Union Carbide

Union Carbide Corporation
legal form	Corporation
founding	1898
Seat	Danbury , Connecticut
Number of employees	3800
sales	$ 5.86 billion (2004)
Branch	chemistry
Website	unioncarbide.com

Union Carbide Corporation is a US chemical company based in Danbury , Connecticut , which is now a subsidiary of Dow Chemical .

Union Carbide was at times the second largest chemical company in the USA. The name Union Carbide is connected to the Bhopal disaster , when an accident in a pesticide- producing factory of a subsidiary in India in 1984 probably killed around 25,000 people. The Bhopal disaster temporarily endangered the company's existence. It sparked attempts at hostile takeovers and was one of several environmental scandals that damaged its reputation.

Company history

Union Carbide was founded in 1898 by John Motley Morehead III (and his father James Turner Morehead ) and manufactured calcium carbide for acetylene production and was active in metallurgy (based on inventions by Thomas Willson ). It merged in 1917 with Linde Air Products (founded in 1907 and manufacturer of liquid oxygen based on the Linde process ), the National Carbon Corporation founded in 1899, and Perst-O-Lite (also a manufacturer of calcium carbide, founded in 1913 and previously one of Union Carbide's main competitors ) to Union Carbide & Carbon Corporation (UCC). The individual parts of the company operated largely autonomously under the UCC holding company and, if necessary, cooperated in the event of overlapping interests. In the company's early history, Union Carbide was primarily active in West Virginia and the vicinity of the capital Charleston , even though the headquarters were relocated to New York at an early stage and later to the Union Carbide Corporate Center in Connecticut . In the beginning, they manufactured carbon electrodes for lamps and electric ovens, as well as aluminum, whereby acetylene was a by-product that was marketed as welding gas and its potential as an industrial gas played an important role in bringing the companies involved in the founding closer together. Union Carbide was also a pioneer in ferro-alloys (ferrochrome) for stainless steel and National Carbon for dry batteries (with the Eveready brand ). The company experienced a great boom in the First World War and made its entry into the petrochemical industry during this time. In 1919 it produced synthetic ethylene, and from this its mainstay in polymer production emerged, including polyethylene and polystyrene , as well as ethylene glycol , which became the market leader in the USA as an antifreeze for cars and remained for decades.

Union Carbide continued to expand through acquisitions in the 1920s and 1930s and acquired overseas hydropower plants in Norway. The takeover of the US Vanadium Corporation in 1926 (with mines in Colorado ) later led to their involvement in the Manhattan Project of building an atomic bomb , in which they played an important role in the processing of uranium and its enrichment. In 1943 they signed a contract with the US government to manage the uranium enrichment gas diffusion facility at Oak Ridge National Laboratory , and the laboratory was managed from 1947 to 1984 by Union Carbide, which had its nuclear division there.

In 1939 they took over Bakelite, founded by Leo Baekeland , a pioneer in the field of plastics development (the synthetic resin phenoplast as Bakelite). During the Second World War, Union Carbide developed into a leading supplier of raw materials for the chemical and metal industries and did business with isobutene for butyl rubber . In the 1950s, the olefin division emerged as a supplier to the chemical industry. When it comes to end products, however, they were sometimes left behind - although they did pioneering work with glyoxal, for example , other companies prevailed on the market (in the case of Glyoxal BASF). Something similar happened with polyurethanes . They had their big breakthrough with their own market-introduced polymers with the establishment of Glad in 1963, which manufactured polyethylene products for the packaging industry.

In the mid-1950s, the group was restructured from a holding company to a diversified conglomerate and the name was changed to Union Carbide Corporation in 1957 . Instead of 18 individual companies, there were only four divisions, Union Carbide Chemicals, Union Carbide Plastics, Union Carbide Consumer Products and Linde. In the 1950s and 1960s, they expanded worldwide, doubling sales from 1960 to 1970 to three billion dollars. They had a leading position in industrial gases, polyethylene, carbon electrodes for industrial furnaces, batteries, industrial chemistry for nuclear energy and ferro-alloys. In the early 1970s they were the second largest chemical company in the USA after DuPont , but they also had to contend with low profits. Bad investments and environmental regulations came after a campaign led by Ralph Nader criticized the excessive sulfur dioxide emissions from their factories in Ohio and West Virginia. The company tried to sit out and ignore the allegations at first (until the US government forced it to comply with more costly environmental regulations in 1974), which gave it a bad reputation in the US. Also in the 1970s, the group, which was suffering from overcapacity and falling prices in the chemical industry, concentrated again on the core business of plastics and chemicals and sold other company activities, including a. the battery division.

After the Bhopal disaster in late 1984 and the dramatic drop in share prices that followed, there were various hostile takeover attempts which the company countered by selling some of its most profitable and well-known brands in consumer products (Glad in packaging, Eveready batteries, Prestone in Frost protection, STP for engine oils, etc.). They focused on chemicals and plastics, industrial gases and carbon products. The workforce was more than halved in the 1980s and joint ventures with other companies were entered into. In 1988 sales rose again to $ 8 billion, a third below the 1981 peak. Cost reduction and joint venture policies continued into the 1990s, including with Exxon Chemical (polyethylene) and in Europe with EniChem (polyethylene ).

In August 1999, it was announced that the Dow Chemical acquisition was in preparation and would be negotiated over the following years. On February 6, 2001, Union Carbide was 100% acquired by Dow Chemical for US $ 11.6 billion, making it one of the world's three largest chemical groups alongside DuPont and BASF .

Hawk's Nest Incident

From 1927 Union Carbide was involved in a tunneling project near Charleston in West Virginia, as a result of which several thousand workers, mostly destitute African Americans, died of silicosis within a year . During the construction work on the approximately three-mile-long tunnel, the workers were exposed to high levels of dust unprotected. Protective masks were not given to workers, but management staff wore appropriate masks during the brief inspection periods during which they were on site. The incident became known as the "Hawk's Nest Incident".

Bhopal disaster

Union Carbide refused to accept responsibility for the accident, citing terrorism or industrial sabotage as the cause. Union Carbide and the Indian government agreed out of court to a one-time payment of $ 470 million, an amount that the Times of India compared with the sum that after the sinking of the oil tanker Exxon Valdez was spent off Alaska to save lobsters.

The incumbent chairman of Union Carbide at the time of the accident was Warren Anderson , who lived undisturbed in the USA despite several extradition requests from the Indian government.

Web links

UnionCarbide.com Official Website
Bhopal.com 'Bhopal Information Center' (Union Carbide website on the Bhopal disaster)
Bhopal.net International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal
UIUC.edu About the Hawk's Nest Incident Background for Muriel Rukeyser 's The Book of the Dead , Ashley Lucas, Ariadne Paxton

Individual evidence

↑ Union Carbide Corporation: About us , accessed November 19, 2010.

^ ^A ^b Encyclopedia of Business, 2nd ed .: Union Carbide Corporation Company Profile, Information, Business Description, History, Background Information on Union Carbide Corporation , accessed November 19, 2010.

↑ ^a ^b Volker Pabst: When the cloud came over the city of lakes. 30 years ago, one of the greatest industrial disasters in history occurred in the Indian city of Bhopal . In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung of December 2, 2014, international edition, p. 8.

↑ History Oak Ridge National Laboratory, official website ( memento of the original from October 1, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2
^ Martin Cherniak: The Hawk's Nest Incident , Yale University Press 1986

[1] Union Carbide Corporation: About us , accessed November 19, 2010.

[EoB-2] A ^b Encyclopedia of Business, 2nd ed .: Union Carbide Corporation Company Profile, Information, Business Description, History, Background Information on Union Carbide Corporation , accessed November 19, 2010.

[Volker_Pabst-3] Volker Pabst: When the cloud came over the city of lakes. 30 years ago, one of the greatest industrial disasters in history occurred in the Indian city of Bhopal . In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung of December 2, 2014, international edition, p. 8.