In June, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agancy (EPA; Washington, D.C.; www.epa.gov) announced the winners of the 2009 Presidential Green Chemistry Challenge Awards. Winners of the Challenge, which promotes R&D of less hazardous alternatives to existing technologies that reduce or eliminate…
Stirling Energy Systems (SES; Phoenix, Ariz.; www.stirlingenergy.com) and Tessera Solar (Houston; www.tesserasolar.com) recently unveiled four, newly designed solar-power collection dishes at Sandia National Laboratories’ National Solar Thermal Test Facility (Albuquerque, N.M.). The refined design of SunCatchers will be used in…
Outotec GmbH (Oberursel, Germany), a 100% daughter company of Outotec Oy (Helsinki, Finland; www.outotec.com) has received a €109-million contract for the design, delivery, construction and commissioning of a new oil-shale processing plant to be built in Narva, Estonia for Eesti…
Earlier this year, NSR Technologies (Decatur, Ill.; www.nsr-tech.com) commercialized its patented process for producing potassium hydroxide (45–50 wt.%) and dilute hydrochloric acid via a membrane separations technology. The company’s flagship production facility in Decatur, Ill. is the first commercial application…
Aculon, Inc. (San Diego, Calif.; www.aculon.com) has developed a formulation of its proprietary SAMP technology (Self-Assembled Monolayer of Phosphate) that can be used as an alternative to hexavalent chromium used in primers and conversion coatings to increase the adhesion of…
Uhde GmbH (Dortmund, Germany; www.uhde.biz) is developing a new process for producing lactic acid (LA) — a monomer for making the biodegradable plastic polylactic acid (PLA) — that does not require a distillation step. As a result, savings in steam…
Last month, Malibu GmbH & Co, KG (Bielefeld, Germany; www.malibu-solar.de) started up a thin-film photovoltaic-module fabrication facility that is claimed to be the world’s first to eliminate the use of nitrogen trifluoride (NF3) — a greenhouse gas with a significant…
Last month, Honeywell Process Solutions (HPS; Phoenix, Ariz.; www.honeywell.com/ps) unveiled the process industry’s first redundant wireless system gateway (WSG), connecting the last major gap in the path to wireless process control. WSGs manage data between wireless field instrumentation and a…
A new zeolite catalyst that increases yields of light cycle oil (LCO) from high molecular weight “bottoms” hydrocarbons in petroleum fluid catalytic cracking (FCC) units was commercialized last month by Grace-Davison, an operating segment of W.R. Grace & Co. (Columbia,…
Researchers at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL; Richland, Wash.; www.pln.gov) have published the first direct route for converting plant cellulose to 5-hydroxymethylfurfural (HMF), a valuable platform chemical for the production of both plastics and biofuels. Appearing in the June issue…