To lower their climate impact, petroleum refiners are increasingly assessing greenhouse-gas-emission intensities as they consider processing lower-carbon feedstocks. One area of particular activity is sustainable aviation fuels (SAF), where demand growth is accelerating While the oil-and-gas industry has been on…
A new recycling process claims to significantly reduce the complexity of recovering graphite from spent lithium-ion battery (LIB) materials by leaching out impurities rather than leaching out metal. By extracting impurities and recovering high-grade graphite, the Hydro-to-Anode technology, developed by…
A mixed-salt process (MSP) designed to reduce the costs and increase the energy efficiency of removing carbon dioxide from post-combustion fluegas is advancing in two related projects. In the first, a 10-MW engineering-scale demonstration plant for the MSP is under…
A new catalytic recycling method that avoids harsh processing conditions could widely expand the recyclability of a broad range of plastics, including polycarbonates, polyesters and mixed-waste feeds. Researchers from the Center for Sustainable and Circular Technologies (CSCT; www.ccst.ac.uk) at the…
Biotechnology plays a key role in sustainably feeding a growing global population How are we going to feed 10 billion people using 35% less land by 2050? This was the question posed by Ian Roberts, chief technology officer at Bühler…
Processors no longer need to sacrifice efficiency or effectiveness when selecting eco-friendly housekeeping methods Commitment to environmental, social and corporate-governance programs coupled with a pandemic-induced need for more effective sanitizing are forcing chemical, pharmaceutical, food-and-beverage and other processors to reevaluate…
Plant Watch Repsol begins construction of Cartagena biofuels plant March 8, 2022 — Repsol S.A. (Madrid, Spain; www.repsol.com) began construction work on the first advanced biofuels plant in Spain at the company’s Cartagena refinery, which will produce fuels using waste…
Utilizing rare-earth elements (REEs), such as for permanent magnets in renewable energy applications, requires costly chemical separations that generate large volumes of waste. A process featuring new diglycolamide (DGA)-based ligands and liquid-liquid extraction exhibits more effective separation of individual REEs,…
A pilot facility currently under construction in Charleston, W.Va. will produce renewable acrylonitrile (ACN) without requiring the traditional petroleum-based propylene as feedstock. Since ACN is the raw material used to make carbon fibers, the new route to ACN allows the…
A pilot plant is scheduled to be completed later this year for the production of graphene using a technology known as flash Joule heating (FJH). Developed in the laboratory of James Tour at Rice University (Houston; www.rice.edu), FJH involves forcing…