Chemicals from Propylene and Butylene

As we learned in Chapter 8, the official production of propylene is usually about half that of ethylene, only because a large part of the propylene is used by petroleum refineries internally to alkylate gasolines. This captive use is not reported. Of the propylene used for chemical manufacture, nearly 40% is polymerized to polypropylene, to be discussed in a later chapter. Of the remaining amount of propylene, seven chemicals from the top 50 are manufactured. These are listed in Table 10.1. Their industrial manufacturing methods are summarized in Fig. 10.1. Note that four of these chemicals, cumene, phenol, acetone, and bisphenol A, are also derived from a second basic organic chemical, benzene.