Steam Cracking

Steam cracking is an industrial process that breaks larger hydrocarbon molecules into smaller ones, chiefly ethylene and propylene, by briefly heating a hydrocarbon feedstock to very high temperature in the presence of steam and without oxygen. The process grew out of the petrochemical industry's need for ethylene, the basic building block of polyethylene and many other plastics, and was developed and scaled up progressively by chemical engineers from the early to the mid twentieth century as demand for petrochemical plastics grew; the source consulted for this entry names no single inventor or exact origin date, so none is recorded here. Steam cracking remains the principal industrial method used to produce the ethylene and propylene that underlie most plastic production today.