Nippon Shokubai Co. (Osaka, Japan; www.shokubai.co.jp) held an opening ceremony for various new facilities at its Himeji Plant site, including new production plants for acrylic acid and n-phenylmaleimide (PMI), as well as a new liquid incinerator. The new acrylic acid…
Kemira Oyj (Helsinki, Finland; www.kemira.com) has reached a preliminary agreement to acquire AkzoNobel's global paper chemicals business. The parties will also enter into a distribution agreement for AkzoNobel's colloidal silica business for retention and drainage applications for the paper industry.…
Washington Penn Plastic Co., Inc. (Washington, Pa; www.washingtonpennplastic.com) has concluded an agreement with ExxonMobil Chemical Company (EMC; Houston, Tex.; www.exxonmobilchemical.com) to purchase and license assets of EMC’s North American specialty compounded polypropylene (PP) products business, following EMC’s decision to cease…
An affiliate of ExxonMobil (Irving, Tex., www.exxonmobil.com), Esso Belgium, a division of ExxonMobil Petroleum & Chemical B.V.B.A., announced that it plans to install a new delayed coker unit at its Antwerp refinery to convert heavy, higher sulfur residual oils into…
GE Power & Water (Schenectady, N.Y.; www.gepower.com) has announced that it has agreed to acquire Monsal (Mansfield, U.K.; www.monsal.com), a private water, waste, advanced anaerobic digestion and integrated biogas-to-energy business.

With Monsal’s advanced anaerobic digestion technology and industry knowledge, GE will…
Stubblefield Howell Weston Rodriguez Evertz Ted Nelson joins Akron Rubber Development Laboratory (Akron, Ohio) as technical advisor. Michael Stubblefield becomes CEO of Avantor Performance Materials (Center Valley, Pa.), a developer of high-performance chemistries . Ronen Tchelet joins biotechnology company Dyadic…
BASF SE (Ludwigshafen, Germany; www.basf.com), Huntsman Corp., Shanghai Hua Yi (Group) Co., Shanghai Chlor-Alkali Chemical Co. and Sinopec Group Assets Management Corp. held a ceremony today kicking off the construction of a new plant with a production capacity of 240,000…
Evonik Industries AG (Essen, Germany; www.evonik.com) is making an investment in the double-digit-million euro range in a new research center at the Rheinfelden, Germany site. Starting at the beginning of 2016, research into silanes will be carried out in modern…
The preliminary value for the April CE Plant Cost Index (CEPCI; the most recent available) rose 0.4% from the final March value, after dropping the previous month. The gain was mostly due to a rise in the Equipment subindex. The…
Process Heat Transfer: Principles, Applications and Rules of Thumb. 2nd ed. By Robert Serth and Thomas Lestina. Elsevier Inc., 225 Wyman Street, Waltham, MA 02144. Web: elsevier.com. 2014. 632 pages. $120.00. Engineering Plastics. By T.R. Crompton. Smithers Rapra Publishing,…