What does ethethyl corporation do? Ethyl Corporation is a fuel additive company headquartered in Richmond, Virginia in the United States. The company is a distributor of fuel additives.Who bought ethyl corporation? The obvious potential buyers for the Ethyl Corporation were large chemical companies like Dow Chemical or Du Pont, but they were prevented from buying from Ethyl under the stringent anti-trust laws of the time. Standard Oil, although happy to sell its share of Ethyl, had never put its shares up for sale for just this reason.What is ethyl and why was it created? 'That made us mad, so we waited two years and bought Ethyl for ourselves,' Gottwald was quoted as saying. The Ethyl Corporation was created by General Motors and Standard Oil following the 1917 discovery that a lead additive in gasoline would prevent car engines from knocking.When did albemarle spin off ethyl? In 1993, it spun off its life insurance company, First Colony Life, and then in 1994, the specialty chemicals business was spun off as an independent, publicly traded company named Albemarle Corporation . In 2004, Ethyl Corporation became a subsidiary of NewMarket Corporation ( NYSE : NEU ).