Kureha Corp. (Tokyo, Japan; www.kureha.co.jp/en ) says it will invest more than $100 million to build a plant in Belle, W.Va., which will produce and sell the high-performance polymer, polyglycolic acid (PGA). Construction of the production facility, which will be…
Two European refining majors – Slovnaft in Slovakia and OVM/Petrom in Romania - have signed contracts with Haldor Topsøe (Lyngby, Demnark; www.topsoe.com) for hydrocracking technology. Topsøe has licensed its hydrocracking technology to Slovnaft for revamp of the full conversion 20,000…
BASF AG (Ludwigshafen, Germany; www.basf.com) and OAO Gazprom (Moscow, Russia) today officially launched production operations at the Russian natural gas field Yuzhno Russkoye. This is the first time that a German company has been directly involved in the production of…
Oxea GmbH, (Oberhausen, Germany; www.oxea-chemicals.com) one of the world’s leading manufacturers of oxo products and derivatives, today announced the introduction of improved manufacturing processes resulting in higher product yields. At the same time, the company is increasing its production capacity…
The Siemens Industrial Solutions and Services Group (I&S; Erlangen, Germany; www.siemens.com/cement) has received an order from Orascom Construction Industries (OCI; Cairo, Egypt), to engineer and supply all the electrical equipment for the new cement works of the Al Safwa Cement…
A plastic membrane that allows CO2 and other small molecules to move through its pores while largely preventing the movement of larger molecules like CH4, has been developed by a team of researchers from CSIRO Materials Science and Engineering and…
Süd-Chemie Zeolites GmbH, a subsidiary of Süd-Chemie AG (Munich, Germany; edlinks.chemengonline.com/6902-539) has begun to expand its production plant for new specialty zeolites, and also construct a new wastewater processing plant, at its Bitterfeld site in Germany. The investment amounts to…
The blood-cholesterol-lowering effects of beta-glucan — the soluble oat fiber — is well known, but up to now it has been difficult to obtain beta-glucan-rich fractions that are feasible for food applications, according to VTT Technical Research Center (Espoo, Finland,…
NRG Energy, Inc. (Princeton, N.J.) and Powerspan Corp. (Portsmouth, N.H.; edlinks.chemengonline.com/6902-541) plan to demonstrate, at commercial scale, Powerspan’s ECO2 technology for capturing CO2 from conventional coal-fired power plants. To date, CO2 -capture demonstrations on coal plants have been conducted at…
In Malaysia, the raw material for biodiesel production has been palm oil. However, making biodiesel can conflict with the oil’s use as food, and growing palm oil (even for food) has caused the destruction of tropical forests in Borneo, Sumatra…