Nippon Steel Corp. (Tokyo; www.nsc.co.jp) and Kobe Steel, Ltd. (Kobe, Japan; www.kobelco.com) plan to begin construction of a plant to recycle steel-mill dust — a byproduct from the steelmaking process — into direct reduced iron (DRI). The two companies will…
Professor Keiichi Tomishige and colleagues at Tohoku University (Sendai City, Japan; www.che.tohoku.ac.jp/~erec/) have developed a high-performance catalyst for synthesizing 1,3-propanediol (PDO) — a raw material for highly functional poly(trimethyleneteraphthalate) (PPT) fibers — from glycerin as starting material. The catalyst —…
Liquid copper is employed to gasify wastes in a process being developed by Ze-gen (Boston, Mass.; www.ze-gen.com) and will be tested in a small commercial plant in an industrial park in Attleboro, Mass. Scheduled for completion late next year, the…
PLANT WATCH U.A.E. to become home of world’s largest CSP plant June 10, 2010 — Masdar (Abu Dhabi; www.masdar.ae) has appointed the bidding consortium of Total (Paris, France; www.total.com) and Abengoa Solar (Seville, Spain; www.abengoasolar.com) to own, build and operate…
Last month, RWE Power (Cologne, Germany; www.rwe.com) and Linde-KCA-Dresden GmbH (www.linde-kca.com), a subsidiary of The Linde Group (Munich, Germany; www.linde.com), signed a framework agreement on the use of RWE’s WTA technology — a German acronym for fluidized-bed (FB) drying with internal…
A novel catalyst designed by scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley, Calif.; www.lbl.gov) and the University of California at Berkeley (www.berkeley.edu) has shown the ability to catalyze the electrolysis of water into hydrogen and…
New technology for fabricating nanoscale polymer threads boosts yields and improves control compared to conventional methods for producing nanoscale fibers by using a technique analogous to that for making cotton candy. The technology, known as rotary jet spinning (RJS), was…
Last month, Great River Energy (Maple Grove, Minn.; www.greatriverenergy.com) dedicated its patented DryFining coal enhancement system at its power-generating plant, Coal Creek Station, N.D. The system, developed by Great River Energy, uses waste heat to reduce the moisture level of…
Torrefaction of biomass Last month, the Energy Research Center of the Netherlands (ECN; Petten; www.ecn.nl) and Vattenfall AB (Stockholm, Sweden; www.vattenfall.com) established a partnership to scale up ECNs BO2 technology — a process for upgrading biomass into a high-grade…
Siemens Water Technologies Corp. (Warrendale, Pa.; www.water.siemens.com) and Aramco Overseas Company, B.V., a subsidiary of Saudi Aramco (Dhahran, Saudi Arabia; www.saudiaramco.com), have signed an exclusive patent and technology license agreement for the commercialization of the EcoRight membrane bioreactor (MBR), a new…