On September 30, 2020, BASF SE (Ludwigshafen, Germany) closed the divestiture of its Construction Chemicals business to an affiliate of Lone Star, a global private equity firm. The purchase price on a cash and debt-free basis is €3.17 billion. The…
The Gazpromneft Omsk Oil Refinery (Omsk) in Siberia, Russia has significantly lowered its air emissions using wet-scrubbing technology licensed by DuPont Clean Technologies (DuPont). With an installed capacity of 22.23 million tons of oil per year, the Omsk Oil Refinery…
PT Chandra Asri Petrochemical Tbk (Jakarta, Indonesia) is starting up a new Enclosed Ground Flare (EGF), a smokeless flare technology, at its petrochemical complex in Cilegon, Banten, Indonesia. The total investment for the EGF was around $14 million. In construction…
Metsä Fibre Oy, part of the Metsä Group, and AFRY AB (Stockholm, Sweden) have entered into a preliminary agreement for the engineering, project management and site services for the implementation of a new chlorine dioxide plant at the Kemi bioproduct…
Nippon Shokubai Ltd. (Osaka, Japan) has begun the facility design for an enhanced production plant for the electrolyte lithium bis(fluorosulfonyl) imide (LiFSI; marketed under the name Ionel) for lithium-ion batteries. The company has assembled the Ionel Construction Team in order…
Northvolt AB (Stockholm, Sweden) announced the signing of a $600 million private placement, led by Baillie Gifford, Goldman Sachs Merchant Banking Division and Volkswagen AG, enabling the company to make further investments in expanding its production and recycling capacity for…
This edition of CE Voices discusses Pacific Northwest National Laboratory’s (PNNL) Chemical Transformations Initiative, which is an ambitious project to investigate electrochemical routes that could favorably treat overlooked waste streams, yielding valuable fuel and chemical feedstocks. This work involves the…
ABB (Zurich, Switzerland) has been awarded the contract to improve asset integrity across MOL Group’s (Budapest, Hungary) downstream assets, through changing mindset, standardizing processes and software and ensuring integrity management is focused on the right equipment. The project spanning MOL…
Royal DSM N.V. (Geleen, the Netherlands) has reached an agreement to sell its Resins & Functional Materials and associated businesses (together, RFM) to Covestro AG (Leverkusen, Germany) for an Equity Value of €1.6 billion. The proposed transaction is another step…
TechnipFMC (Houston) has been awarded a significant contract by Shell Moerdijk for the Engineering, Procurement and module Fabrication (EPF) for proprietary equipment and related services for eight ethylene furnaces at the Moerdijk petrochemicals complex in the Netherlands. The new furnaces…