Business, Government Legal News from throughout WVW.Va. Is home to many important chemical inventions

W.Va. Is home to many important chemical inventions

Numerous chemical achievements have originated in West Virginia, including the invention and commercialization of the UNIPOL™ process, which is now used across the globe to produce some of the world's most widely used plastics.

Polyethylene and polypropylene are polymers, which are very large molecules produced and formed into everyday products such as liquid bottles, plastic bags, packaging materials, insulation and piping.

Polyethylene was first made under high pressure in useful quantities during the 1930s, and Union Carbide acquired the technology from a British company in the 1940s. It was important to the Allied victory in World War II because polyethylene is an excellent electrical insulator and it enabled the practical use of radar. 

However, the high-pressure process of manufacturing polyethylene at the time was expensive and sometimes dangerous to operate, stimulating the invention of catalysts — or materials that aid in the production of chemicals — that operated at low pressure.

In the early days, these polymerization processes took place in liquid, where the product either dissolved or remained solid, forming a slurry. The size of these reactors, which are basically large vats, was constrained by heating and cooling limitations, and considerable expense was required to remove all of the liquid from the plastic.

So, where does the UNIPOL process enter the story? In the early 1960s, an enterprising engineer at Union Carbide, Adam Miller, conceived a novel means of making polyethylene.

Working at what is now the West Virginia Regional Technology Park, he and his associates built a gas-phase, fluidized-bed reactor in which solid particles are suspended by a high flow rate of gas, much like popcorn poppers use a flow of hot air to suspend kernels.

The first commercial reactor to produce polyethylene in the gas-phase was based on pilot plant experiments and engineering carried out in South Charleston. That first reactor, built in Seadrift, Texas, spawned the proliferation of polyethylene reactors built on every continent except Antarctica.

Union Carbide realized early on that it did not have the resources to build the number of plants it projected would be demanded by global markets. So it launched a major licensing effort, providing the technology and support. Today, licensees operate about 100 polyethylene reactor lines worldwide. In addition, Union Carbide built seven polyethylene reactors of its own in North America through the 1980s.

In 2001, Union Carbide was merged into the Dow Chemical Co. Today, Univation Technologies LLC, a joint venture between Dow and ExxonMobil, operates the UNIPOL process franchise for polyethylene. The process also is used for polypropylene, and 51 polypropylene reactor lines are licensed by Dow, operating in 18 countries worldwide.

Many years after the invention of the UNIPOL process, engineers and chemists encountered a challenge — to use this process to make synthetic rubber in the gas phase. Early in my 10-year participation in this effort, some experts contended it was not possible to make rubber this way. However, aided by the invention of new catalysts and process technologies in New Jersey and West Virginia, Union Carbide built the world's first gas-phase reactor for producing rubber, also in Seadrift, Texas.

Currently, UNIPOL remains, by far, the world's most widely licensed process for making polyethylene, producing nearly 25 percent of the world's supply. 

As part of the International Year of Chemistry, take a moment to celebrate the role West Virginia has played in the development and continuation of the field of chemistry. Just think, that water bottle on your desk or the trash bags you took to the curb this morning might not have been invented without technology created in our state. 

Today, at the Mid-Atlantic Technology, Research & Innovation Center, or MATRIC, we're adding new chapters to the Mountain State's legacy of innovation in chemical research and development.

Ronald S. Eisinger, Ph.D. is a senior chemical engineer at the Mid-Atlantic Technology, Research & Innovation Center, or MATRIC, in South Charleston.