| ISSUE 007 · MATERIALS, CAPACITY, CONVERSION | |
| Everyone is counting shells, and now everyone is counting the fill. In November 2024 the US Army awarded a contract with a ceiling of $435 million to REPKON USA to design, build and commission a TNT facility at Graham, Kentucky, and that plant has appeared in every munitions story since. Now name the chemical that RDX is made in. | |
| Acetic anhydride. Tennessee Eastman began producing it at Kingsport, Tennessee in 1929 for cellulose acetate, and in the account the American Chemical Society published with its 1995 landmark designation the company was consuming more than a billion pounds a year in cellulosic plastics, filter products, textile yarns and photographic film. The same company built Holston Ordnance Works in the same town from January 1942, where the Bachmann process nitrates hexamine in an acetic acid and acetic anhydride solvent. | |
| It is also the principal heroin precursor. Under DEA rules at 21 CFR 1310.04, a domestic sale of 250 gallons or 1,023 kilograms is a regulated transaction carrying records and identity requirements. The substance sits in Table I of the 1988 United Nations drug convention, so exports move under pre-export notification, and the International Narcotics Control Board precursors report published in 2026 put global seizures for 2024 at roughly 52,000 litres, with China and the Netherlands together accounting for about 94 per cent of that total. | |
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| PLATE · COAL GASIFIER AND ACETYL CHEMICALS COMPLEX, UNITED STATES, 1983 |
| In October 1973 Arab members of OPEC embargoed oil exports to the United States. By the Federal Reserve’s account the price went from $2.90 a barrel before the embargo to $11.65 in January 1974, and the embargo was lifted in March 1974. American acetyl chemistry ran on petroleum feedstock. |
| Eastman Chemical at Kingsport started research in 1975 on making acetic anhydride from coal. The first small pilot plants ran in 1977, Bechtel took the design and construction contract in 1978, and the chemicals from coal complex began operating in 1983, the first commercial production of acetyl chemicals from coal rather than petroleum in the United States. Bechtel began the engineering to double anhydride output in 1988, and the Phase II expansion was completed in 1991 at 128 per cent of original design. |
| Ten years separated the embargo from the first coal-derived anhydride at Kingsport. Feedstock substitution at this layer is a decade of capital work, and the decade runs the same length whether the buyer at the end of it is a filter tow line or a nitration train. |
| PLATE · ACETIC ANHYDRIDE PROCESS TRAIN, HOLSTON ARMY AMMUNITION PLANT, KINGSPORT, TENNESSEE | |||
| Holston Army Ammunition Plant at Kingsport, Tennessee is Army owned, operated by BAE Systems Ordnance Systems, and described in Army material as the exclusive source of RDX and HMX based formulations since the 1940s. On 26 February 2025 the Army opened public comment on a supplemental environmental assessment for expanded insensitive munitions explosive capacity there. The amended facilities include a third anhydride train. | |||
| The document describes a building housing one train of acetic anhydride process equipment with a total estimated footprint of 3,000 square feet, and additional acid storage potentially part of the construction. It records that the original RDX expansion program already included expanded anhydride capabilities. | |||
| The plant recovers its own acid. The Weak Acetic Acid Recovery Plant was built in 1943 and covers 10,769 square feet, concentrating weak acetic acid separated from RDX, HMX, ammonium nitrate solution and water to about 55 per cent by weight. Two buildings are dedicated to it, one a backup to the other, sharing a tank farm, only one system operating at a time. | |||
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| Every supply figure carries a date and a source in the text. Not a footnote. In the sentence. | |||
| FREE. NO STOCK PICKS. NO PREDICTIONS. | |||
| Nothing here is investment advice. No company is named as an investment. |
