In The News
SAFC Pharma to invest in HPAPIs production
SAFC Pharma, a focus area within SAFC (www.safcpharma.com), a member of the Sigma-Aldrich Group (St. Louis, Mo.; www.sigma-aldrich.com), today officially announced details of a $30-million expansion plan to its Madison, Wisc., facility, designed to significantly increase its capacity to produce…
Tasnee ethylene plant produces on-spec C2 ahead of schedule
The Linde Engineering Division (Pullach, Germany; www.linde) announced that on-spec ethylene production of the Tasnee ethylene plant in Al-Jubail, Saudi Arabia, was achieved on August 23, 2008 following mechanical completion on July 15, 2008, which is six weeks ahead of…
LyondellBasell’s technologies selected by Kazakhstan Petrochemical Industries
Kazakhstan Petrochemical Industries Inc. LLP, in which LyondellBasell (Rotterdam, Netherlands; www.lyondellbasell.com) is holding a minority interest, has selected LyondellBasell’s polyethylene (PE) and polypropylene (PP) technologies for three new plants that will have a combined capacity of 1,300,000 metric tons (m.t.)…
BMS starts construction of TDI plant in China
During the course of this year Bayer MaterialScience (BMS; Leverkusen, Germany; www.bayermaterialscience.com) plans to start construction of a state-of-the-art, world-scale facility for producing the polyurethane raw material toluene diisocyanate (TDI) at the integrated production site in Shanghai. The relevant Chinese…
CAC builds sodium hypochlorite plant in Moscow
Wassertechnik Essen GmbH, a subsidiary of the Austrian EVN AG, has commissioned Chemieanlagenbau Chemnitz GmbH (CAC; Chemnitz, Germany; www.cac-chem.de) to plan and erect a sodium hypochlorite plant on the basis of chlorine membrane electrolysis. Designed to have an annual capacity…
Canada’s first low-CO2 power plant
Siemens’ (Erlangen, Germany; www.siemens.com/energy) coal gasification technology has been selected for Canada’s first low-CO2 IGCC power plant. EPCOR Power Generation is planning to build an integrated gasification combined cycle power plant (IGCC) featuring carbon capture and storage in Genesee near…
Chementator: Dow and NREL Join Forces in a Biomass Gasification Project
A thermochemical process for converting biomass to ethanol, other biofuels and chemical intermediates will be developed jointly by Dow Chemical Co. (Midland, Mich.; www.dow.com) and the U.S. Dept. of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL, Golden, Colo.; www.nrel.gov). Under the…
Chementator: Bio-Based Polyols
Last month, Cargill (Minneapolis, Min.; www.cargill.com) broke ground in Chicago on a $22-million manufacturing plant for producing BiOH polyols. Scheduled for startup in November, the facility will be the first world-scale biobased polyols plant; since BiOH polyols were commercialized in…
Chementator: Making Molten Glass ‘on-the-fly’ Can Cut Energy Consumption in Half
A process that makes glass by "zapping" the raw materials with a plasma as they fly through the air is being developed by Japanese researchers in a new project led by NEDO (New Energy & Industrial Technology Development Organization; Kawasaki,…
Chementator: Concentrating Light to Boost Solar-Energy Efficiency
Engineers at MIT (Cambridge, Mass.; www.mit.edu) are developing solar concentrators that have the potential to increase the electrical power output from solar cells by a factor of more than 40. Instead of actually focusing the light, as in systems being…