Conoco Would Buy Coal, Pitt-Consol Chemical Plans to acquire coal and related assets of Consolidation Coal

Pitt-Consol Chemical is among the properties that Continental Oil will acquire if it succeeds in buying the coal and related assets of Consolida­tion Coal Co. The two companies re­vealed last week that they had agreed to the plan, subject to certain financial and legal checks and conclusion of a definitive agreement.

Under the plan approved by both boards of directors, Conoco (Ponca City, Okla.) would give Consol (Pittsburgh, Pa.) a reserved produc­tion payment (on coal) equivalent to $460 million. Consol would sell the payment to a third party. Consol would also receive 2 million shares of Conoco common stock. Consol would retain miscellaneous noncoal invest­ments with a current market value of about $44.5 million, and its 3.5 million shares of Chrysler Corp. common stock. Conoco would receive working capital estimated to exceed $100 mil­lion.

Consol shareholders will be asked to approve a liquidation plan in which they will receive, for each share of Consol stock, about 0.2 share of Conoco common, 0.35 share of Chrys-

Alr Products, Southern Nitrogen to Combine The planned combination of Air Products and Chemicals with South­ern Nitrogen should effect no change in the operations of the two com­panies, according to a joint statement disclosing the plan. Air Products' headquarters are in Allen town, Pa., and Southern Nitrogen's home base is Savannah, Ga.

The two were already hooked up in a marketing agreement for anhydrous ammonia. Air Products has a manu­facturing complex in New Orleans, La., that includes a 600 ton-per-day anhydrous ammonia plant. Output from this plant was sold under a long-term agreement to Southern Nitrogen, which uses the ammonia to supply its new nitrogen facility at Cincinnati. This nitrogen plant services fertilizer markets in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, and Mis­souri. The plant is designed to proc-

George H. Love

He'll stay on at Chrysler

ler common, and about $41 in cash. Consol chairman George H. Love, who is also chairman of Chrysler Corp., says he plans to retain his Chrysler holdings. Mr. Love says he agreed several weeks ago to stay on as Chrysler chairman, although nor­mally he would have retired Oct. 1.

Conoco netted $100 million last year on sales of $1.4 billion. Consoli­dation Coal earned $33.3 million on gross revenues of $307 million.

ess 80,000 tons of ammonia a year. Air Products (1964 sales of about

$111.2 million) also produces indus­trial gases and apparatus, cryogenic equipment, and a number of chemi­cals, (including amine residues and distillates, fluorine and fluorine com­pounds, imidazoles, catalysts, oxo al­cohols, and urethanes). Southern Ni­trogen's sales in 1964, exclusively in fertilizers, totaled $39.2 million.

The plan, subject to approval by the boards of directors and stockhold­ers of both companies, calls for a stock exchange. Southern Nitrogen's stock­holders would receive 0.375 share of a new cumulative convertible preferred stock of Air Products for each share of Southern's common stock.

The new preferred stock would pay a dividend of $2.00 per share. It would be convertible (share for share) into Air Products common stock. The new stock would be non-callable for five years. After that, it would be callable at $70 a share.

New Edition of Bible For Analysts Due Soon Official Methods of Analysis contains many new analytical methods

The 10th and most drastic updating of Official Methods of Analysis—the soup-to-nuts manual of the analytical field—will be ready for distribution to laboratories all over the world by Nov. 1. It will sell for $22.50, according to its publishers, the Association of Offi­cial Agricultural Chemists (AOAC), which met in Washington last week (see also page 25) .

OMA is the chemical bible of such federal agencies as the Food and Drug Administration, Department of Agri­culture, Treasury Department, and In­ternal Revenue Service. Results based on its procedures are accepted as evidence in cases involving alleged violations of state and federal laws regulating such commodities as foods, pesticides, alcoholic beverages, and narcotics. The procedures are veri­fied independently in dozens of labo­ratories. So research people widely regard them as validated methods.

The book's procedures, replete with Chemical Abstracts abbreviations, are meant to be brief and pointed. AOAC, to save space, double-col­umned each page for the first time. OMA is revised every five years. It first appeared in 1920. This edition's press run will total 15,000 copies.

Editor William Horwitz of the Food and Drug Administration says the changes in the new edition reflect the swift emergence of instrumental methods of analysis plus demands for parts-per-billion precision.

As examples of changes in Volume 10, nine new methods employing ul­traviolet or infrared spectrophotom­etry were added to fertilizer analysis. Procedures for 14 additional pesti­cides were adopted, requiring 12 new methods of analysis. Eight new methods were introduced for oils and fats. The chapter on Drugs in Feeds now includes 15 new methods, in­cluding four for antibiotics.

"During the next five years," says Dr. Horwitz, "we can expect new methods to be adopted for additional pesticide residues, drugs in feeds, and hazardous substances. It takes from five to 15 years between passage of a new statute or amendment to reach a substantial adoption of validated methods by the AOAC."

26 C&EN OCT. 18, 196 5