Plant Watch Neste moves forward with expansion of renewable products in Singapore December 12, 2018 — Neste Corp. (Espoo, Finland; www.neste.com) plans to add production capacity for renewable products at its existing facilities in Singapore. The approximately €1.4-billion investment will…
Existing methane fuel cells typically require high (750–800°C) temperatures to activate methane in a separate methane reformer that creates hydrogen gas. Now researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech; Atlanta; www.gatech.edu) have developed a solid oxide fuel cell…
Microbial electrochemical reduction (MER) of CO2 into value-added chemicals is a potential way to curb greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. MER uses chemolithoautotrophs, which are microbes found in the deep sea, in caves and in hydrothermal vents. These bacteria get their…
Amid a tight labor market, CPI workers at all levels are in high demand as the range of jobs requiring chemical engineering expertise becomes increasingly diverse Many current indicators suggest that it is a great time to be working in…
New user-friendly solutions help chemical processors tackle tasks beyond design and optimization Initially, steady-state simulation was used in the chemical process industries (CPI) to design a plant or a process. Advances in the technology, along with the need to produce…
The increased demand for lithium in recent years — driven mainly by battery manufacturing — has broadened the scope of lithium-processing technologies. Typically, lithium is mined from spodumene ore or sourced from brine deposits, but a new process enables lithium’s…
Flame-spray pyrolysis (FSP) is a type of aerosol synthesis in which solid particles condense from the vapor phase after the combustion of droplets of solution. FSP has been used to produce industrially important nanoscale solids, such as fumed silica, alloy…
Commercial Debut The world’s first commercial plant based on the patented PLAneo technology of thyssenkrupp Industrial Solutions AG (Essen, Germany; www.thyssenkrupp-industrial-solutions.com) recently started production in Changchun, China. Operated by the Jilin COFCO Biomaterial Corp., the new plant produces all standard…
Today, all commercial lithium is sourced from ores or brines on land, where the total lithium reserves amount to 14 million tons. In contrast, the oceans contain 230 billion tons of lithium, although the lithium concentration in seawater is very…
Current oil-water separation technologies, such as centrifugation, filtration, dissolved air flotation, distillation, oil skinners, adsorption and electrochemical methods, are of low efficiency and consume a lot of energy during complex separation processes. Mesh membranes have attracted much interest lately, and…