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The Emergence and Evolution of Atom Efficient and/or Environmentally Acceptable Catalytic Petrochemical Processes from the 1920s to the 1990s

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  • Mark A. Murphy
Mark A. Murphy
UVLAW Patents LLC, Blowing Rock North Carolina 28605, US
Bio
DOI: https://doi.org/10.36253/Substantia-3100

Published 2025-05-14

Keywords

  • Green Chemistry,
  • Green Engineering,
  • History,
  • Atom Economy,
  • E-Factor,
  • Environmental Quotient,
  • Catalysis,
  • Interdisciplinary Research,
  • Evolution,
  • Industry
    • ...More
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How to Cite

Murphy, M. A. (2025). The Emergence and Evolution of Atom Efficient and/or Environmentally Acceptable Catalytic Petrochemical Processes from the 1920s to the 1990s. Substantia. https://doi.org/10.36253/Substantia-3100

Copyright (c) 2025 Mark A. Murphy

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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Abstract

The emergence and evolution of “Green / Sustainable Chemistry” began decades earlier than the 1990s. Beginning in the 1920s and 1930s, atom efficient catalytic processes for producing simple organic compounds started to be discovered and commercialized. In the 1940s and 1950s, oil refining processes using new catalytic methods dramatically increased the carbon efficiency of and usable variety of downstream products produced by oil refining processes, and simultaneously and dramatically decreased the waste residues and the pollution they produced. After World War II, new catalytic processes for producing a wide variety of increasingly atom efficient and/or “environmentally acceptable” downstream petrochemical products proliferated.  This article will briefly recount multiple examples of those pre-1990s evolutionary developments in the petrochemical industries which produced new and highly atom efficient or environmentally acceptable catalytic processes for producing multitudes of petrochemical products that both changed modern societies, and also lead toward the modern conceptions of “Green / Sustainable Chemistry”.

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