Products extracted from air currently account for more than 60% 0f the current US$45 billion world industrial gas business and more than 65% if associated services are included. In addition, the equivalent to a further US$10 billion of air gases is produced by end users.
The uses for these gases are endless, but basically depend on the strong reactive properties of oxygen and generally on the relative inertness of nitrogen and the nearly complete inertness of argon.
The other interesting feature of this business is that the raw material, air, is free and industrial gas companies have grown on their ability to develop economic technologies to separate and deliver its various components. Another unusual feature of the air gas business has been the ability of the industrial gas sector to develop market pull by applications research and development on its potential customers businesses. Typically, they will have shown just how much better it is to use oxygen in place of air in a particular process and generated market for themselves from early adopters and for the gas industry in general as the rest of the potential users catch up.
The separation of air into its components has origins in the early 17th century chemists who realised that air had components that supported life and a denatured air that didnt. In the 19th century oxygen was being produced by chemical means but it was the advent of the ability to liquefy and distil air that made all air gases available in reasonable quantities. Most people know that when a gas expands through a nozzle from a high pressure to a lower pressure cooling occurs. Linde of Germany and Hampson of the UK realised that if the expanded gas was used to cool down the unexpanded gas in a heat exchanger, the whole system would get colder and colder until the air liquefied. Figure 1 shows a picture of a Linde air liquefier in 1900.
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