Amidst very enlightening addresses and panel discussions this event held on 8th August 25 and as earlier reposted on Chemical Industry Digest website had three very illuminating speeches. One by Padma Vibhushan Prof. M M Sharma, another by Naushad Forbes, Co-Chairman, Forbes Marshall and the inaugural address by Mr. Nadir Godrej, Chairperson of Godrej Industries Group, in his inimitable poetic style.
Herewith, the first presentation:
Prof. M M Sharma
I’m very happy that we are having this gathering today, and I’m going to sing praises for chemistry because this is the day to sing praises for chemistry. Life is not possible without chemistry, but life can be much better with chemistry, and chemistry is in everything and chemistry is everywhere.
First of all, I want to remind you how critical chemistry is in human life. Most people do not wonder and don’t realize that oxygen solubility in water is extremely low, and air has only 21% oxygen. How are we able to breathe? How are we able to exhale? The secret is very chemistry dependent. It is oxygen which reacts with haemoglobin with a half-life of less than a millionth of a second. Half-life less than a millionth of a second. If it were not so, we could not have made a living. No way. Also, you don’t realize that when we do exercise, we exhale carbon dioxide at a very high rate. How does that happen? Let them come. And one of the most outstanding examples of catalysis is carbonic anhydrase-based acceleration of carbon dioxide desorption, which, of course, today for climate change everybody is talking about carbon dioxide removal and how papers after papers are coming on carbon dioxide absorption and desorption, and even picking up carbon dioxide from air. The other thing I want to remind you of is how all-inclusive growth in India can be or worldwide but in India in particular, because in a developing economy it is very important to stress all-inclusive growth. I want to give you just two examples.
Imagine if polyester fiber had not come. Polyester fiber came around the same time as nylon, and nylon is the most outstanding example of a discovery-driven product which then gave birth to polyester. Imagine the poorest of the ladies in India being able to wear an outstanding polyester sari which requires very little water to wash and very little time to dry. Imagine if polyester had not come, how we would have guaranteed all-inclusive growth. Everybody sports a mobile phone. Is a mobile phone possible without products of the chemical industry? The answer is an emphatic no. No way you can produce a mobile phone today. Joke apart, it is prestigious to say that I don’t have a mobile phone just as when it came, it was prestigious to say that I have a mobile phone. Today you can say, “Oh, I don’t keep a mobile phone.” You will be a different person. Let me give you an example from this same fiber. It gave birth to hollow fiber. In terms of everyday life, people are not realizing what impact we from chemistry, the chemical industry, have made. Imagine how desalination would have taken place. How membranes revolutionized desalination. So as long as you have brackish water, you have the ocean, you will never be without water. And what is so critical today when I say it is all-inclusive growth Panipuriala also proudly tells you, “I have got RO water,” but if you ask him what is RO, he’ll say, “I don’t know, but it is RO water for sure.” Isn’t it a brilliant example of all-inclusive growth? But how has this made an impact on nephrology? Imagine how dialysis would have been possible in such a short time without hollow fibers. So, starting with hollow fibers by April here, then we got engineering PET. So you get all these mineral water bottles in PET whose global production today is more than 60 billion bottles per annum.
So, every example of our all-inclusive growth and everyday life imagine COVID time. How did we have disposable syringes, and one thing which towards the end became part of the vocabulary: “I have got in this part and that part PSA.” Precious swing nobody knew the full part, but they all knew, “I have got an oxygen plant PSA.” Hey, hospitals in CSR also people put up. But have you wondered how great this contribution was by chemical engineers in doing simulations and doing this pressure swing adsorption? Today pure nitrogen can be done with pressure. So, imagine the reduction in energy consumption when you are making pure nitrogen by pressure adsorption rather than cryogenic.
Polymers, of course, you know how they have changed our life in packaging in so many ways our everyday life from morning till you retire. I want to just give two or three other examples. The greatest development in the history of the chemical industry was the Haber-Bosch process for ammonia. If you see the Heritage Chemical Heritage Magazine and if you also see the survey done when people were asked what is the greatest contribution of the chemical industry or chemistry in the world, it is the Haber-Bosch process. But what people often do not realize is originally the object of making ammonia was to make nitric acid and explosives because you couldn’t do mining without explosives.
Fertilizers came later, and imagine how many people would have died of hunger if fertilizers had not come. There was a reference to agrochemicals, and I always give an example of how agrochemicals have eyes. How do herbicides work? Imagine a rice field a flooded field. How will you take out the weeds or herbs from that field? No way can you. But chemicals have eyes. At a very low concentration, you use this herbicide and weeds and herbs are gone. Isn’t it a great wonder of chemistry that food production has gone up both through fertilizer and through agrochemicals? So, if you keep on giving examples, sometimes even politicians make use of things in so they say, “Oh, this politician is Teflon-like,” meaning a slippery fellow, you know. And Teflon itself I was telling just before the conference started how serendipity has played a big role in innovations in the chemical industry.
Low-density polyethylene, high-density polyethylene, Teflon, cellulose nitrate, penicillin all are serendipitous, but none of them occur to uninitiated persons. So you can’t take comfort that, “I’m going to just sit and one day, serendipitously, I’ll invent something.” It doesn’t happen. You have to be a highly gifted person to come out with it since the chemical industry is highly science-based. And, by the way, the only branch of engineering which hinges on chemistry is chemical engineering. It’s a combination of chemistry and chemical engineering which has made our lives so much better, so much happier, and so much longer. So you can keep on singing the praises of… Let me give you some other breakthrough things that have happened which have made… and I want to quote again my theme is how everyday life, how all-inclusive growth, is so critically dependent upon chemistry, and I’m going to refer to the Duracell pill. Imagine if the pill had not come what would have happened to family planning? What would have been the global population? If the pill had not come, what a fantastic impact it has had. Have you wondered that we cannot have any mobility without products of the chemical industry? Even a bicycle requires a tire, and what is a tire made of? All started… and this makes me make some comment: the most wonderful and most innovative chemist is nature. Nature produces chemicals which are very difficult to synthesize. Morphine is one example. Artemisinin, which the Chinese put up for malaria treatment just see the complex structure. The wonder of nature is that one plant gives you pinene so you get alpha-pinene, beta-pinene, and carene. A similar plant gives you rubber. Now, have you wondered how under ambient conditions we are able to produce rubber? It’s a challenge for the chemical industry to simulate nature.
Shellac the first important polymer that came in the world and the British then established the Indian Lac Research Institute near Ranchi because there was no other polymer. And if you remember, there’s a reference in the Mahabharata when that lac building went on fire it’s an excretion product of an insect. So you have dye there, you have polymer there. Can we simulate how you can get such a complex product? Indigo India became famous because we had indigo plants. Then we came with synthetic indigo a major innovation. But there is once again a trend… I want to finally make a reference to what bugs can do. Science of catalysis ammonia synthesis itself was a brilliant example. But let me give you an extremely simple example: you make syngas carbon monoxide plus hydrogen. How you can play magic?
You can convert this only to methanol. You can convert this only to methane. You can do Fischer-Tropsch and get diesel with a cetane number more than 70. You can operate in petrochemical mode by just changing the catalyst make olefins, alcohols. What wonderful, extraordinary transformations take place. How we can make optically active molecules by asymmetric catalysis. Again, draw inspiration from nature they produce menthol. Pudina is optically active. India is the biggest producer, and how much labor we have to put in to make synthetic optically active menthol. Thiol, which comes from pine, is relatively easy to synthesize, but optically active menthol is not all that easy. There are at least two or three plants in the world which make synthetic L-menthol. So nature is always a source of great inspiration. But look at what fermentation can do and how it will change chemistry and the face of the chemical industry in years to come. And I want to quote Frances Arnold’s epoch-making Nobel Prize-winning directed evolution. Let me start with a very simple example.
The Second World War produced 2,3-butylene glycol by fermentation so that they could make butadiene by dehydration. Remember, in the Second World War, synthetic rubber had to be produced by hook or crook. So America had marshaled 55 companies to produce synthetic rubber because natural rubber was denied to Allied forces. So butadiene-styrene novel technologies came during war. War was destructive, but for the chemical industry it was very productive because we came out with many new processes. So synthetic rubber was… and what a big difference synthetic rubber has made. But keep in mind that natural rubber has its own… So 2,3-butylene glycol was in the Second World War. More recently, by fermentation, they make 1,4-butylene glycol commercial plant. You just tune the bug. Now there is a bug which can give 1,3. So all the three isomers of butanediol can be done by fermentation. Isn’t it a great thing that you can do fermentation to make aniline, adipic acid? But isoprene by fermentation can anyone beat that? Now there’s a pilot plant working for vanillin. Now you know how expensive natural vanillin from Madagascar is, and what sort of money you pay. Of course, synthetic vanillin is much cheaper. This is one of the wonders of chemistry that what you can produce in nature, which is so expensive… Can you afford jasmine absolute? But synthetic jasmine is so much cheaper. Synthetic rose is so much cheaper. So whether you take the area of colors, whether you take the area of perfumery molecules, whether you take medicinal products nature is just unbeatable.
Chemistry is so central. Many times they are blamed for pollution. Of course, we must own… people who don’t run… I said it is highly science-based, so there’s no place for quacks in the chemical industry. And most of the time when you hear about accidents, they are really avoidable because people didn’t respect the chemicals that they were handling, including dust-based explosions how dust can be. So, the chemical industry, being highly science-based, will continue to make a major impact in overall growth, and because it is science-based, I want to finally quote, as I was telling you earlier in the day, I’m very impressed with the President of China making a statement quoted that China must concentrate on fundamental research so that they invent and don’t have to import technology. Coming closer to the chemical industry since we have ICC Director General many years ago they had a conference, like you’re talking of innovation, it was specifically on innovation, and I was required to give the inaugural address. That time I gave a clarion call that let at least one chemical industry announce that they have a Chief Innovation Officer. So many years have gone not a single chemical company in India has announced creation of a Chief Innovation Officer in the company.
I want to seize today’s opportunity to say that companies should take… and that R&D chief should be on the board of directors. How many companies in India and I say with some conviction because I was on the foundation board of IPCL in the early ’70s and the first company in India where before production started, R&D started, and the R&D director was on the board, which was then followed in Indian Oil. But Indian Oil was not the first one to have a director on the board of directors it was IPCL. And then it went to Engineers India, and then, of course, sometimes they keep on playing. But I want to see how many private sector companies in India have an R&D chief on the board. If you don’t have a voice in the board, how would innovation come in? So you have made innovation, and the chemical industry has thrived out of repeated innovations. Imagine what you will be able to do with methane if you innovate.
Can I convert methane directly to methanol? Can I convert one carbon atom convert methane to ethylene? These are the kinds of challenges. Can I convert ethane directly to ethylene plus acetic acid? These are the challenges. And catalyst is one area where chemists, biologists, physicists, material scientists there was a reference material science will be impossible without… and when physicists say they claim that they can predict, and chemists do experiments, I said, “Did you ever predict what is the level of superconductivity you will get with what? Can you predict which material is going to be super magnetic? And how all our renewable power is so critically dependent on chemistry? Have you wondered you don’t have neodymium what will happen to you? You will not get any super magnet. If you take wind although wings are composites today there’s a problem when you shut… how will you utilize those wings which have become non-functional now?” So, ladies and gentlemen, I call and tell you India should at least come out with one process first time in the world. We still don’t have, in the chemical industry, one process which is for the first time in the world. I’m hoping that in the near future, one such thing with which I’m associated will be commercial. Wish you all the best today. Have a good day.
