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A push to upgrade naphthas into petrochemicals

Last month, MOL Group (Budapest, Hungary: www.mol.hu) entered into a strategic partnership with Inovacat (Amersfoort, the Netherlands; www.inovacat.com) to further upscale and commercialize Inovacat’s Gasolfin gasoline-to-olefins technology, which converts low-valued gasoline and naphthas into high-value propylene, butylene and BTX (benzene,…

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Plant Watch: Business News for August 2018

Plant Watch BASF to expand global antioxidant production capacities July 10, 2018 — BASF SE (Ludwigshafen, Germany; www.basf.com) plans to increase the global production capacity for its antioxidant Irganox 1010 by 40% with production expansion projects at its sites in…

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Urban Mining Offers Good Prospecting

As the volume of discarded electronic gadgets grows, efforts are underway to recover the precious resources trapped inside It should come as no surprise that the fastest growing part of the world’s domestic waste stream is e-waste — discarded products…

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Fast-pyrolysis process recovers valuable materials from tires

Each year, more than 1 billion automobile tires are replaced worldwide. Together, the used tires contain 4.4 million metric tons of valuable products, such as carbon black, metals, fuels and chemicals. In an effort to recover these materials, the University…

The Changing Face of Maintenance

Data analytics, connectivity and machine learning are helping processors maintain facilities in a more cost-efficient way Modern technologies, such as smart sensors, data analytics, the industrial internet of things (IIoT) and machine learning, are changing the face of maintenance to…

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Making amine-based CO2 adsorbents more stable

Amine-containing solids have been investigated as promising adsorbents for CO2 capture, but existing amine-containing adsorbents degrade by oxidation, making them unreliable for repeated CO2 adsorption-desorption cycles over a long period. The low stability requires the continuous addition of fresh adsorbents,…

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Chementator Briefs

Forward Osmosis Last month, Bioindustrial Innovation Canada (BIC; Sarnia, Ont.; www.bincanada.ca), Forward Water Technologies (FWT; www.forwardwater.com) and GreenCentre Canada (GCC; Kingston, Ont.; www.greencentrecanada.com) announced a private investment into FWT, supporting the commercial scaleup of a proprietary forward-osmosis technology. The initial…

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Antifouling membranes for single-step desalination

A filter for water purification that can replace, with a single step, the complex, time-consuming and multi-stage processes currently needed, has been developed by a team from CSIRO Manufacturing (Sydney, Australia; www.csiro.au), led by Dong Han Seo. The team has…

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An inexpensive, renewable aerogel shows promise for handling oil spills

Many methods have been developed to remove spilled oil and organic pollutants from water, but they all entail shortcomings, such as low absorption ability and poor buoyancy. Now, a team from the School of Light Industry and Chemical Engineering, Dalian…

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Testing the limits of cryogenic distillation

CSIRO (Perth, Australia; www.csiro.au) and the University of Western Australia (www.uwa.edu.au) have developed a first-of-its-kind pilot plant for high-pressure cryogenic distillation processes. “Although cryogenic distillation is practiced in industry and there are some models that can be applied to cryogenic…