KBR (Houston; www.kbr.com) was awarded a general works contract for the construction of a 200-million standard cubic feet per day, sweet natural-gas processing plant near Fort St. John, British Columbia, Canada. KBR’s Canadian subsidiary, KBR Wabi, will execute all mechanical,…
Fluor Corp. (Irving, Tex.; www.fluor.com) was awarded a contract from Teck (Vancouver, Canada; www.teck.com) to provide engineering, procurement and construction management (EPCM) services for the Highland Valley Copper Mill Optimization project in British Columbia, Canada. Fluor booked $397 million…
Outotec Oyj (Espoo, Finland; www.outotec.com) has agreed to acquire all shares in Demil Manutenção Industrial Ltda. (Guarapari, Espírito Santo, Brazil) from Marcos Del Pupo and his children. Demil provides industrial maintenance services for iron-ore pelletizing plants and is located in.…
Solazyme, Inc. (South San Francisco, Calif.; www.solazyme.com) and The Dow Chemical Company (Midland, Mich.; www.dow.com) have entered into a contingent offtake agreement in which Dow has agreed to purchase from Solazyme all of its requirements of non-vegetable microbe-based oils for…
The Babcock & Wilcox Company (B&W; Charlotte, N.C.; www.babcock.com) says that its subsidiary Babcock & Wilcox Power Generation Group, Inc. (B&W PGG) has received full notice to proceed (FNTP) for the engineering, design, procurement and construction of a waste-to-energy power…
At the Frankfurt-Höchst, (Germany) industrial estate, AkzoNobel is converting an amalgam electrolysis plant to the modern membrane process and has commissioned ThyssenKrupp Uhde GmbH (Dortmund, Germany; www.uhde.eu) to design and supply the energy-saving Uhde membrane cells. This extensive conversion project…
Double-effect coating Researchers at the Leibniz-Instutut für Neue Materialien GmbH (INM; Saarbrücken, Germany; www.inm-gmbh.de) have developed a nanocomposite coating that simultaneously protects against corrosion while having lubrication properties similar to grease and oil. The new material is suitable for coating…
Researches at the U.S. Dept. of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL; Oak Ridge, Tenn.; www.ornl.gov) are developing a process that makes carbon fibers with customized surface contours from polyethylene-based fibers. The patent-pending technique uses a combination of fiber-spinning and…
The technology surrounding a hydrolysis- and fermentation-based process that is capable of utilizing municipal solid waste (MSW) and biomass waste to produce cellulosic bioethanol at low cost is now available for licensing from its developer, TMO Renewables Ltd. (Guildford, U.K.;…
A novel cold-dry process makes possible the utilization of fine form-factor silicon, such as granules and sand-like fines, in the production of high-purity polysilicon for solar photovoltaic cells and semiconductors, where such fine-grained material would normally have to be sent…