Novel technology

 

 

In order to talk about a remarkable product piece of product development I need to set some background. After redundancy from Unichema I joined a tiny company on Teeside in 1981 called Emultec. Emultec was actually a small part of a larger group called Cargo Fleet Chemicals CFC ). Now CFC was mainly a chemical wholesaler spun off from ICI. At that time ( early 80’s ) ICI was a very large producer of chemicals with large plants on Teeside.  In addition to chemical wholesaling ( essentially distributing ICI chemicals in drum quantities rather than road tanker quantities ) ICI also handed over various products and technologies which they regarded as too small for their size. In turn these were passed to Emultec.

Emultec had very little technical expertise. Such as it had it was geared towards exploiting the technology of crude oil storage tank cleaning. This business represented about a half of Emultecs total. The remainder was focused on various chemical specialities such as anti freeze, oil dispersant, and special hydraulic fluids. Included within this was a business supplying a new company Techtron, in the West Midlands. While the products were handed over by ICI there was no technical support for their development. It was to supply such support that I was hired.

Emultec was brought down( merged back into CFC ) because although crude tank cleaning contracts were very large  none were won during my year with the company. Emultec was maintaining an expensive team ready to mobilise; this cost led to a big loss..

Techtron were an important customer and they lost no time in making requests of my expertise. In the course of this I became friendly with their MD Steve. Although I was working for Emultec Steve rather adopted me as their technical man. In that role I was able to make some developments they found useful. Although I left Emultec when the company folded back into CFC my friendship with Steve continued but on a lower key.

Steve would tell me of problems and opportunities Techtron encountered. One such was with Shell offshore production. To maintain oil rigs they were repainted with the existing paint removed by grit blasting. To remove the grit residues Shell was bringing fresh water from shore at considerable expense to rinse the bare surface. Sea water was too corrosive for the job containing dissolved salt.

I need to break off at this point to describe how Russian scientific literature was made available In the west( remember the Cold War was still very much in existence ) Robert Maxwell, the notorious publisher, had made an agreement that some major Russian academic journals would be published in the West by his Pergamon Press. To make them accessible to non Russian speakers the journals were published in a “cover to cover” English translation. This meant that literally everything in the journals was translated

As a former information scientist it was my habit to scan the literature and this included translated Russian journals. In one I found an academic paper talking about the use of sodium molybdate as corrosion inhibitor in high electrolyte solutions. This was a known corrosion inhibitor not used much being regarded as expensive and awkward to formulate. I could immediately see that this could be the answer to Steve’s problem and I could easily see how to produce a suitable formulation. In fact it was a work of only a few hours to make a laboratory sample. Normally prolonged testing at different salt concentrations etc. would be needed but pretty much all that was necessary was in the Russian article.

In order to make a trial batch I visited Techtron one evening and a drum scale ( 205 litre) test sample was made. Shell tested, found it good and Soltech 730 as it was named entered production. This was a completely novel product and aroused a lot of interest particularly with Climax Molybdenum our supplier of sodium molybdate. In the end this petered out because the application was too small a niche.

At this point I must digress into the ethics of the situation. I was working for Castrol. The generally accepted position was that detailed formulations or commercial know how should not be transferred to a potential competitor but the general know how belonged to the individual scientist. Castrol had not commissioned the formulation, I had used only a few hours of lab time and I had few qualms about Techtron using it.

Because it was a unique product it no doubt helped Steve’s subsequent decision to hire me to work full time for Techtron. This I did between stints with Castrol. He had great ambitions for the company which never materialised but it was to turn out happily for me in the long run when I worked part time for Techtron after retiring early after a stroke.

Steve and I hit it off when we first met one evening in Chester. I hadn’t even started at Emultec but Steve was anxious to get in quick. He started off by asking what I knew about industrial cleaning. Now I had, at that point, spent almost all my career working on consumer products but full of bravado I started to talk about industrial cleaning. Steve let me continue for a while until , with a twinkle in his eye, he said simply he could see I didn’t know much. This was so true but said so charmingly that we both burst out laughing. We then spent an interesting evening as I learned about the myriad problems Techtron faced.

We went on to have a happy relationship. I made a point of not attempting to flannel but equally I made sure I expressed my opinions. As far as Steve was concerned this salt water anti corrosion additive gave me great credibility. This worked well for me particularly in part time work at the end of my career. I had retired from Castrol early after illness but I didn’t want to give up work completely.  As I was valuable to Techtron  (and didn’t cost a lot ) I was given a great deal of freedom.