With our government structure overhauled, everything is even more compartmentalized than before. That is nice in that I can focus on my own work more, but it also means I'm less informed on updates in other areas of expertise. As a rough example, I get less information on the situation on the mainland, general construction, and our industrial production.

It has let me focus even more on my own work though, since it's cut my number of distracting meetings that I have to attend drastically. Thjs year, we've once again hired a number of new graduates to work on various projects, though we've noticed a bit of a trend that could be considered worrying. It hasn't really cemented itself yet, but the trend among our human students has been towards expressing a desire to return to their homelands over working for us. This seems to be more centered around the border states that previously threatened to leave our alliance, but there is still a stronger than normal desire among the other humans.

That presents some amount of concern when it comes to engineering and science, as their information will be far easier to steal than it would be with the dwarves. We haven't been hiring many non-engineering and science oriented individuals, since we do actually want them to return to their homelands to improve political and bureaucratic efficiencies, so it's a bit of a double edged sword.

Regardless, our new hires are split among our various projects, including a few hires who showed potential in the last semester related to my demonstrations of the fractionating column. While the general operation of hydrocarbon columns with their higher carcinogen risk will be left to lower prestige demons who can likely evolve away their cancers, we still do need high level engineers to design and test for efficiency improvements.

My intent is to get everything roughly designed and working, inefficiencies and all, to make artificial rubber. Alongside that, I fully intend to have dedicated individuals working on improving the purity and recovery of those materials. For right now, that means having these new hires experimenting with settings in the adjustable fractionating column to determine better setups for recovering ethene and BTX.

For the most part, having more trays in a column means a higher separation. However, the relationship isn't linear. The column that I had built for the academy has quite a few adjustable settings. Temperature and pressure are two major ones, but each individual tray can be removed or snapped at a different height with a bit of effort. In doing so, various different kinds of data can be collected on tray spacing, column height, and tray count.

If half of the trays were removed, for example, there are multiple choices in which trays can be removed. If you remove every other tray, you've halved the tray count, but doubled the tray spacing, while keeping column height the same. If instead you remove trays from both the top and bottom of the column, you've essentially reduced the column height and number of trays, while keeping spacing the same. By making these sorts of changes, final column designs can be focused in for the different recovery steps.

As another example of what can be done, initial mixes we produce have dozens of different chemical constituents. Benzene already has to go through three stages of separations, not including steam cracking, just to isolate it from the initial wood tar. The larger the column and the more trays, the longer it generally takes to process as a batch, or for continuous processes, the larger amount ends up entrained in the column before you end up with a steady state process. As such, certain stages will be more efficient if kept smaller. It may be more effective to do two stages of separations, rather than one large stage, as far as getting a good final product is involved. These are the kinds of research targets I've set for the five hires I have researching ethene, BTX, and benzene recovery.

While they work on that, I'm going to try to develop butadiene production. I've stated before that my intent is to produce an initial sample using the ethanol plus catalyst pathway. This involves using any number of alkaline oxides at high temperature and pressure to drive the reaction towards reduction forwards. Magnesium Oxide is what I'd like to try to use. It shouldn't be too hard to produce, given we have plenty of lime and sea water. This will lead to an ion exchange from calcium hydroxide to make magnesium hydroxide, and just like how we can heat calcium hydroxide to return it to calcium oxide, the same can be done for magnesium oxide. From there, if we want, we can produce magnesium metal to be included in the fluorite research facility as an inclusion material.

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Producing magnesium oxide from what we had was actually relatively easy. By first reducing the sea water down to a brine, it was possible to produce a decent amount of magnesium oxide over a few weeks. There are better methods for us to produce magnesium oxide that wouldn't involve using up our lime, should we need more of it in the future. For now though, what I've produced is plenty. The downside is that, just as previously, there is actually a bit of work to activate the catalyst, as geometry plays a big role.

I'll be doing tests in a reaction vessel at different temperatures and pressures over different samples of catalyst prepared in different ways to try to produce what I want. I've also brought in a few additional researchers to handle some of the tests in parallel with me, since there are a fairly large number of tests to run.

I was asked, while we were running tests, how it is that I know what we're trying to produce if no one has ever heard of it or seen it before. It's been some time since I addressed this. Many people haven't really questioned it. It's a bit of an open secret that I'm not originally from this world. I told the demons decades ago, and no one really brought it up. I imagine from there it became a matter of psychology that, since no one else was mentioning it was odd or asking the question, no one wanted to bring it up, similar to the bystander effect. Many of the people probably just assumed I had figured it all out, or that I was some kind of super genius. In either case, that has played to my benefit in the past. After all, would you really want to go up against someone who could discover all this stuff in such a short time, I certainly wouldn't.

However, that isn't actually the case. I've made some discoveries, albeit they were applications of things I knew overtop the altered physics of this world, so they weren't exactly the most groundbreaking discoveries. In any case, it'd be difficult to predict the exact properties of a material like butadiene from scratch. As a member of a larger chemistry group of hydrocarbons with four carbon atoms, there are general properties we could expect, if we had gibbs free energy tables, we could even be more precise about some properties, but we don't have that, so it isn't like I could sidestep the question to maintain the illusion here.

It also shows good problem solving and questioning instincts to ask such a question to begin with, even if everyone else seems to be sidestepping it. So, rather than come up with some lie, I told them the truth, though only after having them understand it as an open state secret that they shouldn't go around sharing. Honestly, looking back on when I told people previously, if I hadn't said anything back then, I think we'd have one of two possible outcomes. In all likelihood, the elves are aware of this information to some degree. If they weren't aware of it, it's possible that they'd actually be more afraid of me and would have already killed me, or would be more passive out of fear.

They may have actually underestimated my impact as a result of knowing that I wasn't from this world. To them, the invading demons also seem to be from another world. Further, it's less threatening, like a dwarf coming to your country and explaining metalworking. It's simply imparted knowledge brought from somewhere else, that could be discovered on it's own, hypothetically by anyone. If I found out that a human was suddenly making dozens of major altering discoveries a year within the northern alliance, I'd probably say we need to eliminate them as a threat quickly too, since that unknowable unknown is more threatening.

The underestimation comes from the kind of transformation of worldly understanding that comes from the scientific method, now that we're actually getting individuals integrated into such a style of learning, as evidenced by the very question that was asked of me. A change in the rigor of information development and cooperation is the real threat that changes world power structures. The elves have even copied my technologies to a degree. The idea of why I'm threatening is right there. Once I introduce something, it can be copied. Eventually I'll run out of things to introduce, and they can quickly catch up, and resume the status quo.

There should be an end to it at some point, and for elves who live for centuries or millennia, they can wait. In fact, this polar cold war benefits them in that manner. Small skirmishes and fear have already driven me to push to the ends of what I know as far as military technology is concerned. The only think we haven't really developed on that front are nuclear weapons and missiles. What they perhaps don't understand is that one piece of knowledge that I've brought goes beyond that, which is the tools to teach others how to make new discoveries, that leads to a forever arms race of adaptation that they won't be able to sit around forever waiting for technology to slow back down.

When they realize that, conflict may occur in a last ditch effort to revert things back to normal. Which is all the more reason that being ahead in military technology at that point will be vitally important. I had, perhaps, failed to fully analyze why the elves did everything the way they had, up until the fact of the matter was brought to my attention by a simple question.

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