User:Milton Beychok/Sandbox

In 1922, a French mechanical engineer named Eugene Jules Houdry and a French pharmacist named E.A. Prudhomme set up a laboratory near Paris to develop a catalytic process for converting lignite coal to gasoline. Supported by the French government, they built a small demonstration plant in 1929 that processed about 60 tons per day of lignite coal. The results indicated that the process was not economically viable and it was subsequently shutdown.

Houdry had found that Fuller's Earth, a clay mineral containing aluminosilicate (Al₂SiO₆), could convert oil derived from the lignite to gasoline. He then began to study the catalysis of petroleum oils and had some success in converting vaporized petroleum oil to gasoline. In 1930, the Vacuum Oil Company invited him to come to the United States and he moved his laboratory to Paulsboro, New Jersey.

In 1931, the Vacuum Oil Company merged with Standard Oil of New York (Socony) to form the Socony-Vacuum Oil COmpany. In 1933, a small Houdry process unit processing 200 barrels per day (32,000 litres per day) of petroleum oil. Because of the economic depression of the early 1930's, Socony-Vacuum was no longer able to support Houdry's work and gave him permission to seek help elsewhere.

In 1933, Houdry and Socony-Vacuum joined with Sun Oil Company in developing the Houdry process. Three years later, in 1936, Socony-Vacuum converted an older thermal cracking unit in their Marcus Hook refinery in New Jersey to a catalyic cracking unit using the Houdry process. In 1937, Sun Oil began operation of a new Houdry unit processing 15,000 barrels per day (2,390,000 litres per day). The Houdry process at that time was a semi-batch operation involving multiple reactors with some of the reactors in operation while other reactors were in various stages of regenerating the catalyst. Almost 50 percent of the cracked product was gasoline as compared with about 25 percent from the thermal cracking processes.