Homage to Gaia (28 page)

I left Shell Centre in a happy daze and my mind was full, on the journey back to Harvard Hospital, with the prospects of this new life that was opening before me. The thought that the move would mean a drop in income of seventy-five per cent hardly entered my mind. We returned to Southampton and took our last journey on the
Carmania
to Montreal at the end of September with a future secured. We made the journey back to Houston driving across Canada to the small border town of Sault-Sainte-Marie and entered the state of Michigan there. It was a delightful journey back through the middle of the USA, one rarely experienced by tourists or visitors, yet it had much to offer. We made first for the small town of Marquette on the southern shore of Lake Superior and spent an afternoon on the clean sandy beaches, bathing and watching the large fresh-water waves breaking on the shore of, what seemed to us, a vast ocean. From Marquette we travelled south through western Minnesota and South Dakota, and on into Iowa and Nebraska. I had imagined this western region to be entirely flat and an endless ocean of grain. Some of it was, but there were long stretches also of rolling hill country, quite like the Wiltshire
downs. We passed through Grand Island, Nebraska, stayed a night at Dodge City, the alleged centre of the US, and visited the tourist shrine at Boot Hill, and then went down through Oklahoma into Texas, with a fine view of a tornado on the way. As always, crossing the border into Texas seemed like entering a different and a more civilized country. Soon after returning, I resigned my post at Baylor College of Medicine and arranged to leave just before Christmas 1963.

I made my visit to the Shell Wood River station in November 1963. The industrial science world of an oil company was not new to me. I had visited many such laboratories in Houston to talk to the analysts who used my electron capture detector, and other instruments that I had invented, in their daily work. But I had never before dealt with the main business, what they called oil products—in other words, the outputs from the refineries that took in crude oil and turned it into gasoline, kerosene, diesel fuel, fuel oil and lubricating oils, and asphalt for the roads. They showed me their work on anti-knock additives for gasoline and the high-class physical chemistry of combustion that trying to invent better ones involved. We also discussed the strange series of chemicals added to base oils to make them into better lubricants. When I left Wood River, I had much to think about on the problems of this rather new kind of scientific world into which Rothschild had led me.

One of the most intriguing problems that arose during the thirty years I worked with Shell was the giant airship project. In the 1960s, Shell considered the possibility of a vast stainless-steel airship that would use natural gas, methane, as the lift gas to support it on its journey from the Middle East to Europe. This airship, twice the length and twice the diameter of the ill-fated German airship
Hinden
burg
,
would carry 2,000 tons of natural gas, would travel at over 100 miles per hour, and could carry several hundred tons of cargo in addition to the methane. Steam would be the lift gas for the return journey from Europe and it would transport in a year as much methane as a much larger ocean-going tanker. I loved the idea and hoped to see it develop into a passenger-carrying airship. How
wonderful
to cross the Atlantic on it; surely if the methane cargo version succeeded, it would not be long before a passenger airship flew. A transatlantic airship kept aloft by steam and with a hull made of two
durable layers of stainless steel sheet enclosing two inches of
insulating
foam, sounded to me a safe and sound way of travelling. How much better, I thought, to cross the Atlantic in twenty-four hours on such a craft with a proper bunk to sleep in and dining rooms, than the cramped seats of a jet. But, as you know, it never happened.

They never let on what killed the project, but I suspected that no one in the ranks of Shell middle management would risk having his name attached to such a project. Their hands were stayed, perhaps, by visions of the obloquy of being remembered as the men responsible for the first of these to be stranded prominently on some peak in the Alps. The incredible business of the Brent Spar well illustrates this process. Here was an old, disused oil-storage platform that Shell had emptied and then decided to sink in moderately deep waters of the ocean. The way they presented their intentions to the public gave Greenpeace a fine opportunity for a stunt to picture Shell as a villain of the environment, contaminating the pure pristine waters of the
Atlantic
. So successful were they in conveying this impression that in Germany there was a near hysterical response and violence was done to Shell filling stations. Senior management had no option but to accept that they had lost this battle. The real marine biological
evidence
is that to bury a platform such as Brent Spar in the ocean is a gift for marine life. Iron is one of the most nutritious elements and the algae, the prime producers of marine life, need it. It is welcome; more than this, the iron network of the platforms before it finally rusts away as food provides a habitat where fish are protected against the nets of trawlers. The German Greens should have remembered that during the two world wars the opposing forces deposited a vastly greater quantity of steel in the Atlantic Ocean. No long-term harm to marine life has come from it.

I know that these thoughts of mine excusing the actions of a multinational oil and chemical company are considered by the Greens at best as misguided loyalty to friends and colleagues in the industry, or at worst, misinformation put out by me and paid for by the industry. I entreat them to reconsider their old-fashioned radical views about the industrial world. Multinationals exist to provide the products we demand, and they do so with impressive efficiency. So much so, that in some dry parts of the world gasoline is cheaper than water. We share equally with these companies the blame for
corrupting
the air. How many Green activists walk or cycle rather than drive their cars? My experiences with Shell left me firmly with the
impression 
that they are neither stupid nor villains. On the contrary, I know of no other human agency that plans as far ahead or considers the environment more closely. The world twenty years from now is a serious subject of consideration by Shell and the other oil companies, and they are wise enough to worry about a reduction in the number of their customers through environmental degradation. Governments and the United Nations have a much shorter time constraint, caring only about a few years ahead—perhaps to the next election, perhaps not. What impressed me much more than these general facts was the objective personal view I had of the human pyramid of the
multinational
. My role as an independent scientist gave me the opportunity to meet employees at all levels. Many of the senior management were scientists or engineers and they were aware of and concerned about environmental problems. I will not forget the extent to which
Rothschild
, a biologist, was disturbed by the revelations of Rachel Carson in her book
Silent
Spring.
Shell were manufacturers of halogenated pesticides like dieldrin and aldrin, and DDT. They made them in response to the demand from farmers for better pest destruction. They were not out deliberately to poison the world; they were filling an industrial niche and receiving a reasonable profit for so doing. When the public think of chemicals as evil, poisonous products of a malign industry, they are reflecting the distorted thoughts of those who in their student days railed against capitalism. We all too easily forget how we hailed DDT as a lifesaver in the 1940s and early 1950s—according to the late Kenneth Mellanby it saved more lives than any other synthesized substance. We honoured its inventor, Paul Müller, with a Nobel Prize and he used all of the prize money to support young scientists. Shell stopped making dieldrin and aldrin well before it was illegal to do so. What a different picture is this from that painted by the environmentalists.

In the late 1960s, Rothschild asked me if I would prepare for him an essay on the prospects for Shell in the year 2000. He was due to lecture on this topic in Israel and wanted to make a speech based on the views of his advisers. My thirty-year-old essay has stood the test of time well. In brief, it said that by 2000 Shell and other industrial companies would be so concerned with global pollution problems that the only way they would profit was by selling products that alleviated, not worsened, pollution.

Shell was engaged in making chemicals as well as oil products, and their Research Centre at Sittingbourne in Kent was particularly
concerned 
with chemicals for agriculture, including pesticides and
herbicides
. Here Goulden and his colleagues had first used my electron capture detector in pesticide analysis. Politically inclined
environmentalists
too conveniently forget that it was not some
ideologue
in academia that first found halogenated pesticides everywhere in the world; it was scientists at Shell and at the Food and Drug Administration of the USA. Shell funded and encouraged this work and did it in their own laboratory here in the UK. To my regret, I visited Sittingbourne only a few times. Cornforth and Popják worked there and, like me, were among those who had left Mill Hill in the early 1960s. It was a joy to discuss difficult problems of science with them. Kappa Cornforth was very deaf but he could read the lips of his wife Rita who had worked with him in the Chemistry Department at Mill Hill. I think that he was one of the most able of all the scientists at Mill Hill and I was so pleased when his work was recognized by a Nobel Prize in 1975. I recall fondly a happy two days at Sittingbourne and staying with the Cornforths in their small mansion nearby. We even played croquet on their lawn—something that evoked memories of lunchtime breaks in wartime days at the old Institute in
Hampstead
.

Shell’s Research Centre at Thornton in Cheshire is a kind of
industrial
village made up of brick units which look a bit like houses. There are shrubs around them and lawns in front of them and small roads linking one building to another. It would be more pleasing but for the refinery of Stanlow that looms over its western edge. I was in a small conference room in one of these brick buildings talking to a group of senior engineers when one of them grinned, and with a rich Scouse accent, burst out, ‘Hey, whacker, go down to Lewis’s and buy us some acid.’ I had forgotten that engineers do not much care for academic science-speak. I was discussing with them the peculiar problem of extreme pressure additives for lubricants. These are an odd family of chemicals which, when added to the oil used in the gearbox of your car, prevent the teeth of the gears from tearing metal from each other as they rotate under power. The engineers had discovered empirically that a peculiar set of chemicals, when added to the oil, could stop the unfortunate process that caused the car rapidly to come to a stop. But they had no explanation of how they worked. I caused the comment and the burst of laughter from the other engineers by saying, when I looked at their list of effective additives, ‘They look to me like a list of Lewis acids.’

Now, GN Lewis was one of the century’s truly great physical
chemists
and one of his contributions was to explain the true nature of acids. We all know about vinegar and lemon juice and the taste of acidity, and we know that it would be unwise to taste the much stronger sulphuric and nitric acids. But what are acids? What have they in common? An early Swedish chemist, Johannes Nicolaus Brönsted, recognized that they all, when dissolved in water, increase the abundance of protons, which are hydrogen atoms with a positive charge; protons exist in water, not as bare hydrogen nuclei, but in close association with one or more water molecules. So Brönsted said, ‘Acids are proton donors, and the strength of an acid can be measured by the abundance of protons in its solution in water.’ The pH scale measures acidity and alkalinity and this is a scale expressed in multiples often. An acid solution with a pH of 0 is very strong, one with a pH of 3 is one thousandth as strong, and pure water, which has a pH of 7.4 is no acid at all. Alkali solutions, which are proton acceptors, go from 8, weak alkali, to 14, a very strong one. GN Lewis enriched our
imagination
on just what an acid is by concentrating not on the proton, the hydrogen atom, but on its positive electrical charge. He proposed that an acid is more than just a proton donor: it is an electron acceptor. In other words, a substance with a hunger for negative electrical charges, that is to say, free electrons, is an acid. Now, having played for years with electron capture detectors, I knew all about substances that liked electrons, and it was this that led me to see the list of extreme pressure lubricant additives as Lewis acids. They included substances like tetrachloro phthalic anhydride and other halogenated compounds such as iodine and certain sulphur compounds, all of which I knew were electron attracting. It made me wonder if the avidity of these additives for electrons had something to do with their effectiveness. We all know that when two pieces of metal make contact, an electric current—a flow of electrons—is enabled. Could it be that under the extreme conditions of gear wheels, when the film of an ordinary lubricant is squeezed apart, the metal makes contact in the same way as it does at an electrical contact? And the electron flow across between the two pieces of metal in effect welds them together. The addition of highly electron-attracting compounds to the oil could have the effect of preventing this fusion of the two pieces of metal when they work in juxtaposition. I never discovered whether they followed up this idea, nor whether it proved to be a fruitful source of even better EP additives.

A fair part of my work with Shell was on ways to produce energy that were less environmentally damaging. We all, early on, agreed that burning methane instead of coal or crude oil was a good temporary measure. The burning of methane puts into the atmosphere only half as much carbon dioxide per unit of energy produced as does coal. In the 1960s, when North Sea gas was first made available, Shell and the UK itself was frustrated from using this clean fuel as the source of electric power by the inept legislation of those days. Lawyers with no understanding of science drafted the constitutions of the gas and electricity boards formed by the government after the Second World War. They denied any collaboration between the two boards—
electricity
and gas. Consequently, we continued to support dirty
coal-burning
power stations, far beyond their justification. We delayed the burning of North Sea gas for power until the 1990s. The most exciting of all alternative energy sources that Shell considered was the possibility of extracting the energy released when a fresh water river mingles with the salty ocean. I was astonished to learn that this is the equivalent of a 600-foot waterfall at every estuary. We tried, but failed, to harness this source.