When was sasol started

They jointly announced that Sasol had approved a feasibility study to build a gas-to-liquids plant adjacent to the existing complex. Two months later, it was announced that the company would also study building a world-scale ethane cracker for the same area.

A first-of-a-kind technology designed by Sasol engineers to produce hexene and octene from ethylene. It can trace its roots back to May , when Shitagau Noguchi Added by chcom. Show more Show less. Akzo Nobel chcom 8 years ago 0 Views 0 Likes Akzo Nobel NV history, profile and corporate video Akzo Nobel NV engages in the production and supply of decorative paints, performance coatings and specialty chemicals. Arkema chcom 8 years ago 0 Views 0 Likes Arkema history, profile and corporate video Arkema SA engages in the manufacture and supply of chemical products.

Akzo Nobel Added by chcom 0 Views 0 Likes. Sasol said it is designing the Louisiana plant to produce 96, barrels of fuel. The facility will include a gas processing plant, a chemical plant, and a refinery, and will be located near shale gas fields in Texas.

Burning is scheduled to begin in It has one CDM approved project for destruction of nitrous oxide, qualifying it for Certified Emission Reductions in that it could sell off. Sasol also attempted to register the substitution of gas for coal in its energy feeds as a CDM project. Sasol has also spoken out to oppose legally-binding reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. Yet Eskom does not appear in the JSE report because it is not a listed company.

In September , Sasol set off the world's first passenger flight powered with only synthetic jet fuel synfuel , produced from coal. The fuel, produced by the coal-to-liquids CTL process, is the only fully synthetic jet fuel to have been approved as a commercial aviation turbine fuel. Sasol CEO Pat Davies said that the new jet fuel had undergone significant testing, burning liters of fuel in the process. Davies said the synfuel had lower CO2 output than conventional jet fuel, and that the synthetic fuel provided an alternative source of supply to oil, in a world where demand is always on the increase.

Davies said that in terms of energy security for South Africa, it was a "sensible" path to pursue: "South Africa is sitting on an abundance of coal and natural gas reserves, and Sasol consists of the technology, in line with what we are doing with petrol and diesel, to convert these resources into jet fuel.

Further, the South African technology company has entered into a number of international ventures to implement its CTL and gas-to-liquids technology across the globe.

South Africa remains Sasol's home base with its largest facility located in Secunda, however, the group is also building plants in the Middle East, Nigeria, and its biggest venture decision yet will be set up in China.

With the industry functioning, private finance became available, and Sasol was successfully privatized in As international oil sanctions threatened South Africa's oil supplies and African nationalists targeted Sasol installations, the company remained in the domestic political foreground.

Political considerations also became international. Opposition to the continued involvement of U. This had no practical effect in South Africa, as Fluor's place was taken by a European consortium.

Already a major industrial enterprise when it went into the private sector, Sasol continued to grow, maintaining and expanding its role not only as the supplier of an increasing proportion of South Africa's fuel requirements, but also as a major producer of explosives, polymers, fertilizers, and other chemicals, and as a provider of technical services at home and abroad.

It was only after World War I revealed just how vulnerable to external events the South African economy was because of its reliance on imports, that substantial efforts were made to promote domestic industrial development.

Earlier moves in that direction had been strongly opposed by the mining industry on the grounds that domestically produced goods would be more expensive than imports. There were some small-scale producers of consumer goods such as shoes and textiles but no attempts had been made to move beyond gold and coal mining to make use of some of the country's other varied and abundant mineral resources to establish an industrial economy.

Between and , some iron works using electric furnaces and scrap metal from the mines and railways operated, but were of no real significance. In a blast furnace was built in Newcastle, Natal, and a steelworks at Vereeniging, Transvaal, but it was with the formation of the Iron and Steel Corporation Iscor in that the foundations of an industrial economy were firmly laid.

It rapidly became clear that development would be hampered by the fact that there were no known petroleum reserves in the country.

In addition to the fact that Afrikaners--people of Dutch origin--were moving increasingly into the world of finance previously dominated by Britons, more immediate political considerations also came to the fore.

South Africa in the s and s experienced serious political, economic, and social problems as more and more poor white Afrikaners, unable to secure even a minimal living in the agricultural sector, sought work in towns--work that was in conspicuously short supply. In the Pact Government--a coalition of the South African Labour Party representing skilled, primarily British workers, and the National Party representing strongly anti-British Afrikaner nationalists--moved away from the policy of laissez-faire, making it possible to impose protective tariffs on imports.

By protecting and promoting domestic industries, the move was expected to create more jobs. Other policies were put in place to ensure that as many new jobs as possible would go to white rather than black workers.

Although there was considerable debate about direct government involvement in manufacturing, government finance of essential infrastructure had never been seriously questioned.

The railway network had been built and continued to be run as a nationalized enterprise, and in the Electricity Supply Commission ESCOM had been set up to provide electricity for the entire country. By the time Iscor was formed, although some mining financiers were beginning to show some interest in investing in industrial development, domestic risk capital was not easily available, and there was a growing aversion to allowing foreign capital to increase its hold on the economy.

Many Afrikaner nationalists, including members of the government, did not feel that they could trust British or other foreign capitalists to be sufficiently loyal to South Africa to operate such a fundamentally important industry in the true interests of the country. The growing number of Afrikaner financiers wanted a share in the profits of industrialization, but, having to build on a predominantly agricultural capital base, did not have the large amounts of finance needed.

State-provided capital was considered preferable, all the more with regard to the conversion of coal to oil, as private sector efforts to raise the necessary initial funds came to naught. Research into the possibility of converting coal into oil had been going on in Europe for many years. Some of the scientific basis for the process was discovered at least as early as , with further major progress reported in There was particular interest in the development of a commercially viable process in Germany where, in , Friedrich Bergius who would share in the Nobel chemistry prize for his work in this field first patented an effective means of producing a substance similar to oil by liquefying coal and increasing its hydrogen content under pressure--hydrogenation.

Continued German interest in the search for an economical means of producing oil from coal led, in , to the discovery of an alternative process based on gasifying rather than liquefying coal. Franz Fischer and Hans Tropsch at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Coal Research at Mulheim developed a process in which synthesis gas--sometimes referred to as water gas--produced from coal was combined with hydrogen in the presence of a catalytic agent under controlled temperature and pressure conditions.

In a free market climate, the comparatively high cost of synthetic fuels made them totally uneconomical. The government was now much more interested in the establishment of a coal-to-oil capability than it had been when the idea was first mooted in the s.