In The News
KBR to provide engineering and procurement services for first-of-a-kind plant in Iowa
KBR (Houston; www.kbr.com) says it has been awarded a contract for engineering and procurement services for DuPont’s first cellulosic ethanol plant in Nevada, Iowa. KBR will provide front-end engineering, detailed engineering and procurement services to DuPont's Industrial Biosciences Group for…
BASF to build butadiene extraction plant in Antwerp
BASF SE (Ludwigshafen, Germany; www.basf.com) plans to build a butadiene extraction plant at its Verbund site in Antwerp, Belgium. The plant will have an annual production capacity of 155,000 metric tons (m.t.) and is scheduled to start up during 2014.…
Technip awarded contract for one of the largest ethylene crackers in the world
Technip (Paris, France; www.technip.com) was awarded by Reliance Industries Ltd. (RIL) a license, supply of basic engineering package and an engineering and procurement services contract for the Refinery Off-Gas Cracker (ROGC) plant. This contract is part of the expansion project…
MHI receives award for testing CO2-recovery facility for Statoil
Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Ltd. (MHI; Tokyo, Japan; www.mhi.co.jp) has been awarded from Statoil (Trondheim, Norway; www.statoil.com) to undertake verification testing for a technology qualification program (TQP) for one of the world's largest carbon-dioxide-capture facilities. The approximately 3,400-ton/d CO2 recovery system…
Linde signs contract for second LAO plant with Alpha-SABLIN process
Linde Engineering, a division of the Linde Group (Munich, Germany; www.linde.com), is set to build a new Alpha-SABLIN plant for the production of linear alpha olefins (LAO) in Nizhnekamsk, Russian Federation, which upon completion will be operated by Nizhnekamskneftekhim (NKNH),…
CB&I awarded paraxylene contract by Reliance Industries
CB&I (The Woodlands, Tex.; www.cbi.com) has been awarded a contract by Reliance Industries Ltd. for providing technology for the world’s largest aromatics complex to be built at Jamnagar, Gujarat, India. "Our role as the exclusive licensor for BP's paraxylene technology…
July Chementator Briefs
ADN production Nylon-polymer producer Invista (Wichita, Kan.; www.invista.com) has developed new technology for the production of adiponitrile (ADN), a key ingredient for nylon 6,6. The advances, which came as a result of $40 million of R&D spending, can improve…
A step closer to replacing platinum in catalytic converters
The research group of Masaru Ogura, an associate professor at the Institute of Industrial Science, University of Tokyo (www.u-tokyo.ac.jp), has clarified the degradation mechanism and the role potassium carbonate plays in the catalyst systems used for reducing soot from the…
The quest for a more-efficient gas-fired power generator
Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Ltd. (MHI; Tokyo, Japan; www.mhi.co.jp) will begin developing basic technologies for a triple combined-cycle power-generation system that integrates solid-oxide fuel cells (SOFC) and a gas turbine combined cycle (GTCC) power generation system. Under the umbrella of the…
A compact thermal storage system
Theres a growing trend toward generating electricity from biogas (see pp. 15–17), but roughly half of the total energy content of the fuel is released as heat, which is dissipated into the atmosphere unused. To improve the overall efficiency, researchers…