The Emergence and Evolution of Atom Efficient and/or Environmentally Acceptable Catalytic Petrochemical Processes from the 1920s to the 1990s

The emergence and evolution of “Green / Sustainable Chemistry” began decades earlier than the 1990s. Beginning in the 1920s and 1930s, atom efficient catalytic processes for producing simple organic compounds started to be discovered and commercialized. In the 1940s and 1950s, oil refining processes using new catalytic methods dramatically increased the carbon efficiency of and usable variety of downstream products produced by oil refining processes, and simultaneously and dramatically decreased the waste residues and the pollution they produced. After World War II, new catalytic processes for producing a wide variety of increasingly atom efficient and/or “environmentally acceptable” downstream petrochemical products proliferated.  This article will briefly recount multiple examples of those pre-1990s evolutionary developments in the petrochemical industries which produced new and highly atom efficient or environmentally acceptable catalytic processes for producing multitudes of petrochemical products that both changed modern societies, and also lead toward the modern conceptions of “Green / Sustainable Chemistry”.