SOUTHERN HORIZONS 



payers; during the war they were literally business- 

 savers. To raise the daily sales of the stations is a real 

 problem of the whole industry. Cleaning fluids, house- 

 hold lacquers, and insecticides would slip into the sales 

 groove like a piston in a cylinder, and all can be made 

 from petroleum intermediates. What with pop and 

 candy, sandwiches and soda, fruit, the comics, and pic- 

 ture postcards, these ubiquitous, well-located distribu- 

 tion stations of the petroleum industry may someday 

 soon rival the drugstore and the five-and-ten. 



Meanwhile some of these puzzled executives have 

 found a way out of the petro-chemical dilemma by 

 alliances. Phillips Petroleum and Goodrich Rubber 

 started it when they organized the Hycar Chemical 

 Company and long before Pearl Harbor produced a 

 new, strictly American type of Buna synthetic rubber. 

 A wartime version of the same idea is the Port Neches 

 butadiene plant operated by the so-called Port Arthur 

 group of oil companies; Texas, Gulf, Socony-Vacuum, 

 Pure Oil, and Magnolia. Near by at Texas City, the 

 Carbide and Carbon Chemicals Corporation has a work- 

 ing agreement to take ethylene and propane from the 

 adjoining refinery of Pan-American. The newest petro- 

 chemical alliance is the Jefferson Chemical Company, 

 owned jointly by American Cyanamid and Texas Oil. 



The Jefferson plant is building now next to the Texas 

 refinery at Port Arthur. From both ends of the line, from 

 Frank L. Wallace, works manager of the refinery at 



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