Bioethanol Ethanol from plant and forestry waste and dedicated energy crops could replace approximately one-third of U.S. gasoline requirements by 2030 on a sustainable basis, according to a study by Sandia National Laboratories (Livermore, Calif.; www.sandia.gov) and General Motors Corp.…
Wacker Chemie AG (Munich, Germany; www.wacker.com) has mid-term plans to construct a new hyperpure polycrystalline silicon facility in the U.S. and has purchased land in Tennessee for this purpose. The land in Bradley County covers approximately 550 acres (220 hectares),…
The Ukrainian based holding company Ukrtatnafta (www.ukrtatnafta.com), has awarded Axens (Rueil-Malmaison, France; www.axens.net) a contract for upgrading the gasoline pool at the Kremenchug refinery, which is the largest throughput capacity refinery in the Ukraine. The upgrading project is the first…
BASF SE (Ludwigshafen, Germany; www.basf.com) is systematically expanding its portfolio of specialty monomers and launching its new product, 2-propylheptyl acrylate (2-PHA), on the market. This is a new raw material and building block for functional polymers. 2-PHA belongs to the…
In the future Endress+Hauser (Reinach, Switzerland; www.endress.com) will support its customers in the Emirate of Qatar with their own distribution and service company. Endress+Hauser (Qatar) L.L.C. has opened for business early this month. The Persian Gulf region is experiencing enormous…
POSCO Group (Seoul, South Korea), the worlds’s fourth biggest steel producer, has commissioned Uhde GmbH (Dortmund, Germany; www.uhde.biz) to provide extensive services for the construction of four new coke-oven batteries to expand its coke production by more than 2.3 million…
Ultrasound has been applied, with limited success, for the remediation of contaminated soil. Up to now, the approach has been to first extract the contaminant from the soil into a liquid, which is then passed through a sono-reactor where the…
In a so-called thermoacoustic engine, researchers from the Energy Research Center of the Netherlands (ECN; Petten, Netherlands; www.ecn.nl) have achieved a record efficiency in the conversion of heat to sound, improving the existing record of 41% to 48% of the…
A new bioplastic Up to now, the main plastic produced from renewable resources has been polylactic acid (PLA), which is derived from corn starch. However, because PLA does not have the same level of performance as petroleum-derived plastics, PLA has…
Plant Watch Linde and Samsung Engineering to build ethylene plant in India January 7, 2009 — The Linde Group (Munich, Germany) and its consortium partner Samsung Engineering Co. have been awarded the contract to build a turnkey ethylene plant in…