In The News
Foster Wheeler wins contract for wax expansion project in South Africa
Foster Wheeler Ltd., (Clinton, N.J.; www.fwc.com), a global engineering and construction contractor and power equipment supplier, announced that its South African subsidiary, Foster Wheeler South Africa, has been awarded a front-end-engineering design (FEED) contract. The contract was awarded by Sasol…
Sale of Pulcra Chemicals is now formally completed
Cognis (Monheim, Germany; www.cognis.com), a global specialty-chemicals supplier, has announced that the sale of Pulcra Chemicals to Fashion Chemicals GmbH & Co. KG (Fashion Chemicals) has been formally completed. Pulcra Chemicals, which supplies process chemicals to the textile and leather…
Economic Indicators: Business News
Plant Watch Oxea expands carboxylic-acids production, adds butyric acid October 14, 2008 — Oxea GmbH has decided to produce butyric acid at its North American production site in Bay City, Tex. The existing carboxylic-acids production plant will receive significant upgrading.…
Chementator: Bringing the corrosion resistance of tantalum to off-the-shelf stainless-steel parts
Tantaline (Lyngby, Demnark; www.tantaline.com) has developed a process that creates a surface alloy of tantalum on a metal substrate (typically stainless steel). As a result, the surface acquires the corrosion resistance of tantalum — the most corrosion resistant metal commercially available…
Chementator Briefs
Heavy crude UOP LLC (Des Plaines, Ill.; www.uop.com) plans to do further development of its Catalytic Crude Upgrading (CCU) technology through an agreement with Brazil’s Petrobras (Rio de Janeiro) and Albemarle Corp. (Baton Rouge, La.). CCU is a process…
Chementator: A new gasifier slated for its commercial debut
Uhde GmbH (Dortmund, Germany; www.uhde.biz) has commercialized a new gasifier design, the Prenflo (pressurized entrained-flow) with Direct Quench (PDQ) process, which is an optimized design of its Prenflo PSG gasification process for applications requiring hydrogen-rich syngas generation (ammonia, methanol, H2,…
Chementator: A trash-to-syngas process earns a patent
PHREG Technologies, Inc., a startup company in Yorba Linda, Calif., has received a patent on a pyrolysis process that converts municipal waste and other bio-organic materials into a synthetic gas of 350–600 Btu/scf quality, depending on the nature of the…
Chementator: This process improvement speeds up delayed coking
Decoking in a delayed coker operation is a laborious process that can take up to 18 h. A new method that reduces the time to 6 h has been developed by US Cokertech, LLC (Norman, Okla.). This effectively triples capacity…
Nestlé orders aseptic filling line from GEA
GEA Procomac, a company of GEA Group AG (Bochum, Germany; www.geagroup.com) specialized in aseptic filling technology for PET containers, has received an order for a low acid aseptic filling line from Nestlé USA to be delivered in 2009. The order…
Evonik plans more investment in Brazil
Evonik Industries AG (Essen, Germany; www.evonik.com) plans to build a new facility for producing hydrogen peroxide, which is used primarily in the production of cellulose and paper, at the Triunfo petrochemical complex near Porto Alegre, in southern Brazil. An investment…