In The News
Linde wins $1-billion contract for ethane cracker
Borouge (Abu Dhabi; www.borouge.com), a leading provider of innovative, value creating plastics solutions, has awarded a contract worth $1.075 billion to The Linde Group (Munich, Germany; www.linde.com), a world leading gases and engineering company, to build another 1.5 million tonnes…
Topsøe contracts the world’s largest ammonia plant
Haldor Topsøe A/S (Lyngby, Denmark; www.topsoe.com) will supply ammonia synthesis technology for the world’s largest ammonia plant. The plant will produce more than 3,500 tonnes of ammonia per day. Topsøe has signed a contract for the supply of ammonia synthesis…
A gypsum-free, energy-saving route to lactic acid
Uhde GmbH (Dortmund, Germany; www.uhde.biz) is developing a new process for producing lactic acid (LA) — a monomer for making the biodegradable plastic polylactic acid (PLA) — that does not require a distillation step. As a result, savings in steam…
BASF to close Styropor plant at Tarragona; and more
Plant Watch PET resin capacity expands in Saudi Arabia June 15, 2009 — Uhde Inventa-Fischer GmbH (Berlin, Germany) has entered into a contract with the Saudi Basic Industries Corp. (SABIC) to provide the technology license and the basic engineering for…
Making solar panels even greener
Last month, Malibu GmbH & Co, KG (Bielefeld, Germany; www.malibu-solar.de) started up a thin-film photovoltaic-module fabrication facility that is claimed to be the world’s first to eliminate the use of nitrogen trifluoride (NF3) — a greenhouse gas with a significant…
The missing piece for wireless process control
Last month, Honeywell Process Solutions (HPS; Phoenix, Ariz.; www.honeywell.com/ps) unveiled the process industry’s first redundant wireless system gateway (WSG), connecting the last major gap in the path to wireless process control. WSGs manage data between wireless field instrumentation and a…
New catalyst boosts liquid-fuel yield from heavy hydrocarbons
A new zeolite catalyst that increases yields of light cycle oil (LCO) from high molecular weight “bottoms” hydrocarbons in petroleum fluid catalytic cracking (FCC) units was commercialized last month by Grace-Davison, an operating segment of W.R. Grace & Co. (Columbia,…
Direct conversion of cellulose to HMF demonstrated
Researchers at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL; Richland, Wash.; www.pln.gov) have published the first direct route for converting plant cellulose to 5-hydroxymethylfurfural (HMF), a valuable platform chemical for the production of both plastics and biofuels. Appearing in the June issue…
A new support for biofilters
Researchers from the Environmental Biotechnology Cooperative Research Center (Sydney and Perth, Australia; www.ebcrc.com.au) have developed a new way to harness bacteria to biodegrade odor-causing substances. Traditional biofilters typically employ compost supported on wood chips to trap the odor-producing substances, and…
Using gold to catalyze oxidation reactions
Polymer-supported nanoclusters of gold have recently been shown to catalyze the oxidation of alcohols to ketones at room temperature in air by the research group of chemistry professor Shu Kobayashi, University of Tokyo (www.chem.s.u-tokyo.ac.jp), in a project supported by Japan…