In The News
The first commercial power-to-liquids plant planned
Nordic Blue Crude A/S (NBC; Porsgrunn, Norway; www.nordicbluecrude.no) intends to build the first power-to-liquids (PtL) plant in the Norwegian industrial park of Heroya, located 140 km southeast of Oslo. Although the date for the startup has not yet been released,…
Business News for July 2018
Plant Watch Arkema to expand polyamide powder production capacity in France June 6, 2018 — Arkema (Colombes, France; www.arkema.com) plans to expand its global production capacity for specialty polyamide powders marketed under the brand name Orgasol by more than 50%…
Fast-pyrolysis process recovers valuable materials from tires
Each year, more than 1 billion automobile tires are replaced worldwide. Together, the used tires contain 4.4 million metric tons of valuable products, such as carbon black, metals, fuels and chemicals. In an effort to recover these materials, the University…
Making amine-based CO2 adsorbents more stable
Amine-containing solids have been investigated as promising adsorbents for CO2 capture, but existing amine-containing adsorbents degrade by oxidation, making them unreliable for repeated CO2 adsorption-desorption cycles over a long period. The low stability requires the continuous addition of fresh adsorbents,…
Chementator Briefs
Forward Osmosis Last month, Bioindustrial Innovation Canada (BIC; Sarnia, Ont.; www.bincanada.ca), Forward Water Technologies (FWT; www.forwardwater.com) and GreenCentre Canada (GCC; Kingston, Ont.; www.greencentrecanada.com) announced a private investment into FWT, supporting the commercial scaleup of a proprietary forward-osmosis technology. The initial…
Antifouling membranes for single-step desalination
A filter for water purification that can replace, with a single step, the complex, time-consuming and multi-stage processes currently needed, has been developed by a team from CSIRO Manufacturing (Sydney, Australia; www.csiro.au), led by Dong Han Seo. The team has…
Harnessing the Joule-Thomson effect for treating wastewater with high salinity
A thermal-membrane process system, based on the Joule-Thompson effect (JTE) for treating wastewater with high salinity or with a high-level of inorganic contents has been developed by Thermosift Engineering Pvt. Ltd. (Asaripallam, Tamil Nadu, India; www.thermosift.com). The system operates at…
Chementator Briefs
C2H2 hydrogenation Last month, Clariant (Munich, Germany; www.clariant.com) launched OleMax 260, a new selective acetylene-hydrogenation catalyst, which is said to have extremely high ethylene selectivity and operational stability. Specially developed for ethylene producers with “front-end” process configurations, OleMax 260 offers…
Transformations in Transit: Chemical Logistics Get Smarter
Digitalization, sustainability, security and safety are at the forefront of innovations in the logistics and supply-chain sectors Ensuring that chemical products reach the correct location at the correct time requires intricate networks of complex logistics and scheduling tasks where several…
A Pt-free electrode for making H2 from water
One of the major obstacles to making hydrogen economically by splitting water is the high cost of noble-metal electrodes. Less expensive, non-noble metals only function as electrocatalysts under alkaline conditions, where the reaction requires more electricity. Now, professor Ryoichi Ito…