In The News
September chementator briefs
Worlds largest PDH unit Lummus Technology (Bloomfield, N.J.), a CB&I company (The Woodlands, Tex.; www.cbi.com), has been awarded a contract by Tianjin Bohua Petrochemical Co. for the license and engineering design of a grassroots propane dehydrogenation (PDH) unit to…
Solar Semi Engineering acquires Edwards CME
Solar Semi Engineering Ltd. (SSE; U.K.; www.solsemi.com) , a solar and semiconductor start-up company, today purchased the business and assets of Edwards Chemical Management Europe Limited (CME; Newhaven, U.K.) for an undisclosed sum. CME is part of Edwards (Crawley, U.K.; www.edwardsvacuum.com),…
KBR & Saudi Kayan: Startup of grassroots cracker
KBR Inc. (Houston; www.kbr.com) today announced the start-up of a 1.35-million metric tons per year (m.t./yr) steam cracker at Saudi Kayan Petrochemical Co.’s (Saudi Kayan) olefins plant located in Saudi Kayan’s Petrochemical Complex at Al-Jubail, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. KBR executed…
Pall: Contract for NG-purification technologies
Pall Corp. (Port Washington, N.Y.; www.pall.com) has been contracted to supply critical enabling technologies for the Habshan 5 natural-gas (NG) treatment plant being constructed by Abu Dhabi Gas Industries Ltd. (GASCO) in the UAE. A joint venture of Tecnimont S.p.A.…
Enzyme-based method could make CO2 capture economically viable
Codexis (Redwood City, Calif.; www.codexis.com) and CO2 Solution (Quebec City, Canada; www.co2solution.com) have jointly developed a cost-effective method for capturing carbon dioxide from coal-fired power plants. Solvent-based systems for capturing CO2 are relatively well-understood, but they have not been widely…
An attractive way to remove arsenic from water
A magnetic composite based on reduced graphene oxide (RGO) has been developed by a Korean team with an exceptional capacity to remove arsenic from drinking water. The team, headed by professor Kwang S. Kim from the Center for Superfunctional Materials,…
A more efficient, less expensive way to continuously make bioethanol
An enhanced reactor technology that boosts the speed of producing bioethanol by a factor of four while decreasing production costs by 25% compared to a stirred batch fermenter has been developed by IHI Corp. (IHI; Tokyo; www.ihi.co.jp). The technology features…
A new iodine-based catalyst for asymmetric synthesis
Professor Kazuaki Ishihara and colleagues at Nagoya University (Nagoya, Japan;www.nubio.nagoya-u.ac.jp/indexe.HTM) has discovered an efficient, chiral, salt-based hypervalent iodine catalyst that could replace toxic metal catalysts without generating the waste or explosion risks associated with hypervalent organo-iodine complexes. The researchers took…
Heat plus light may boost solar energy efficiency
Photovoltaic cells typically operate at 20% efficiency in converting solar energy to electricity. A new system that could boost the efficiency to as much as 60% by combining the light and heat of solar radiation is being developed at Stanford…
This membrane system extracts hydrogen from mixed gas streams
A metal membrane system developed by Eltron Research and Development (Boulder, Colo., www.eltronresearch.com) separates hydrogen from mixed-gas feed streams that result from gasification, steam reforming and petrochemical processes. Based on a proprietary, dense metal alloy with hydrogen permeability that is…