans themselves talk of the beginnings both of artificial silk and of synthetic nitrogen, and the gradual cheapening and improvement of the process of production, enabling them to become the very serious rivals of the silkworm, of chili-saltpetre, and guano fields. But until this cheapening is an accomplished fact, there is the' question of protection, which would raise an infant industry in synthetic oil to a. rival of the genuine imported product. It is possible that this move is contemplated on the part of the Government. What with the exploitation of new oil-fields in America, of Roumania and the opening up of Russian sources, it is firmly believed here that benzine will grow cheaper instead of dearer, and that even if every European in the near future should own and drive a car at the American rate, there will be oil enough for all. Voices arc already raised iu praise of the Dye Trust for placing some of its great wealth at the disposal of the country by building the plant necessary. To supply all Germany’s, needs twenty such plants would be necessary, at a cost of 160 milliard mark. According to German computation, France also could supply her needs, should occasion arise, from the factory at Lens, where General Patart’s method of producing methyl-alcohol is in use, England—which is, to Continentals, notoriously the country where extravagance prevails in tliejj, mines—stands to gain enormously by adopting the Bergius process.