This month, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Ltd. (MHI; Tokyo; www.mhi.co.jp) is starting up a demonstration plant for producing bioethanol from the straw of rice and wheat. Located at the Futami Farm of MHI Kobe Shipbuilding Plant, the facility — developed in…
A contract for the world’s first commercial transport-gasification facility was awarded to KBR (Houston, www.kbr.com) by Beijing Guoneng Yinghui Clean Energy Engineering Co. for a coal power plant in China’s Guangdong province. The two-phase project will showcase KBR’s transport integrated…
Last month, PAS, Inc. (Houston; www.pas.com) launched Integrity Automation Genome Software, said to be the world’s first software capable of analyzing assets, functionality and dataflow within and among automation and production systems. Integrity provides a universal framework for aggregating and…
Acetonitrile, a byproduct of acrylonitrile production, has been in short supply for about a year because of a dramatic reduction in the demand for acrylonitrile, used in plastics for the manufacture of cars, appliances and electronic goods. A process modification…
Last month, in unveiling the S-Series release of its DeltaV digital automation system, Emerson Process Management (Austin, Tex.; www.emersonprocess.com) introduced electronic marshalling, a new concept in input/output (I/O) configuration that promises to streamline the design and installation of automation systems,…
BASF announces its intention to cease activities in Feluy, Belgium October 22, 2009 — BASF Antwerpen N.V., a wholly owned subsidiary of BASF SE (Ludwigshafen, Germany; http://www.basf.com) has announced its intention to close its 115,000-ton/yr maleic anhydride (MA) production facility…
Rotec Ltd. (Ashkelon, Israel; http://www.rotec-water.com), a technology-transfer company of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGN; Beer-Sheva, Israel), is developing a new desalination technology that promises to increase the water-recovery rate of reverse osmosis (RO) systems from 75–85% up to 95%.…
Process Systems Enterprise Ltd. (PSE; London, U.K.; www.psenterprise.com) is to make new advanced thermodynamic modeling tools for prediction of liquid and gas thermodynamic properties available through its gPROMS process-modeling environment. The technology makes it possible to considerably speed up the…
Outotec Oyj (Espoo, Finland; www.outotec.com) has commercialized a new cooling tower that offers increased cooling capacity with significantly lower emissions to air when cooling solutions in metallurgical processes. The new tower can be used in a wide range of process…
Federal and state government officials today joined executives from American Electric Power (AEP; Columbus, Ohio; www.aep.com) and Alstom (Paris, France; www.alstom.com) at AEP’s Mountaineer Plant to formally commission the world’s first project to both capture and store carbon dioxide from…