Phillips Petroleum Co. v. Esso Standard Oil Co. (91 F. Supp. 218, 1950)

WILLIAM C. COLEMAN, Chief Judge.

This is a patent suit in which the plaintiff, Phillips Petroleum Company, a Delaware corporation, claims that the defendant, Esso Standard Oil Company, also a Delaware corporation, which maintains and operates an oil refinery in Baltimore, has infringed patent No-. 2,002,394, issued May 21, 1935 to the plaintiff as assignee of the inventor, F. E. Frey, this patent being for a process for converting hydrocarbons. The defendant denies infringement and also asserts that the patent is invalid because anticipated by the prior art.

The alleged invention of the patent lies in that part of the field of petroleum chemistry which deals, broadly speaking, with the conversion of gaseous hydrocarbons into liquid hydrocarbons, which are substances composed entirely of hydrogen and carbon. Such liquid hydrocarbons have properties which are essential in motor fuels. The conversion process is generally known in the industry as paraffin alkylation. With the last War, a great need arose for gasoline of the highest quality for use in airplane motors, particularly what is known as 100 octane gasoline, for the production of which the process under the patent and the alleged infringing process of the defendant have particular application.

More specifically, as stated in the first paragraph of the patent “This invention relates to the process for converting hydrocarbons by thermal treatment into products of higher molecular weight and, more specifically, to reacting together paraffins and olefins into products of higher molecular weight which are substantially aliphatic (open chain structure) in character and contain a high proportion of paraffins.”

Hydrocarbons, of which there are many types, are, as just stated, shbstances composed wholly of carbon and hydrogen. Where the proportion of carbon in the molecule is very small, the substance is a gas at ordinary temperatures and at atmospheric pressure; where it is greater, the result is a light liquid and when increased, heavier liquids and oils result, and at the top of the carbon scale solids occur. Some hydrocarbons are stable in their nature and are referred to as being “saturated” as to their chemical affinity to other hydrocarbons and are called paraffins from ■“parum” meaning “too little”, and “affinis” meaning “akin”, so named in allusion to their chemical inactivity. Other hydrocarbons are unstable and are inclined to deteriorate and to react with one another and hence are called olefins which are hydrocarbons of the ethylene series, having but one double bond.

While the Frey patent issued with seven claims, only claim 2 is here in suit. It is as follows: “In a process for the production of higher boiling hydrocarbons from lower boiling hydrocarbons, the step which consists in adding to a stream of predominantly saturated hydrocarbons, maintained at a conversion temperature and pressure, successive small quantities of predominantly olefinic hydrocarbons, in such amount that the content of added olefins in the mixture at no time exceed 10% by weight of the total hydrocarbons present.”

This same claim was quite recently litigated in the Fifth Circuit in a suit brought by the same plaintiff as the one in the present suit against Shell Oil Company. The District Court found claim 2 invalid and not infringed. The Court of Appeals affirmed, holding that if confined to the heat pressure process which alone was disclosed by the patent, there was no infringement and if given broader scope, the patent was invalid for want of sufficient disclosure of any catalytic process and because anticipated by the prior art. See Phillips Petroleum Company v. Shell Oil Company, 166 F.2d 384.

In the course of the trial of the present case a great deal of the same or substantially the same testimony was introduced that was heard in the Fifth Circuit case. In the course of its opinion in that case, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals said as follows, in finding that there was n