(58a) Eastman Chemical Company's Chemicals from Coal Program: the First Quarter Century

While there has been a resurgent interest surrounding alternatives to petroleum and natural gas as feedstocks for the chemical industry, especially in the transformation of coal to chemicals, this has been a continuing interest at Eastman in the period 1975-2000. After the first oil crises of the 1970's, Eastman turned its attention to local coal as a means to generate syngas as a primary chemical feedstock resulting in the commercialization of the first modern chemicals from coal facility in 1983. This facility is currently producing methanol, methyl acetate, acetic acid, and acetic anhydride. However, while less publicized, the effort continued through the year 2000, albeit at a significantly reduced level. As a consequence, Eastman developed yet to be commercialized technologies for the production of additional chemicals from syngas including vinyl acetate, acetaldehyde, propionic acid, propionic anhydride, methacrylates, and acrylates. As Eastman and the rest of the industry reenergize the programs to look at alternative resources, including coal, it is worthwhile to look back at these efforts since they represent models for transitioning from petroleum feedstocks to a coal based syngas feedstock in order to produce key chemicals for the US chemical industry.