New Industry for the West

Under a blazing sun, the governors of Colorado and Utah last week took part in a historic ceremony: the opening of the first privately financed U.S. plant to make gasoline in quantity from a solid hydrocarbon. The place: American Gilsonite Co.'s new $14 million refinery outside Grand Junction, Colo. There, as Colorado's Steven L. R. McNichols and Utah's George Dewey Clyde each pulled a handle, water gushed from a pipeline, turned black with particles of Gilsonite.

Gilsonite is one of nature's freaks, a petroleum-like substance which, through geologic accident, failed to liquefy. The man who first saw the commercial possibilities of Gilsonite was Samuel H. Gilson, a U.S. deputy marshal in Utah and part-time prospector. One day in the 1880s while prospecting in eastern Utah's Uintah Basin, he found a crumbly, shiny, black substance which he mistook for a new form of coal. But when he tried to burn it, it melted. It was one of the world's largest known deposits of a natural pitch substance similar to what Noah supposedly used to caulk the ark.

From Sack to Slurry. Though his friends scoffed that the substance would never be worth much, Gilson formed the St. Louis Gilsonite Co. By wagon, then by railroad, the company hauled out sacks of Gilsonite, as the substance came to be known, to use in coloring black paints, waterproofing roofs, blacking inks and even paving streets. Eventually the company was bought by the Barber Asphalt Co. (now Barber Oil Corp.), which in 1946 teamed up with Standard Oil Co. of California to try to extract gasoline and high-purity coke from the Gilsonite.

A major problem, beyond solution with the techniques of Pioneer Gilson's day, was to move the Gilsonite out of mountains in bulk at low cost. American Gilsonite's solution is a 72-mile-long, $2,500,000 pipeline which daily carries a slurry of 700 tons from the minehead at Bonanza, Utah over 700-ft. gorges and across an 8,500-ft. pass to the refinery.

A Major Field. There the water is drained off and the dried Gilsonite is fed into retorts from which flow 54,600 gal. of gasoline and at least 250 bbl. of fuel oil daily. Some 275 tons of high-grade metallurgical coke are obtained from the cracking process for sale at about $30 a ton to the coke-shy aluminum-smelting industry. So good is the gasoline obtained from Gilsonite that it has a higher octane rating than several premium leaded brands. American Gilsonite figures the cost of a barrel of its crude, laid down at the refinery, is $1.50 to $2, v. $3.25 for a barrel of liquid petroleum. And the supply old Sam Gilson found is enough to operate the plant for over 50 years. With rights to 60% of all the known Gilsonite in the world, the company figures that it has at least 16 million recoverable tons, the equivalent of 100 million bbl. of underground oil--a major petroleum field.

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