At the end of the 8th century, gases were separated from the air by chemical methods, which laid the foundation for the industrial gas industry. Daniel Rutherford (1749-1819) first separated nitrogen in 1772. Soon after, Joseph Priestley and Carl Wilhelm Scheele separated oxygen in 1776. Oxygen was first used in medicine, and then in the late 19th century began to enter the commercial use of welding. Another major event in the development of atmospheric gas was the discovery of acetylene in 1863, a commonly used welding gas. Then it was found that acetylene was soluble in acetone, which made it possible to transport the cylinder. The trend of gas widely used in industrial processing began. In 1877, the fractionation process was invented, which for the first time saved a lot of money for mass production of gas. The rapid development of industrialization, the two world wars and the use of oxyacetylene torch welding greatly promoted the growth of industrial gas demand in the mid-20th century.
The second big increase in gas demand occurred in the early 1960s, because steel mills abandoned the early air injection methods and switched to oxygen injection process. Oxygen injection method reduces the content of carbon and phosphorus, thus greatly improving the quality of steel products. The oxygen production increased 10 times from 1960 to 1965. Nitrogen is also widely used as an inert "covering agent". This promoted the large-scale construction of gas production equipment.
In the mid-1980s, the electronic industry also began to rise, which promoted the demand for special gases to further increase. With the increase of consumption in traditional markets such as metal prefabrication and production, and the addition of new application fields in terminal markets such as health insurance, electronics, beverage and food packaging, the gas industry continued to grow in the 1990s.
The energy sector has become the biggest driving force for the development of the gas industry in the past few years. The promotion of clean fuels has increased the use of hydrogen in the refining industry. In a series of end markets such as health insurance, food and beverage, refining and enhanced oil recovery, gas has been widely used as energy, which makes the gas demand continue to strengthen in the early 21st century.
According to HSBC's forecast, the global industrial gas market has an economic scale of US $58 billion, with the four major producers accounting for about 72% of the market share. The growth rate of industrial gas industry has traditionally been 1.5 to 2.0 times of global GDP, with an average annual growth rate of about 8% in the past 10 years.
The largest regional markets for industrial gases are still Europe and North America. As HSBC mentioned earlier, in order to obtain higher returns, it is necessary to establish a regional marketing system and strengthen customer density. Therefore, it is natural for the four global gas companies to dominate the European and North American markets: airliquid in France, Linde in Germany and the United Kingdom, and air products and Praxair in the United States.
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