Industrial microbiology continues to hold the promise of producing an increasingly large array of commercially important chemicals because an ever-wider number of useful microbes is being developed and successfully deployed at commercially viable scales. Today, many of these bio-based chemicals…
Plant Watch Novozymes and Beta Renewables open advanced biofuels facility in Italy October 9, 2013 — Novozymes (Copenhagen, Denmark; www.novozymes.com), a producer of industrial enzymes, and Beta Renewables, opened what is said to be the world’s largest advanced biofuels facility,…
Harvest Power (Waltham, Mass.; www.harvestpower.com) recently began operation of the first commercial-scale, high-solids anaerobic digester in North America. The facility produces biogas from food waste and yard waste in Richmond, B.C., Canada. “The anaerobic digester employs essentially the same biology…
Short-chain hydrocarbons have been produced for the first time by microbial fermentation by a research team from the Dept. of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST; Daejeon, South Korea, www.kaist.ac.kr), led by…
Clariant (Muttenz, Switzerland; www.clariant.com) is today officially opening its new €100-million Clariant Innovation Center (CIC) in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. The company’s new global hub for Research & Development (R&D) is based at the Industriepark Höchst. It will be the…
Clariant (Muttenz, Switzerland; www.clariant.com) plans to sell its Leather Services business to Stahl Holdings B.V. (Waalwijk, the Netherlands; www.stahl.com), which is majority-owned by Wendel Group. Stahl is a Dutch company providing high quality chemicals, dyes and coatings for leather and…
Honeywell (www.honeywell.com) says it will establish a new manufacturing campus in Zhangjiagang, China, to support growing demand in Asia for energy technology and advanced materials produced by its Performance Materials and Technologies (PMT; Morris Township, N.J.) business. The initial phase…
Jacobs Engineering Group Inc. (Pasadena, Calif.; www.jacobs.com) :JEC) announced today that it was awarded a contract from Codelco’s Radomiro Tomic Division for sustaining capital services for its Radomiro Tomic (RT) copper mine in Calama, Antofagasta, Chile. The three-year contract has…
Haldor Topsøe A/S (Lyngby, Denmark; www.topsoe.com) says that Qinghua, the largest substitute natural gas (SNG) plant ever built in the world was successfully started in the city of Yining, located in Xinjiang, a region in the northwestern part of China.…
BASF New Business GmbH (Luswigshafen, Germany; www.basf.com) has entered into an agreement with the Dutch Technology Foundation (STW; Utrecht; www.stw.nl), Delft University of Technology (www.tudelft.nl) and the University of Amsterdam (www.uva.nl) for licenses on the basic patents for magnetocaloric materials…