During the last Sci Bar, Bob mentioned the "Flaming Badischer Plant at ICI, here is his story in more detail. If anyone has similar stories please email me and I'll help "broadcast" them for you via the Blog site (email me, Dave Hornby on dphornby@gmail.com)
The Flaming Badischer
A Personal Recollection
Many people who lived in Widnes & Runcorn
around 1966 to 1968 will recall the huge flame that was often emitted from the
top of a flare stack at ICI’s Castner Kellner Works in Runcorn. Such was the
brightness, I recall someone who lived several miles away saying it was light
enough to do some gardening at 10 pm in September. The plant concerned was
locally known as ‘The Badischer’.
For those of us who lived some distance away,
the brightness was a curiosity. However, it was a different matter for the
residents of Weston village just up the hill from the site - such was the slope
of the land, the flare was more or less level with the village, and they could
also hear the roar from the flame. With flaring often going on overnight,
getting sleep was a problem, and with many of the local residents being
employed by ICI, there was probably a reluctance to complain.
Not so the Vicar of St John’s Church in
Weston. With his church and home facing the flare, his services as well as his
sleep were interrupted. When his complaints to ICI were ignored he was able to
ratchet up the pressure when he somehow obtained a highly confidential list of
the home phone numbers of the key managers, not only of the Castner Kellner
works, but for the whole of Mond Division.
So, if the vicar was awake at night due to
the light & noise from the flare, he worked his way through the list,
phoning people to tell them what their flare was doing to him & his
neighbours. In addition, he told them that if the flare was still alight when
he got to the end of the list, he would start from the top again. As these were
people who needed to be on call in case of an emergency, leaving the phone ‘off
the hook’ wasn’t an option. With ICI senior managers being kept awake, there
was a sudden change in ‘public relations’.
Within days, managers met the vicar to discuss his concerns and arrangements were quickly put in place to restrict the times when the flare could be used. A list went up in the plant control room identifying an early evening cut-off point and the times of services at St John’s when flaring was absolutely forbidden.
I recall being in the control room at the plant
one Sunday afternoon when they were trying to settle the very temperamental
plant into steady operation so as the flare could be turned off before the
afternoon service at St John’s. With a couple of hours to go, staff were fairly
confident they would succeed. An hour later, a problem had cropped up and the
tension was building up - if they couldn’t quickly get steady operation, hours
of effort to get the plant going and a great deal of fuel would have been
wasted.
What was the process about? The plant was
newly built to produce acetylene, a gas that was then a key component for
making other chemicals, the then increasingly popular plastic PVC in
particular. The 1960s was the era of making chemicals from oil in refinery type
settings. Liquid raw materials stored in tanks were pumped into reaction
vessels by means of motorised valves operated from the distant control room,
the staff there being dependent on information provided by instruments. The
chemistry took place in these vessels, often unseen by eye. There was usually a
flare stack, used at start-up & close down (particularly in an emergency) to
burn off inflammable substances that couldn’t be used to produce the required
product.
As ICI didn’t know much about this sort of technology,
they bought the rights to a newly developed ‘oil refinery’ type of process from
BASF, a German chemical company that had originally been called Badische Anilin
& Soda-Fabrik, hence the ‘Badischer’ name. Such was the eagerness of ICI to
build this plant, construction commenced before BASF had properly tested its
own first full size plant.
This process was based on the fact that when
oil burns, a significant amount of acetylene can be produced in the flame. However,
as acetylene itself burns very readily, most will burn away in the flame that
produced it. A key feature of the BASF process was to use a process called
quenching that involved squirting a liquid into the flame chamber to cool the
flame, so minimizing this extra burning.
A technical challenge was the choice of
substances to use to quench the flame because cheap materials like water were
not suitable for the task. The chosen material was naphthalene, known to
everyone from that era as the constituent of moth balls that gave them their
identifiable smell (do they exist nowadays?). Although naphthalene is a solid
at room temperature, at the required temperature for quenching it was liquid
and could be pumped around.
The quenching liquid also had the important job
of removing from the flame chamber the carbon particles (soot) produced in the
flame. As naphthalene wasn’t a cheap, it had to be recycled, and the recycling needed
to take the carbon particles out of the liquid ‘sooty naphthalene’ otherwise it
would soon become unusable.
With construction going ahead at Runcorn,
word came from BASF of problems with their original plan to recycle the naphthalene,
namely by distilling it off in ‘kettles’ -yes, that was what they were called! The
idea was to boil the naphthalene off, leaving the soot behind; then the now
clean naphthalene was condensed to a liquid for re-use. In view of the
difficulties, BASF advised ICI not to install kettles but to use centrifuges
instead. So, with some quick and expensive re-designing, the ICI plant was
built with centrifuges. However, with construction nearly complete, word came
from BASF, ‘Sorry, centrifuges don’t remove the soot but we have now got the
kettles working’. ‘But because of your advice we haven’t got kettles!’, said
ICI.
When ICI tried to get the plant working there
were lots of unreliability problems in the complex process, e.g. pumps breaking
down & back-up pumps not working. Also,
the problems with centrifuges that BASF had reported soon cropped up. As a
result, ICI was having to pay to get rid
of lots of ‘sooty naphthalene’ and buy lots of fresh naphthalene - such was the
demand, the world price shot up.
Senior management asked, ‘Who is the
Castner’s expert on centrifuges?’ No answer. Stage by stage the net was cast
wider, up to ‘Who in ICI across the world knows about centrifuges?’ Still no
answer. This highlighted the problem of buying technology you have no
experience of! Hurriedly, a group was formed in the Research Department to try
to find how to get the centrifuges working efficiently. This was how I got
involved.
With work going on in two laboratory teams, a couple of us set up & ran a ‘pilot plant’ so as promising results from the small scale work in the laboratories could be tested on something like an industrial scale before being tested on the Badischer plant itself.
One thing we did was to seek the guidance of ‘technical’
staff from the three centrifuge manufacturers in Britain, one of whom had
supplied the huge centrifuges on the Badischer plant that weren’t doing the job
they were supposed to do. The first two were an utter waste of time - their
only experience was providing centrifuges to breweries to take the yeast out of
the beer so it wasn’t cloudy. They hadn’t a clue about centrifuges being used
in any other setting.
On arrival, the guy from the third firm
immediately apologised for wasting our time - he had no technical knowledge but
had been sent because the ‘technical’ people had refused to come. He was the
most useful one we met - he confirmed what we were suspecting, namely that the
‘technical expertise’ was desperately limited to taking yeast out of beer. Also
he told us of a surprising occurrence when a centrifuge was ‘wrongly’ set up
but was astonishingly effective. He suggested that as manufacturers were in
business to sell centrifuges, they had no interest in a curiosity that could
result in their customers needing fewer centrifuges.
On the pilot plant we used large quantities of volatile liquid chemicals, full of soot when we had finished with them, so no use to anyone. When we had about 100 drums, each containing 45 gallons, somebody had to do something with them. However, we were told that it wasn’t our responsibility & eventually they were taken away; to where, we were never told. I have always had a bit of a conscience about what happened to them.
From our own efforts over the next 12 months we learned how to make use of the curiosity we had been told about to get the much better effectiveness. We also learned how to get those darned fine particles of soot to stick together - bigger particles would be more easily removed by a centrifuge. The next stage was to try running the two approaches together. I recall, when doing some paperwork near the pilot plant, hearing a change to the familiar sound of the centrifuge. I will always remember that when I went on to the pilot plant to see what was happening, the sloppy semi-solid black mess of carbon particles was being pushed out of the centrifuge like nothing we had seen before. Subsequent analysis of ‘soot in’ & ‘soot out’ & the repeating of the test proved we had hit on something that was dramatically effective.
However, to implement what we proposed on the
huge plant would cost a lot of money & take many months to implement. Also,
the previously mentioned reliability problems of pumps and instruments
continued to be a second headache. And,
by this stage, another ‘non-acetylene’ route to making PVC was becoming
available.
In the end ICI decided to abandon efforts to
get the plant working. It had cost a vast sum of money - all the new cars in
the plant car park and first ventures into continental holidays were evidence
of this, paid for by endless overtime.
To be reasonably brief I have omitted all sorts of personality issues,
memorable moments, etc. It was generally assumed that ICI would ensure that the
career of whoever ‘sorted out’ the Badischer problem would be ‘made for life’ and
that those who played their part would prosper. When the pressure is on &
careers can be ruined or enhanced, human nature can become very raw! In the
end, no one won ‘glory’.
Suffice to say, due my Badischer experience, the ‘interpersonal dynamics’
in particular, I became aware that I was more interested in people than
chemicals. This triggered a career change; I left ICI & trained as a
Probation Officer & happily worked in that setting in Merseyside for over
30 years.
Well over 40 years on, that is how I recall it! If anyone has some sooty
naphthalene they want to clean up, get in touch.
Before Badischer. Prior to the Badischer process, acetylene was produced at Castner
Kellner Works in Runcorn by the Carbide process. In a method little changed
since its invention in 1888, coke and lime were heated to 2,000oC, a temperature that required a special electric furnace. Molten
calcium carbide, glowing white with the heat, was run off from the furnace into
trucks where it cooled & solidified - a hot & spectacular sight. Once
the carbide was made, acetylene was released by crushing it and adding water.
In the early days of motor cars their lights operated in the same way, if on a
much smaller scale - water was dripped on to calcium carbide and the acetylene
given off was burned, giving a very bright light.
Prior to the ‘oil refinery’ type of chemical manufacture with its ‘at a
distance’ operation, processes tended to rely more on physical effort &
experienced ‘hands on’ control. Typical of its era, the Carbide plant required
many process workers doing lots of physical work in extremely hot conditions -
by repute they drank mega quantities of beer to replenish their fluids. It was
an expensive way to make acetylene - but it worked. However, it did not produce
the quantity required by the 1960s.
Bob Roach Sept 2014 roach36@talktalk.net
