Researchers from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley, Calif. www.lbl.gov), along with a host of collaborators, have made progress on an artificial photosynthesis system that converts CO2 into ethane and ethylene using nanostructured copper and perovskite. In a recent publication…
A proprietary molten-salt electrolysis (MSE) process originally designed for battery manufacturing has now been re-optimized for North America’s first operational cobalt-refining plant. The DirectPlateTM MSE technology developed by Xerion Advanced Battery Corp. (Kettering, Ohio; www.xerionbattery.com; see Direct molten-salt electroplating cuts…
The past several years have seen rapid growth in technologies designed to mitigate the effects of climate change. Advances have been made in decarbonization efforts, such as alternatives to petroleum-based fuel sources including biofuels, hydrogen, solar, wind and other renewables;…
Safe and cost-effective storage represents one of the major hurdles in the widespread adoption of “clean” hydrogen in energy applications. A hydrogen-storage approach called cryo-compression is being poised as a bridge between high-density (but expensive) hydrogen liquefaction and cheaper (but…
As industries and consumers have shown an increasing preference for water and oil repellents that do not include any fluorinated materials, significant efforts and years of research and testing have gone into developing non-fluorinated alternatives. AGC Chemicals Americas, Inc. (AGCCA;…
Plant Watch Cariflex opens $355-million latex plant in Singapore May 15, 2025 — Cariflex Pte. Ltd. (Singapore; www.cariflex.com), a wholly owned subsidiary of DL Chemical Co., Ltd. (DL Chemical), inaugurated its new polyisoprene latex plant at Jurong Island, Singapore. With…
When challenged by fragmented knowledge and time-intensive manual analysis, artificial intelligence helped to accelerate decision-making during operational events Artificial intelligence (AI) is no longer a futuristic concept in the chemical process industries (CPI) — it is a present-day driver of…
The ability to economically produce large scales of graphene will help to enable many high-performance applications, from smart packaging materials and medical devices to safer gas storage. A new process demonstrated at Southwest Research Institute (SwRI; San Antonio, Tex.; www.swri.org)…
Biogas — produced from anaerobic digestion of organic matter — contains a mixture of gases, with methane and carbon dioxide as the predominant components. To use biogas as a fuel source, purification of the gas is typically needed to remove…
Recycling vehicle tires is complicated because the rubbers used (including butadiene and polyisoprene) are highly cross-linked, and because pyrolysis-based recycling of the rubbers generates environmentally hazardous compounds like benzene and dioxins. Now, researchers at the University of North Carolina at…