The columnist also focused on the excellent properties of Russian lubricants, which were superior in quality to American and Scottish products. To confirm this, Charles Marvin cited the assessment of the prominent chemist, Boverton Redwood (1846–1919): “Russian lubricating oil is characterized by considerable fluidity compared to its specific weight; it does not thicken at low temperature and does not precipitate paraffin wax.”
He was also very impressed by Russia’s active use of residual oil or mazut as liquid fuel. This effective replacement for coal was used at that time by 250 bulk and passenger steamships, several hundred locomotives and more than 1,000 steam stationary engines.
In summarizing his discussions regarding the future of Russia’s oil regions, Charles Marvin wrote: “The obstacles that hampered the oil business and held up the striving of petroleum products to leave the Caspian coast are breaking apart, and the time is not far off when all of Europe will be flooded with cheap Baku kerosene.” The Briton, looking forward to the unlimited horizons of oil cooperation between England and Russia, stressed in particular that “a vast field is opening up for trade in supplying an enormous region with lamps, kerosene kitchens, oil pipelines, every manner of portable mechanisms, as well as bulk tank cars and tanks for storing kerosene and other objects, the need for which is caused by the developing oil field,” and that “England should not miss the chance to seize at least some of the trade sectors that will result from oil industry development in Baku.”47
The appeals of Charles Marvin and his like-minded supporters for the active development of an Anglo-Russian energy dialogue did not fall on deaf ears within the government of Great Britain or among entrepreneurs in both countries, and by the beginning of the 20th century Great Britain had taken over first place on the export list of Russian oil industrialists.
Viktor Ragozin’s Oleonaphthas
The frenzied development of Russian industry, as well as railway, river, and sea transportation, required not only fuel, but also large quantities of quality lubricants. As a rule, foreign lubricants imported into Russia were of low quality and were actually made from substitutes. At best, they consisted of petroleum material mixed with vegetable oils and animal fat with gutta-percha added.
Russian engineers and entrepreneurs soon began to search for alternatives to foreign lubricants and throughout the country—in the Kuban, in the Crimea, in a series of provinces of central Russia—efforts were undertaken to create high-quality lubricants. Despite these efforts, however, production volumes remained relatively small, and it soon became clear that a fundamentally new approach was needed.
Such a breakthrough in the manufacturing technology of oils occurred in the center of Russia, in Nizhny Novgorod Province, when the Russian entrepreneur Viktor Ragozin (1833–1901) began producing lubricants on an industrial scale. A graduate of Moscow University, Ragozin began his first experiments in 1873 in a laboratory set up in his apartment in Nizhny Novgorod. The results of his work decomposing oil residue over the course of the two years gave him the knowledge and confidence to take his research to the next level.
In early 1874, Viktor Ragozin wrote a letter to Russian Finance Minister Mikhail Reytern, in which he laid out his plans for experimental research on obtaining lubricating oil under factory conditions using a new type of equipment. The matter reached Alexander II, and on November 6, 1874, the emperor issued his “Highest Order on the Performance of Experiments at Retooled Photogen Refineries,” which stated the following: “According to the most humble report of the minister of finance on the petition of Nizhny Novgorod merchant Ragozin to give him permission to build a temporary photogen refinery that would not have any distillation stills at all, but instead would have chambers of a special type in which oil would decompose from the action of heat; where the goal of this is to test a new method of preparing kerosene, in particular, lubricating oil from petroleum.”
In 1875, Viktor Ragozin built a pilot refinery in Nizhny Novgorod, located on the bank of the Volga beyond the steamship landing. It was here that he definitively developed the technology of preparing lubricating oil from residual oil (mazut) using superheated steam. At the end of the same year, he received a favorable review concerning the quality of his lubricants from the well-known Russian chemist Professor Fëdor Beilstein. This prompted him to set up a modern new refinery for large-scale industrial production of lubricants in the small city of Balakhna located 25 miles from Nizhny Novgorod.
The Balakhna refinery, put into operation at the beginning of 1878, was producing at least 12,000 barrels of lubricants a year using a technological process that was completely new at that time. The process involved first heating the residual oil to 572°F, then passing superheated steam through it; this steam carried the oil fractions with it into a condenser, where they separated from the water.
The lubricants produced using this method—Viktor Ragozin’s “oleonaphthas”—were exhibited at the 1878 Exposition Universelle de Paris, where they met with great success, winning a gold medal.
In the same year, large batches of Russian “oleonaphthas” were delivered to France for more than 700,000 francs. Just two years later, practically the entire French navy had switched to the exclusive use of Ragozin’s “petroleum oils.”
In Russia itself, these lubricants were evaluated for use on railway transportation. A commission led by the well-known tribologist Professor Nikolay Petrov gave them high marks. The use of the Balakhna “oil tar” reduced the consumption of coal by one-third, and increased the operating distance of railroad car axles by a factor of eight.
The growing demand for lubricants prompted Viktor Ragozin to expand his production facilities. In 1879, a new, large-scale refinery was put into operation in the village of Konstantinovo near Yaroslavl. In its first year of operation, it produced 68,450 barrels of spindle, machine, and railroad car oil along with a wide assortment of kerosene and other refined products. Initially, the V. I. Ragozin & Co. Partnership’s refineries produced four grades of lubricant: spindle, machine, and winter and summer variants of railway car oil. The list of finished products was soon expanded to include other grades of oiclass="underline" cylinder oil, diesel fuel, etc. In 1879, the Konstantinovo refinery was producing 68,450 barrels of product worth 1.4 million rubles.
The V. I. Ragozin & Co. Partnership, which was formed in 1880, had scientific research laboratories in Moscow, Paris, and London, where chemical specialists carried out experiments and tested heavy refining products. Viktor Ragozin explained that: “Once I had set up the new processing of oil, I wanted to give my work a scientific foundation and consulted Russian and foreign chemists. I had Mendeleyev, Markovnikov, and Schulenberg from the College de France working in my laboratories. This work lasted for years.”
For Viktor Ragozin’s services to the domestic oil industry, the Scholarly Council of the St. Petersburg Technological Institute bestowed the honorary title of production engineer on him in 1888.
The Russian newspaper Neftyanoye delo [“The Oil Business”] wrote that “the Konstantinovo refinery occupies first place, in terms of both the quantity of refined product and the character of the fractionated distillates.” The influential American publication Engineering seemed to echo the Russian press indirectly when it said that “concerning lubricating oils, there cannot be any doubt that the Russian product has enormous advantages over the American one.... Russian oils withstand the very strictest tests and have remarkably high viscosity relative to their specific gravity.” Perhaps the highest form of praise came from the American oil industry’s use of the slogan “just like Russian lubricants” on the packaging of their products.