Industry: Test-Tube Cornucopia

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The new plant at Beaumont, Texas, had all the brilliance—and some of the unreality—of a Dali painting, with its soaring silver towers and bright blue and brown pipes, all threaded together by garish yellow catwalks. Built by Socony's Mobil Chemical Co. at a cost of $25 million, the plant is typical of the complex and colorful plants in one of the world's fastest-growing industries: petrochemicals.* Last week, in the air-conditioned control rooms of Mobil's plant, engineers began the first tests of the complex maze of pipes. By summer, when the plant will be in full production, it will be the world's biggest producer of high purity ethylene. a leading member of the nouveau riche petroleum family.

Socony is late in getting into an industry that in just two decades has grown from little more than a gleam of waste gases in chemists' test tubes to a $7 billion industry. The Gulf Coast from Pensacola to Brownsville, where 75% of the nation's producing facilities are located, has earned a new name, "the Golden Crescent." Petrochemical products reach into almost every phase of modern living and account for 60% of the sales of all chemicals and allied products. And the end is not in sight. Vice President K. J. Nelson of Enjay, giant Humble Oil & Refining's petrochemical division, says that even though the industry has grown 75% since 1955, he expects it to grow another 52% by 1965.

Building Blocks. The building blocks of this new giant are hydrogen and carbon atoms left over from refining natural gas and cracking crude oil to make gasoline.

Refineries process them into pure gases of butylene, propylene and ethylene. pipe them to petrochemical companies, which turn them into plastics or chemicals.

Ethylene. for example, becomes polyethylene plastic, which, rolled into sheets, is used for dry cleaners' bags and bread wrappers. Extruded into thread, it is used in cloth and rope; molded, it is used in squeeze bottles. As a liquid, it also becomes the ethylene glycol base in permanent-type antifreeze. Petrochemicals have made possible products such as synthetic detergents, which have 75% of the soap market, and synthetic rubber, which has 65% of the rubber market. They go into nylon, Dacron, vinyl, chemical fertilizers, aspirin, sulfa drugs—altogether 3,000 products. Some of the newest products pose a serious threat to zinc, steel and aluminum: Celanese Corp. and Du Pont have each developed plastics that are so tough that they may replace metal parts in autos, appliances and business machines. Nails of Celanese Celcon plastic can be driven into wood.

Handy Raw Materials. The reasons why the Golden Crescent produces most of the U.S. petrochemicals are plain: easy pipeline reach of 60% of the nation's oil and 67% of the gas reserves; cheap water transportation to customers who fabricate the plastics; some 300 underground salt domes with the brine needed in processing. Of the $6.7 billion in U.S. petrochemical plants, $4 billion is on the Golden Crescent. Under construction and in planning is almost $1 billion more.