Government Sues to Stop Stauffer-Avisco Deal Companies surprised by move for injunction against Stauffer's plan to buy Avisco assets Stauffer and American Viscose say they are surprised by the timing of the Justice Department's move to block Stauffer's plan to acquire assets of American Viscose. Stauffer says the move is surprising because a definitive purchase agreement has not yet been approved by the boards of the two firms. The Justice Department has asked the U.S. District Court in Philadelphia for a permanent injunction against the acquisition and for a preliminary injunction pending final adjudication. At press time, no date for a hearing on the complaint had been set. The Justice Department charges that if Stauffer acquires Avisco's assets there will be a substantial lessening of competition or a tendency to create a monopoly in carbon disulfide, sodium sulfate, caustic soda, sulfuric acid, and industrial chemicals generally in violation of section 7 of the Clayton Act. In mid-August (C&EN, Aug. 13, page 2 5 ) , the two companies revealed a plan whereby Avisco would sell all of its assets (except its holdings of Monsanto stock) to Stauffer in exchange for 3,541,000 shares of Stauffer common and $66 million in debentures. The Justice Department charges that this agreement constitutes a combination and conspiracy that violates section 1 of the Sherman Act. The Justice Department also claims that Allied Chemical owns 8% of Avisco's common and that Stauffer's acquisition of Avisco will give Allied an indirect ownership interest in Stauffer, one of Allied's major competitors. Carbon Disulfide. According to the Justice Department, Stauffer and an affiliate (Old Hickory Chemical, owned jointly with Du Pont) accounted for about 74% of the total domestic sales of carbon disulfide in 1960. Avisco, says Justice, is the largest single buyer of carbon disulfide, which it uses to make cellophane and rayon. In 1960, it says, Avisco bought over 116 million pounds of carbon disulfide at a total cost of $5,975,000, or about 26% of all U.S. sales. Du Pont, the second largest consumer of carbon di30
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Archer Daniels Midland Opens Peoria Center Archer Daniels Midland has dedicated its new 33-acre, 21-building chemical center at Peoria, III. Here, a workman checks controls in one of the two process buildings. This building houses equipment for making fatty acids, fatty glycerides, and hydrogenated esters, including a 6000 gallon hydrogénation unit capable of taking a 40,000 pound charge of raw materials. Plasticizers, nitrogen chemicals, and other specialty chemicals are made in the other process building. The center also contains a three-acre warehouse and 100 tanks capable of storing 20 million pounds of finished products. Another 28 tanks hold 28 million pounds of crude fats and oils (soybean, flaxseed, coconut, cottonseed, rapeseed, and marine oils). ADM's plant started partial production last April. It should be fully completed in December.
sulfide, bought about 17% of total U.S. sales, including all of the output of Old Hickory. Thus, says the complaint, by acquiring Avisco assets and by facilities in which it already has an indirect interest, Stauffer would have a captive market for carbon disulfide representing 4 2 % of the total domestic sales of the chemical. This would deprive independent competing producers of carbon disulfide of a fair opportunity to compete for Avisco's needs, argues the Government. Similar arguments are used with respect to Stauffer's output and Avisco's purchases of sulfuric acid and caustic soda. As for sodium sulfate, the Justice Department says the effect of Stauffer's acquisition of Avisco assets would be to make Stauffer the largest single producer, giving it a capacity of more than double that of the next largest producer. Avisco's capacity for sodium sulfate is estimated in the complaint at 260,000 tons a year, Stauffer's
at 208,000 tons a year. Avisco is now the largest single producer, with about 17% of total U.S. capacity. Allied, the fourth largest producer, markets Avisco's output.
Cryovac Moves South Divisional headquarters, R&D go to South Carolina W. R. Grace's Cryovac division has completed moving its administration and research headquarters from Cambridge, Mass., to Duncan, S.C. The gleaming new facility, built at a cost of $2 million, is located about 15 miles from Simpsonville, S.C, where Cryovac makes packaging films. Research and management personnel in the move total about 200. The headquarters move to South Carolina follows the start up of Cryovac's Simpsonville plant by seven years. This plant has been expanded twice since then. Besides Cryovac S
film, made from polyvinylidene chloride, the Simpson ville plant makes the newer Cryovac L (irradiated polyethylene) and Cryovac Y (oriented polypropylene). When the time came for Cryovac to look for new quarters for its research and engineering staff, which had outgrown its Cambridge quarters, management chose to move it to South Carolina. After this decision there was no real reason left to keep the headquarters in Cambridge, and division president Bradley Dewey, Jr., decided to move the entire group south. Now only Cryovac's machinery operation, which makes packaging machinery to be used with Cryovac film, remains in Massachusetts—at Woburn. Other Cryovac film plants are at Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in the center of a large meat packing region, and at Cooksville, Ont. Grace's overseas chemicals division has several other Cryovac plants overseas. The Duncan location is close enough to the plant at Simpsonville to be readily accessible, but it is far enough away so that the headquarters and research staffs will not get involved in day-to-day operating problems. More than half the ground floor space in the new headquarters building is devoted to a pilot-plant area for making film. An irradiation pit is included in the pilot-plant area. The new facility also has a variety of packaging equipment for making test runs on films in the development stage. Following this, test packages can be studied under conditions resembling those under which the package would eventually be sold—for example in a supermarket.
Italian Engineering Firm Forms U.S. Affiliate Compagnia Tecnica Industrie Petroli, S.p.A., an Italian process engineering firm, has formed a U.S. affiliate, CTIP, Inc., in New York. The new affiliate will be headed by George W. Gross, formerly of Esso Research and Engineering. The company will specialize in process design and engineering and in plant construction for the chemical, petroleum, and related industries. And it will serve as a new business link for U.S. petroleum and chemical processors building plants abroad. CTIP, S.p.A., which was formed in 1934, supplies engineering service and has built petroleum and chemical
plants in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. Mr. Gross estimates that about $200 million a year will be spent between 1964 and 1968 to build petroleum processing plants in the European Common Market countries alone. ECM's energy demand can be expected to increase at an annual rate of about 6% during the remainder of this decade, he says. Assuming that petroleum will supply about 7 5 % of this energy demand, processors will have to add some 400,000 barrels per day to the ECM's oil refining capacity each year, he adds.
NEW FACILITIES Allied Chemical's Solvay Process Division has opened its new technical center in Syracuse, N.Y. It will house Solvay's research, technical service, and commercial development groups. The new center has special labs for work on corrosion, glass, plastics, pulp and paper, and textiles.
Jefferson Chemical has completed a new building at its Austin, Tex., research and technical service laboratories for research on urethane foam. The new building contains a simulated foam plant equipped with both highand low-pressure foam machines.
Merck Sharp & Dohme Research Laboratories has started construction of new research facilities at West Point, Pa. The new buildings, scheduled for completion in mid-1964, will include facilities for medical activities, pathology, toxicology, virus research, and pharmaceutical development.
Morningstar-Paisley is building new industrial adhesives plants in Newark, Calif., and Toronto, Ont. The new California plant will replace the present one in Redwood City, Calif. The company is also installing an additional reactor that will double its present capacity for polyvinyl acetate at its Clifton, N.J., plant.
Good year's chemical division has a new stainless steel finishing line in operation at its synthetic rubber plant in Houston, Tex. The new line, sec-
ond one for the plant, cost $1 million. It is used to make special grade styrene-butadiene rubbers for applications that require exceptional purity and quality, such as wire, cable, shoe products, and plastics.
Marathon Oil has put on stream at its Detroit refinery a new 10,000 barrelper-stream-day Platforming unit for production of mixed aromatics, a new Udex solvent extraction unit for recovery of high purity benzene, toluene, and xylenes; and new 2200 barrel-perstream-day Unifining unit for desulfurization of feedstocks. It has also revamped a previously existing Unifining unit, increasing its capacity to 14,000 barrels per stream day. Procon, Inc., was the contractor. A benzene-toluene mixture from the Udex unit goes by pipeline to Dow Chemical's new Hydeal hydrodealkylation unit, also built by Procon, at Bay City, Mich. The Hydeal unit transforms the toluene to benzene for use in Dow's styrene operations.
Chemetron's National Cylinder Gas division plans to more than triple the capacity of its air separation plant at Mansfield, Ohio, which went on stream only this month. The expansion, to be completed by next April, will boost oxygen output to 175 tons a day. The plant supplies oxygen for use in open hearth furnace operations of EmpireReeves Steel Corp.
WEEK'S PRICE CHANGES October 8, 1962 Advances Cottonseed oil, Valley, lb. Grease, yellow, lb. Silver bullion, oz. Tallow, fancy, lb.
CURRENT
PREVIOUS
$0.107 8 0.047* 1.19 0.03*74
$0.107* 0.047* 1.18 0.057s
Declines Cod liver oil, USP, gal. $1.30 Gum styrax, Asiatic, lb. 3.50 Itaconic acid, c.L, bags, lb.: Refined 0.347 2 Industrial 0.297 2 Peanut oil, crude, lb. 0.16 Silver salts, oz.: Cyanide 0.937* Potassium cyanide 0.687* Nitrate 0.797s Chloride 0.947* Oxide 1.14
$1.40 4.00 0.397a 0.347 2 0.167 2 0.94 0.6879 0.80 0.947s 1.147s
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