THE CHEMICAL WORLD THIS WEEK
Commissioner Howe Enhancing the overbalance
icy likely to enhance the overbalance in federal support for the sciences and social science as compared to more ephemeral but perhaps more important areas of higher education." Dr. Howe hastened to add that his remarks "should in no sense be taken as an attack" on the need for further support of the sciences. "But it does seem to me," he continued, "that when we are designing a program that has total institutional impact—a major new program—we have to recognize that there is no analogous federal support for the smaller segment of the institutions concerned that is made up of the humanities and the arts." Committee members agreed that more federal money undoubtedly should be going to fields other than science. However, they pointed out that the subcommittee (a unit of the House Science and Astronautics Committee) only has legislative jurisdiction over science problems, not general educational problems. Dr. Howe's main concern with H.R. 875 is with the narrow base on which it rests—a base dealing exclusively with the sciences and the social sciences. The inevitable effect of this bill, he says, will be to encourage larger enrollments in the sciences, more university and college focus on developing additional granting of degrees, and more course offerings in these areas. Dr. Howe charges that the total effort of the Federal Government up to now in supporting higher education through grants of a variety of different kinds has been overwhelmingly focused on the sciences. As a result, government support of this research has caused "a flowering of scientific 12 C&EN JULY 22, 1968
studies directed toward improving our agriculture, our defense, our health, our transportation, and our economic system, with no similar commitment to those areas of study which help us to understand ourselves and which help us to answer the questions of where our civilization has been and where it is going." The Office of Education fully supports the basic premise of H.R. 875: that colleges and universities are in grave need of funds, funds which can be used with broad discretion and maximum flexibility by each institution for its unique needs and priorities, he said. The Department of Health, Education, and Welfare is preparing a long-range strategy for supporting higher education. This study should be completed early next year. Dr. Howe urged the committee to take no action on H.R. 875 until then. Leaving aside the question of the desirability of increasing federal aid for science education, Dr. Howe is sharply critical of the complex formula under which the grant money in the bill would be divided. On the whole, he charges, the bill would favor the more successful and wealthy colleges at the expense of more needy ones. But perhaps the biggest flaw in H.R. 875, in Dr. Howe's opinion, is the emphasis on graduate training as opposed to undergraduate support. Many people contend that a disproportionate amount of federal money has gone to research and graduate education. "This bill . . . would not seem to be aimed at correcting this imbalance or giving a needed priority to the improvement of undergraduate education," Dr. Howe charges.
SULFUR
New Mine in West Texas U.S. sulfur capacity will be boosted by more than 25% in one jump late next year. Duval Corp. will build a 2.5 million ton-per-year Frasch mine in eastern Culberson County, in west Texas (C&EN, June 24, page 4 7 ) . Although the Frasch process is normally used only to recover sulfur from salt dome structures, there is no salt dome indicated at the Culberson County site, Duval says. While the Duval mine will probably ease the sulfur shortage a bit, no one is predicting a return to a balanced supply-demand situation. Sulfur companies have their customers on 80 to 90% allocation at present. The huge capacity jump might tend to stabilize the price, however. Current U.S. sulfur price is $41.50 per long ton, f.o.b. mine; Mexican sulfur goes for about $55 a ton, f.o.b. Mexican port. However, late 1969 is over a year from now
and the drive to recover the element from low-grade ores should continue in earnest (C&EN, July 15, page 17). Duval's 50 million ton reserves in Culberson County, 17 miles west of Or la, average 18% sulfur in the sulfurbearing strata. The $65 million project will be pumping the brown slurry from depths of 240 to 1237 feet. The arithmetic average of the bed thickness is equal to about 34 feet of pure sulfur. The Frasch process involves melting sulfur with superheated water then forcing the slurry to the surface with compressed air. Duval put a Frasch pilot plant on stream at the mine last month. The results have established the technical feasibility of extracting sulfur by the Frasch process. "However," Duval says, "the economic aspects are subject to technical and other factors which can only be determined by full-scale operations." At present, the company is starting up the first nonsalt dome Frasch mine at another west Texas site. This first major sulfur mine in west Texas, near Fort Stockton, will produce 500 tons per day. Back in Culberson County, Elcor Chemical is building a plant to recover 1000 tons of sulfur a day by another process. Elcor says it will use a mineral beneficiation process but declines to elaborate. Expected on stream by the end of the year, the plant will be supplied with sulfur-bearing ore from an open-pit mine. Although sulfur deposits have been known to exist in west Texas since before the turn of the century, no process has thus far proved economical for the low-grade ores. With the presently favorable price and improved technology? perhaps the economics have changed. At any rate, the two different processes being used at mines in west Texas will make interesting watching and speculation. Other sulfur producers also own land in the area.
OCEANOGRAPHY:
Minerals on the Shelf The U.S. Continental Shelf has in the past 16 years yielded more than $3 billion in total revenue to the Federal Government, and less than 1% of the shelfs surface has been scratched, noted Dr. Vincent E. McKelvey of the U.S. Geological Survey at the Symposium on Mineral Resources of the World Ocean, held earlier this month in Newport, R.I. Geologists estimate that more than 2 billion barrels of proved reserves of oil and 30.3 trillion cu. ft. of natural gas are contained in more than 800,000 square miles of submerged lands
Texas sulfur An old process, a new source
bordering our coasts, Dr. McKelvey says. Undiscovered recoverable reserves in such areas may amount to many times this amount, he adds. Known sulfur reserves amount to 37 million tons, with undiscovered minable resources estimated at 40 million to 50 million tons. Also, huge amounts of salt, recoverable at low cost, are present in Gulf Coast salt domes, he says, but because of large reserves available on land, it has no prospective value except in local offshore use for processing sulfur. Phosphate deposits off the coast of California have some promise for early development; and 100 million tons are classed as known "marginal" resources, and larger amounts are classed as "submarginal." Some minerals on the sea floor cannot be extracted as cheaply as they can from land, and so their prospective value depends on the advance of exploration and extraction technology. Undiscovered mineral resources of the order of millions of ounces of gold, hundreds of thousands of ounces of platinum, and thousands of tons of tin may exist off the coast of Alaska along the Bering Sea, Dr. McKelvey says. However, the real problem is to find the ways of recovering these sea-floor resources that are cheap and competitive with the extraction of minerals from deposits on land. "The full potential of the continental shelves must be recognized to be far greater than can be foreseen at this stage of their investigation and the development of marine technology," he adds. Dr. McKelvey points out that the technological gap between exploration and exploitation is the principal ob-
stacle confronting the tapping of mineral resources from the oceans. He also notes that the present problem of evaluating resources in the sea can be compared with that of evaluating the land resources of the U.S. in 1908 when the authorities of the day were convinced that usable resources of oil, gas, iron ore, phosphate, and anthracite coal would be exhausted within a few decades.
ALUMINUM:
GE Plates the Light One A novel electrodeposition technique makes metallic coating on aluminum and its alloys—previously difficult, to say the least—a simple, routine operation, General Electric Co.'s Stanley J. Beyer told the 55th annual convention of the American Electroplaters' Society in San Francisco. Even more unusual, Mr. Beyer points out, is that parts consisting of aluminum combined with other metals such as copper now can be plated over their entire surfaces with a firmly adherent metal layer. This wasn't possible before, he notes. The development promises to broaden the potential outlets for aluminum, whose low cost, ample availability, and impressive list of desirable physical properties—light weight, good strength-to-weight ratio, corrosion resistance, to mention just a f e w make it ideal for a variety of uses. Many applications, however, require that aluminum be plated with a metal. For example, aluminum bus bars are coated with tin to prevent interruption in the flow of electricity that
buildup of nonconducting aluminum oxide on their surface would bring about. Aluminum automotive bearings must be plated with a harder metal surface because aluminum itself galls badly under the mechanical stresses involved. The crux of the problem is that aluminum's affinity for oxygen makes it difficult to obtain a true metallurgical bond with a plated metal. The way around this difficulty is to apply a thin immersion layer of tin or zinc to the aluminum surface. This bonded layer then becomes the base coat over which the engineering or decorative metallic layers are electroplated. Until now, only two commercial means were available in the U.S. for accomplishing this, both of which are immersion deposition techniques. Neither method is ideal. There are numerous process steps involved. Different aluminum alloys behave differently toward the deposition solutions and adherence frequently is poor unless plating conditions are adjusted for individual alloys. Mr. Beyer, who heads u p the inorganic section of the finish systems laboratory in GE's appliance park, Louisville, Ky., cites many advantages that his new electrodeposition plating process has over the former coating methods. Examples: • The process is simple to operate and easy to control. •There's excellent adhesion between the "strike" layer and the aluminum. • Effectiveness of the deposition doesn't vary from one aluminum alloy to the next. This means that different aluminum alloys may be processed together on the same rack. In a typical electrodeposition operation, the aluminum parts, after having been cleaned, are placed in an aqueous solution of a proprietary compound containing an alkali stannate and connected cathodically to a d.c. power source. The plating solution's pH is maintained at about 12 while electrolysis is carried out at a current density of between 2 and 3.5 amp. per square decimeter for 10 to 30 seconds. Still electrically "hot," the aluminum parts are transferred directly to a copper cyanide bath and electrolysis is continued for some five minutes. At this point, the parts are covered with a smooth, adherent electrodeposited coating of copper. Final coats can be applied in the conventional way using standard plating solutions. When a patent on the invention is issued, GE has agreed to reassign it to M&T Chemicals, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of American Can Co., which has tradenamed the process Alstan 80. GE, meanwhile, retains the right to use the invention for its own operations. JULY 22, 1968 C&EN
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