BASF SE (Ludwigshafen, Germany) has signed a binding agreement to sell its Food and Health Performance Ingredients business, including the production site in Illertissen, Germany, to Louis Dreyfus Company (LDC), a leading global merchant and processor of agricultural goods including…
The Mitsubishi Chemical Group (MCG; Tokyo) has announced two capacity expansions at its production sites in Japan in response to growing demand for semiconductor materials and lithium-ion batteries. In the first project, MCG will increase its production capacity of a…
Messer Group GmbH (Bad Soden, Germany) has begun operations at a new plant producing green CO2 at its Vrdy site in the Czech Republic. This enables Messer to increase the supply reliability of its customers, for example in the local…
A next-generation absorbent material with a high affinity for short- and long-chain per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) has recently been granted a patent in the U.S. Developed by Puraffinity Ltd. (London, U.K.; www.puraffinity.com), the material is bottom-up-designed, beginning with a…
Surfactants can stabilize oil and water in an emulsion, a useful mechanism in many industrial processes and in cleaning up oil spills. But separating and recovering the oil and water, such as for eliminating waste discharge, can be difficult. A…
Powerful permanent magnets Permanent magnets — materials that create their own persistent magnetic field — are frequently used in most types of electronics, turbines, engines and motors. Currently, nearly all powerful permanent magnets require rare-earth elements (REEs), such as neodymium…
Electrochemically converting carbon dioxide into useful chemicals or fuels is a promising CO2-utilization strategy, but scaling up the process is a challenge. One reason is that the gas-diffusion electrodes (GDEs) used to facilitate contact between gaseous CO2, solid catalyst and…
Dry reforming of methane (DRM), in which carbon dioxide and methane are combined to form synthesis gas (H2 and CO), is an attractive route to making syngas because it does not require consumption of water and does not produce CO2…
Meeting climate-change goals requires steep reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions from existing power plants and hard-to-abate industry operations. However, the energy required to release captured CO2 from sorbent material is a challenge for the economic viability of these efforts. Also, retrofitting…
One of the main limiting factors in the production of “green” hydrogen via electrochemical water splitting is the relatively slow rate of the oxygen evolution reaction (OER) and the use of very expensive noble metals like iridium to catalyze the…