Science: Synthetic Black Gold

The French National Research Co. announced, and careful U. S. oil men accepted it as a fact, that Chemist Audibert of Paris had succeeded in making synthetic petroleum, not as a laboratory curiosity, but by a process commercially practicable. This announcement was made and received as being far more important than other fuel-substitute discoveries lately made— coal dust in the U. S. and Germany, fagots in France (Time, Oct. 11). Submitting oxygen, hydrogen and coal to a pressure of 200 atmospheres, introducing a secret catalytic agent and filtering the result, M. Audibert had indubitably obtained a heavy viscous fluid which readily refined to kerosene, gasoline and the usual by-products of that “black gold” which nature only makes after centuries of compression upon organic matter in subterranean strata.

The Paris press and the National Bureau of Liquid Combustibles rejoiced: “Now we shall be relieved from the expense so terrible of importing most of our automotive fuel” (80% of it from the U. S.).

U. S. oilmen were not, however, cast down by any vision of a great market lost to them suddenly of in the proximate future. Chemist Audibert’s process had indeed been shown commercially practicable, but only for a nation with coal in sufficient abundance to permit the diversion of millions of tons annually from furnaces to carburetors. To supply France with synthetic gasoline by the Audibert process would require three or four million tons of coal per annum, All this would have to be imported as France has not enough coal as it is. In terms of coldest economy, the logical way for France to deal with her able son’s discovery seemed to be to divulge it to one of the biggest coal-producing nations—the U. S., China, Germany—thus drive down the price of natural petroleum and import that as before.