Allied Material Corporation - Road Oils, Asphaltic Compounds Manufacturer - Stroud, OK

Folks ,

Ran across an interesting panoramic photo in the May, 1935 Frisco Employee's Magazine of this industry.

The caption notes that it makes "...any and all grades of road oils asphalt for road making, asphalt for roofing, asphaltic fluxes and asphalt paints...the crude used in this plant comes from the only field of its kind in Oklahoma and has as high a grade of asphaltic base oil as there is to be found any place."

The photo shows what appears to be a string of tank cars. Presumably shipments in would have been oil from Oklahoma fields. I'll have to plead ignorance.

I'm guessing tanks would have also been shipped out; however, would the fluxes and paints shipped via boxcar?

I'm also intrigued by what appears to be an ice plant-like structure in the middle?

Thanks, in advance for any insight anyone can provide!

Best Regards,

 

I'm guessing the structure in the middle is a large, natural convection cooling tower - no fan, that's why it is tall.

Cold/cool water would be needed to condense and cool the overhead vapor from the one or two distillation towers to the right, which were used to separate the various fractions in the asphaltic crude into the different grades of product cuts. There probably is a steam boiler somewhere in there to provide the heat for the bottom of the distillation towers, oil fueled no doubt.

Crude likely came in tank cars. It looks to me that finished products also went out in tank cars, although different cars, as they are smaller. Possibly also some product went out in 55 gal drums, which can be filled by hand, so boxcars might also have been seen both in and out.

Back in the day, a plant like this probably did not package their products in anything smaller than 55 gal drums. That would have been done in large metropolitan areas closer to the end markets, likely in the warehouse where the distribution centers were.

Again, I'm guessing, but from the looks of the place, seems logical.

Ken

 

I passed the picture by a cousin of mine who is a Civil Engineer for Marley Cooling Tower Company

He is in total agreement with Karl and Ken. It is an early design gravity flow, natural convection cooling tower.

 

Knew I could count on the Frisco Brain Trust for a quick answer!

Thanks Karl, Ken and Keith,

This industry has no place on my modeled layout, but it'll be good to have tank cars shipped through our HO-scale Northern Division to be routed to points further on.

Best Regards,

 

True.

In the colder months, tanks, and tank cars, require heating via internal steam coils, and the pipelines are either steam traced or steam jacketed, in order to keep the stuff fluid enough to be pumped.

Ken.

 

Sherrel,

This adds a fun, but puzzling element.

Would the ubiquitous oil / fuel depot in northern climates like Kansas City have had similar features?

If so, from where did the steam originate?

Going a little beyond the scope of this thread, would most fuel oil facilities for the Frisco have needed similar heating for the Bunker C fuel oil?

Seems I recall reading here somewhere that it was pretty thick stuff.

Best Regards,

 

Chris,

Some type of heat transfer cooling tower, etc. device would be necessary for condensing steam back to water regardless of the locale. The steam could be produced from a primary source of heat expressly for the creation of steam or from a secondary source such as waste heat from another process.

Any facility or equipment that needed to move Bunker C would need steam lines for warming the fluid to reduce its viscosity. On locomotives, once up to steam, the boiler was the source. Before the boiler came up to steam, another steam source was necessary to ensure flow of the fuel for the boiler.

 

Typically, the vapor overhead from the distillation tower is cooled by some type of vent condenser, supplied cool water by the cooling tower.

Elementary chemical engineering - a fractionation distillation tower is a basic unit operation in any basic refining process like Stroud must have been. The crude feed would come into the tower somewhere in the middle. Light fractions would go up, heavier fractions would go down.

The heavy bottoms from the distillation tower are vaporized by some sort of a reboiler, either steam heated or, possibly, direct fired, both types would have used oil as a fuel in the case of the Stroud, OK plant. The cooling tower would not be the condenser per se, but would be the device to provide cooling to the condenser.

Ken

 

Let me correct some terminology that is being used incorrectly.

A distillation tower and a cracking tower are two very different things.

A distillation tower is just a separations device. It uses the fact that lighter things boil off at a lower temperature than do heavier things. Crude oil is a mixture of many, many different materials. A plant like Allied took the heavy asphaltic crudes they wanted and distilled it into the different fractions they wanted.

Lighter oils coming off the top end of the tower, heavy asphaltic tars coming out the bottom. None of the individual materials in the crude are altered significantly, only separated into different fractions having different properties.

A cracker is a totally different animal, and, usually, does not even look like a distillation refining tower. It uses either thermal energy or a catalyst to actually break apart individual molecules, usually heavy ones, into two or more lighter molecules. It actually changes the chemical make up of the crude stream.

A modern, large oil refinery has a whole bunch of distillation towers separating the crude into the many products they make. The refinery usually also has one or two crackers, usually very big critters, that take the excess heavy tars and asphalts and break them, cracking, into smaller, lighter molecules

These molecules fit within the jet fuel, gasoline, lube oil, kerosene, grease, etc., ranges of their products. The output of the crackers goes into a multiple distillation tower system to separate the various cracked fractions.

I doubt that Allied had a cracker. From the looks of the picture, they only had one, or two, distillation columns. If they heated the bejeebers out of the asphalt/tar bottoms of their distillation tower(s), they could get some minimal cracking of big, heavy molecules into lighter things I suppose, but those towers are not crackers.

Chemical engineering - ain't it fun?

Ken