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…
Capacitors are attractive in large-scale energy-storage applications, such as electric vehicles or grid storage, because of their ability to rapidly charge and discharge, but their energy densities have been too small to allow their use in such applications. Researchers at…
Ethylene dichloride Recently, Chemetry (Moss Landing, Calif.; www.chemetrycorp.com) and Braskem (Sao Paulo, Brazil; www.braskem.com) announced their intent to construct and operate a demonstration plant using Chemetry’s eShuttle technology for the production of ethylene dichloride (EDC) in Brazil. The initial focus…
This month, a demonstration project to generate power from fuel cells running on biogas has begun at Asahi Breweries’ Ibaraki Brewery. Coordinated by Asahi Quality & Innovations, Ltd., an independent research subsidiary of Asahi Group Holdings, Ltd. (Tokyo, Japan; www.asahigroup-holdings.com),…
Scientists from Nanyang Technological University (NTU; Singapore; www.ntu.edu.sg), led by professor Madhavi Srinivasan, have developed a method of using orange peel waste to extract precious metals from spent lithium-ion batteries and to make batteries from those recovered metals, creating minimal…
MITO Material Solutions (Indianapolis, Ind.; www.mitomaterials.com) has developed a proprietary graphene-functionalization technique that produces unique strength-enhancing additives for a wide variety of polymers and composites. The additives significantly improve mechanical properties (including tensile strength, flexural modulus and others) of the…