Am,No°vUr'i^i8arm' }      Industrial  Organic  Chemistry.  799 
available  for  most  uses  that  the  normal  refinery  gasoline  is.  Most 
of  the  areas  producing  natural  gas  are  available  for  this  gasoline 
extraction  but  it  has  developed  particularly  in  West  Virginia,  in 
Oklahoma  and  in  California.  It  is  furnishing  a  rapidly  increasing 
amount  of  gasoline  yearly.  The  third  source  of  gasoline  mentioned 
is  from  special  cracking  processes,  and  it  is  this  class  of  processes 
which  have  been  attracting  the  most  interest  and  giving  the  greatest 
promise  of  large  results.  The  whole  subject  was  discussed  from  a 
theoretical  and  historical  point  of  view  in  Bulletin  114  of  the  Bureau 
of  Mines  by  Rittman,  Dutton  and  Dean.  Since  the  date  of  that  publi- 
cation in  1916,  a  great  deal  additional  has  been  published  in  the  Jour- 
nals and  much  has  been  done  in  a  practical  way.  The  Burton  process, 
adopted  by  the  Standard  Oil  Co.,  is  now  in  operation  on  a  large 
scale  in  several  of  the  largest  refineries  of  that  company ;  the  Ritt- 
man process  has  been  tried  on  a  working  scale,  although  not  yet 
developed  in  a  final  form  for  large  scale  production;  the  McAfee 
process  of  decomposition  in  the  presence  of  aluminum  chloride  as 
catalyst  has  been  developed  by  the  Gulf  Refining  Co.  and  the  Snell- 
ing  process  has  also  been  brought  forward.  That  heavy  petroleum 
oils  can  be  cracked  so  as  to  produce  much  light  oil  or  gasoline  is 
beyond  question,  but  the  problem  is  to  avoid  the  production  of  large, 
proportions  of  unsaturated  compounds  which  require  acid  treat- 
ment in  the  product.  McAfee  claims  to  avoid  this  production  o£ 
unsaturated  compounds  and  that  his  gasoline  requires  no  acid  treat- 
ment, but  the  success  of  his  process  is  conditioned  on  the  economical 
recovery  of  the  anhydrous  aluminum  chloride  available  for  use. 
Enormous  quantities  of  other  special  petroleum  products  have  also 
been  called  for  by  reason  of  war  demands,  such  as  high-grade  lubri- 
cating oils.  I  had  brought  to  me  for  testing  some  time  back  a  "  re- 
coil oil,"  required  by  the  government  for  use  with  heavy  guns,  that 
with  a  high  viscosity  had  to  stand  a  cold  test  of  —  50  F.  ( — 200  C). 
Then  the  demands  of  the  English  and  the  U.  S.  Navy  for  fuel 
oil  has  drawn  upon  the  Mexican  oil  fields  as  well  as  those  of  Louis- 
iana and  Texas  and  pushed  production  to  the  maximum. 
Meanwhile  a  new  raw  material  has  been  brought  to  notice  that 
is  capable  of  adding  enormously  to  our  available  petroleum  supplies 
in  the  oil  shales  of  western  Colorado  and  eastern  Utah,  the  deposits 
also  being  found  to  some  extent  in  Nevada,  Wyoming  and  Montana. 
These  shales  readily  yield  by  distillation  a  crude  oil  capable  of  fur- 
nishing gasoline,  kerosene  and  paraffin  and  in  addition  large  amounts 
