Process safety strategies, water use and alkylation technology were among the topics figuring prominently at the 2016 AFPM annual meeting An evolving set of issues facing petroleum refiners in the U.S. figured prominently at the annual meeting of the American…
A holistic and proactive approach to cybersecurity can help protect your industrial control system from hackers In December 2015, 80,000 homes in the Ukraine were left without power when a cyber attack took down the electrical infrastructure. Investigations suggest that…
Shell Thiogro (www.shell.com/sulphur/thiogro) and Uhde Fertilizer Technologies (UFT; www. uhde-fertilizer-technology.com), part of thyssenkrupp Industrial Solutions AG (Essen, Germany), have established a partnership to integrate UFT’s fluidized-bed (FB) granulation technology with Shell’s Urea-ES (enhanced sulfur) technology, which was introduced in May…
Fe-free HTS catalyst Last month at the Nitrogen + Syngas 2016 conference (Berlin, Germany; February 29–March 3), Haldor Topsøe A/S (Lyngby, Denmark; www.topsoe.com) introduced SK-501 Flex, a new high-temperature shift (HTS) catalyst with the unique ability to operate at any…
A multi-company partnership has achieved the largest-ever use of molybdenum/tungsten (Schrock-type) catalysts for a metathesis process involving ethylene and renewable oils. The reaction run, which produced primarily 1-decene and 9-decenoic acid methyl ester from ethylene and plant oils, represented a…
Milliken & Co. (Spartanburg, S.C.; www. millikenchemical.com) has optimized its core clarifying technology for polypropylene (PP) resin to raise the clarity level to compete with that of polyethylene terephthalate (PET), polystyrene (PS) and polycarbonate (PC). The optimized technology allows the…
Conventional catalytic converters in automobiles are based on heterogeneous catalyst systems with precious metals (such as Pt and Pd), rare earth elements and Ce (in the form of CeO2). However, the cost and limited resources of such metals is driving…
Professor Hisao Hori and his research group at Kanagawa University (Hiratsuka City, Japan; www.kanagawa-u.ac.jp) have reported what is said to be the first photo-induced recovery of rhenium from aqueous solutions — an achievement with implications for an inexpensive way to…
A process for the separation and recovery of stranded and associated natural gas is being developed by Framergy, Inc. (Wilmington, Del.; www.framergy.com), with support from the National Science Foundation’s Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I program. The company is…
A recently introduced heat-transfer fluid is made from corn sugar, rather than from petroleum. Known as So-Blu, the fluid was developed through a joint effort of Dupont Tate & Lyle BioProducts (Loudon, Tenn.; www.duponttateandlyle.com) and SolarUS Inc. (Branford, Conn.; www.solarus.com),…