Toward a Triumph

Rubber Czar William M. Jeffers wrote his third progress report to the U.S. people as the biggest, most fully integrated synthetic rubber plant formally began operations in West Virginia. Said Czar Jeffers:

"While the Rubber Program is not yet solved, it is in the best shape it has ever been." He cited chapter & verse:

> Of the entire program--now cut back to the 850,000 tons where it was before the Baruch report raised the sights--30% is completed and the rest is due to come in by year's end.

> This year's essential rubber needs add up to 609,000 long tons (437,000 tons are strictly military requirements for the U.S., Britain and Canada). This year's initial inventory of crude (443,000 tons) plus this year's expected crude imports (54,000 tons) and synthetic production (254,000 tons) add up to 751,000 tons. That means that the U.S. should have a margin of safety of 142,000 tons--42% more than the rock-bottom minimum working inventory that the military believes essential.

> Only 735,000 tons of the program is the all-purpose Buna-S synthetic (the rest is specialty stuff like Du Font's oil-resistant Neoprene). Thus only 5,000,000 new civilian tires (plus 7,000,000 still stockpiled) are in sight this year, only 30,000,000 new tires next year to keep 25,000,000 U.S. automobiles rolling. That many, said Jeffers, is "a military necessity." Clearly the casual driver is still out in the cold and the essential driver must drive carefully and sparingly.

The Preliminaries. That the rubber program has come this far is mainly due to the doggedness of Big Bill Jeffers. But that synthetic rubber, an incredibly complex chemical, is today a reality is due to the fact that other men were toiling on rubber long before the Baruch report made U.S. motorists realize the rubber crisis. The experts compressed ten years of normal development into two, created gigantic, intricate plants with almost nothing to go on except small-scale laboratory experiments. This was almost like building a Flying Fortress out of the experience of flying a kite.

There was hulking, 55-year-old Chemist Bradley Dewey, who as president of Boston's Dewey & Almy Chemical Co., had been working on synthetic rubber for years before he became Jeffers' right hand. There was tough Engineer Michael James ("Jack") Madigan, the New York bridge builder who became a special breaker of bottlenecks for the War Department, bulled through the no-more-changes-in-technology policy that solidified the rubber program last summer (TIME, July 20). And there were scores of others, in industry and in the Government, who anonymously got things going when bigwigs were not much help. The first butadiene and synthetic rubber in the new program was produced in May 1942. Within the month 250,000 tons of annual capacity, all pre-Baruch in origin, will be in production.

The Actualities. Institute, W. Va., a tiny town by the winding Kanawha River, used to be known --if at all-- for its Negro college, West Virginia State. This week in Institute, business and Government Pooh-Bahs gathered to watch the official opening of its big rubber operation, Carbide & Carbon Chemical's butadiene-from-alcohol plant, which, at capacity, will consume as much corn as 520,000 acres will produce. C. & C. (a Union Carbide subsidiary) also makes its own styrene (Buna-S is three parts butadiene, one part styrene). Ad joining its plant is a U.S. Rubber conversion plant that, with C. & C.'s raw materials, can turn out 90,000 tons of rubber, enough for 16,000,000 tires a year. One year ago the plant site was just a swamp.

The alcohol-butadiene plants are due to come in ahead of most of the ones that make butadiene from oil. This is because the U.S. distilleries could convert to industrial alcohol in a hurry. But by year's end only 30% of the raw materials for butadiene will come from the farm. The rest will come from the oil industry, which now has one big plant going (Jersey Standard's 30,000-ton Baton Rouge unit, which produced its first ton last February).

The Future. One big reason that oil has dominated the rubber program is cost: gasoline, which costs 3-6-c- a gallon to manufacture, makes up only one-half to 1-c- of the cost of manufacturing a pound of Buna-S; corn at $1 a bushel comes to 14-c- per lb. Before the war natural rubber sold up to 22-c- a lb., but its peacetime average was nearer 10-c- and most plantations can earn money at 8-9-c- a lb.

What the price of Buna-S, which now sells for 36-c- a lb., will be after the war, nobody knows: estimates run all the way from 10-c- to 30-c- a lb. But mass production now plus hasty wartime amortization of Government-owned plants should cut the postwar price drastically. Another pertinent statistic is already known: Buna-S can be mass-produced at the annual rate of 60 tons per man, while the average native rubber collector can produce only 150 pounds. Workers on the most efficient plantations do well to collect a ton a year. This means that the U.S. could produce the 600,000 tons that it consumed in an average prewar year with only 10,000 workers v. at least 1,000,000 natural rubber workers.

As to quality, no one synthetic yet has all the all-round value of natural rubber. Buna-S is now perhaps 90% as good for passenger tires (it heats up faster). But Buna men point out that when natural rubber was that new, the life expectancy of a tire was limited to about 3,000 miles v. 30,000 for a Buna-S tire right now. And the specialty rubbers all have certain qualities--imperviousness to gases, or oil, or light, air and chemicals--that make them much better than natural rubber for certain uses. They should take at least 30% of the former natural rubber market.

One fact about the other 70% of the Far East's rubber market also seems reasonably clear: its postwar fate is more apt to be determined by high intergovernmental finagling than by the pure economics of Buna-S v. natural rubber. On the economic and technological fronts the synthetic battle is just about won.

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