useful         A note on the author         Copyright         Downloads         Glossary         Acknowledgements & Peer appreciation     Back to Sasol | Table of contents | Contact us Search across a range of Sasol reports           Summary       The Sasol Story:   A half-century of technological innovation   This is the story of how a country at the southern end of Africa launched an industry half a century ago in defiance of expert opinion elsewhere, and lived to see its courage bear rich fruit.      Coal & Gasifiers           Coal’s promise discovered   Pillars, panels & probes       Man discovered almost 10 000 years ago that you can separate some metals from the rock ore in which they reside by heating the ore with fire...    Sasol’s achievements begin with the efficient mining of coal; at Secunda it’s on a massive scale.          Plant & Catalysts           Finally, it was courage   More to catalysts than speed       Petrol, diesel, wax and many industrial chemicals are all made from the two elements, carbon and hydrogen How on earth can they be combined to form a liquid, let alone plastics?   "A chemical concern which does not continually grow and improve its processes must necessarily retrogress, and for this reason research plays an important part at Sasol", said chairman Etienne Rousseau in his address to the 1964 annual general meeting...         Economics & Chemicals           An epic in two parts   Developing with a bang       Sasol’s sales turnover rose steadily during the 1960s. Profit margins, however, rose only modestly despite steady improvement in plant availability and efficiency. The cause was apartheid on the one hand, and a booming economy on the other.   Behind Paul Kruger’s challenge was the need to free Sasol’s profitability as far as possible from world oil prices. The selling prices of its petrol and diesel were closely tied to them; those of its chemicals were not.         Plastics & Synthol           Some very long chains   Getting off the merry-go-round       Plastics were widely regarded as tacky substitutes for good, solid materials like glass, leather, wood, steel and natural fibres. Which is why South Africa’s government decided, in the 1960s, that a local plastics industry should be launched, with Sasol providing its main raw materials or feedstocks    By the late-1960s Sasol’s research engineers and plant operators had overcome the main problems presented by the Synthol reactors. Nevertheless, they remained tricky as well as expensive to operate and maintain. Why, asked Sasol’s young research scientists in the late-1960s, had Kellogg come up with the idea of the Circulating Fluidised Bed?         Reactors, Exploration & Gas-to-liquids           New global prospects   Fuels for the future       There is an anomaly running through Sasol’s history. Though most of its investment has been in making petrol, the Fischer-Tropsch process is better suited, when it comes to the quality of motor fuels, to producing diesel. That’s because most of the hydrocarbon molecules it produces are straight-chain and quick to ignite.   Sasol’s high-temperature Fischer-Tropsch reactors provide it, as we have seen,with a unique treasure chest of different kinds of molecules. When it came to producing petrol and diesel fuel, however, that uniqueness was to present exciting technical challenges.         The lure of innovation           Sasol’s future success in forming partnerships with global companies will depend primarily on what technological achievements it can offer of international value. Notwithstanding the long-term potential of its gas-to-liquid fuel technology, the range of Sasol’s products and the competitiveness of its technologies will be prime factors in determining the rate of growth, and the stability, of its income.                Time Line 1890 Franz Fischer co-patents an oil- from-coal process    1950 Sasol is formed to produce oil and chemicals from coal.    1956 The checkered flag symbol at petrol pumps captures Sasol’s winning spirit    1966 South Africa’s government supports the launch of a plastics industry in which Sasol will play a key role    1984 Sasol enters the explosives business    1999 Imported SAS reactors travel by road to Secunda where they soon create new production records    2001 Sasol and Qatar Petroleum sign an agreement for joint exploitation of natural gas reserves in the Persian Gulf                About this report Published in 2002 to record more than 50 years of innovation, Mind over Matter describes Sasol's achievements - how we got there, our people and the technologies they developed.     Downloads • Full report PDF 5.2MB • All download options         Top of page