Eugene Houdry

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Eugene Houdry (April 18, 1892 - July 18, 1962) was a French mechanical engineer who invented catalytic cracking of petroleum feed stocks. He originally focused on using lignite (brown coal) as a feedstock, but switched to using heavy liquid tars after moving to the United States in 1930. Although others had experimented with catalysts for this purpose, they were stymied by the fact that the catalyst ceased to work after a time. Houdry diagnosed the nature of the problem and developed a method to regenerate the catalyst. The first Houdry unit was built at Sun Oil's Marcus Hook, PA oil refinery in 1937. Many more units were built by the 1940s and were instrumental for US wartime aviation gasoline production.

The process was further developed by two MIT engineers, Warren K. Lewis and Edwin R. Gilliland, under contract to Standard Oil of New Jersey, now ExxonMobil. They developed the process into fluid catalytic cracking, which solved the problem of having to shut down the process to burn the coke off the catalyst by using a continuously circulating fluidized catalyst made of a fine zeolite powder. This process is still in widespread use, especially in the US where gasoline is in high demand compared to other refined products.

Houdry later became interested in automotive catalysts, and the catalytic converter was one of approximately 100 patents that he received. but nothing came of it until the 1970s because the tetraethyl lead that was still in use in the 1950s and 1960s poisoned the catalyst.