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Material World
Industry

Chemical manufacture

The industry that turns a handful of feedstocks into tens of thousands of substances, and consumes materials mostly as plant.

Converting raw materials — oil, gas, minerals, air, water, salt — into the intermediates and products everything else is made from. Its material demand is unusual: the chemicals are the product, and the materials it *consumes* are the plant, which must contain aggressive substances at temperature and pressure for decades.

So it is the largest customer for corrosion-resistant alloys, fluoropolymer linings, technical ceramics, refractories and catalysts, and the industry where material selection is most explicitly a chemistry problem.

History

Begins with sulfuric acid and soda ash in the eighteenth century, and is the first industry organised around applied science rather than craft. The Haber-Bosch process for ammonia in 1913 is the single most consequential chemical development there has been — it fixes nitrogen from the air for fertiliser, and a large share of the nitrogen in a living human body has passed through it.

Petrochemicals from the 1940s reorganised the whole industry around cracking, which is where the polymers came from.

Economic significance

It sits between extraction and everything else, which makes it both indispensable and largely invisible to the public. Its plants are among the largest capital assets built, run for forty years, and are located by feedstock and energy price rather than by market.

It is also the industry with the most acute decarbonisation problem, because a substantial part of its emissions come from the chemistry itself rather than from the energy used, and cannot be removed by changing the fuel.

Medium confidence Weak evidence

How we know: checked recently · only one source, so there is nothing to cross-check it against · stated directly by the source.

How this connects

Where a connection has been confirmed by an outside reference, that reference is named beside it.

uses

  • Sulfuric acid — compound · produced in greater tonnage than any other manufactured chemical, and a country's consumption of it was once used as an index of its industrial development
  • Sodium hydroxide — compound · and it is made as the inseparable co-product of chlorine, which ties the markets for two unrelated chemicals together permanently
  • Polytetrafluoroethylene — material · linings and gaskets where the chemistry defeats every elastomer
  • Technical ceramic — material · pump and valve components in service too aggressive for any alloy
  • Contact process — process · the route to sulfuric acid, and one of the oldest continuously operated industrial catalytic processes
  • Steam cracking — process · the reaction the whole petrochemical industry is arranged around, and its largest single energy consumer
  • Crude oil — material · the feedstock, before it is a fuel, for almost every synthetic polymer
  • Refractory brick — material · and the steel industry is the larger consumer, where refractory used per tonne of steel is a number operators watch
  • Borosilicate glass — material · laboratory and plant glassware, on chemical durability as much as on thermal shock
  • Water — compound · as solvent, reactant and coolant, and as the steam that reforms methane into the hydrogen for most of the world's ammonia
  • Salt — compound · which takes far more of it than food does: roughly six per cent of world production is eaten and most of the rest is a way of buying chlorine

Sources

  • Material World
    Our own writing
  • Wikidata
    Wikimedia Foundation · Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal (public domain dedication)

Questions this page answers

Where it comes from, and what it becomes

Follow Chemical manufacture back to what it starts as, and forward into what it becomes. Each step is a documented one — a real route material takes, not a chain of inference.

Upstream — what it comes from

  • Chemical manufacture → uses (pump and valve components in service too aggressive for any alloy) → Technical ceramic → is composed of (alumina is the most-used engineering ceramic) → Aluminium oxide → is sourced from (dissolved out with hot caustic soda in the Bayer process) → Bauxite → is sourced from (the residue of prolonged tropical weathering, which strips the silica and alkalis out of an aluminosilicate rock and leaves the aluminium behind — basalt is one common parent among several) → Basalt → is composed of (an early-crystallising constituent of basaltic magma) → Olivine
  • Chemical manufacture → uses (and it is made as the inseparable co-product of chlorine, which ties the markets for two unrelated chemicals together permanently) → Sodium hydroxide → is produced by (at the cathode, in fixed proportion to the chlorine whether demand agrees or not) → Chlor-alkali electrolysis → takes as input (the largest single use of salt, and the process the whole chlorine and caustic soda industry rests on) → Salt → is produced by (in the solar route — the same process, read from the other end) → Brine evaporation → takes as input (the feedstock for solar salt and, in the salars, for the far stronger brines that lithium comes from) → Seawater
  • Chemical manufacture → uses (linings and gaskets where the chemistry defeats every elastomer) → Polytetrafluoroethylene → is produced by (found by accident when a cylinder of tetrafluoroethylene polymerised itself, and made deliberately the same way since) → Polymerisation → takes as input (as vinyl chloride, which is why more than half of PVC's weight is salt rather than oil) → Chlorine → is produced by (at the anode) → Chlor-alkali electrolysis → takes as input (as brine; the salt is the feedstock for both products at once) → Halite
  • Chemical manufacture → uses (and the steel industry is the larger consumer, where refractory used per tonne of steel is a number operators watch) → Refractory brick → is composed of (calcined, as the alumina source for the high-alumina grades) → Bauxite → is sourced from (the residue of prolonged tropical weathering, which strips the silica and alkalis out of an aluminosilicate rock and leaves the aluminium behind — basalt is one common parent among several) → Basalt → is sourced from (partial melting of mantle peridotite is what basalt magma is — the residue left behind stays peridotite, depleted of what went into the melt) → Peridotite → is composed of (the mineral that defines the rock and gives it its name — a peridotite is olivine-dominant by definition) → Olivine
  • Chemical manufacture → uses (laboratory and plant glassware, on chemical durability as much as on thermal shock) → Borosilicate glass → is produced by (with boron oxide replacing most of the soda, which is what drops the thermal expansion to a third and lets a hot dish go into water) → Glass melting → takes as input (as the stabiliser, and without it a soda-silica glass would slowly dissolve in water) → Limestone → is sourced from (precipitated from it, mostly by organisms building shells and skeletons out of dissolved calcium and carbonate) → Seawater → is composed of (about 96.5 per cent by mass — seawater is 3.5 per cent dissolved solids and the rest of it is this) → Water
  • Chemical manufacture → uses (produced in greater tonnage than any other manufactured chemical, and a country's consumption of it was once used as an index of its industrial development) → Sulfuric acid → is produced by (absorbed into existing acid as oleum, then diluted — never added to water directly) → Contact process → takes as input (burned to sulfur dioxide, increasingly recovered from oil and gas rather than mined — and including the sulfur dioxide captured from ore roasting, which turns a smelter's principal pollutant into a feedstock) → Sulfur → is extracted from (historically the principal source of sulfur for sulfuric acid) → Pyrite

These are the most distinct paths back. Chemical manufacture can be traced through others besides.