Many indicators point to current success and prosperity for U.S. petroleum refineries, but simultaneously, the industry is facing a future of massive changes in energy and transportation By many measures, the U.S. petroleum-refining industry is succeeding and prospering. According to…
Coupled with advanced analytics and networking capabilities, today’s smart sensors help processors optimize the facility Picture a piece of equipment not just monitoring its own health, but also automatically ordering the part it requires and, when it notes that the…
Plant Watch Arkema starts up photocure resin expansion in China April 11, 2019 — Arkema (Colombes, France; www.arkema.com) started up the 30% capacity extension of its photocure liquid-resin production plant in Nansha, located near Canton, China. This new production line…
Microalgae have been investigated as a source of “bio-crude” — fatty acid molecules (lipids) that can be refined into renewable transportation fuels — but harvesting lipids from the algae cells economically remains the most challenging and energy-intensive step in the…
A catalyst that performs low-temperature reforming of methane with carbon dioxide (dry methane reforming) into synthesis gas (syngas) has been developed by Japanese researchers, led by Hideki Abe at the National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS, Tsukuba City, www.nims.go.jp), in…
A new energy-storage process has begun operations at a large-scale pilot plant in Berlin, Germany. At the combined heat and power (CHP) facility of Swedish energy company Vattenfall, SaltX Technology AB (Hägersten, Sweden; www.saltxtechnology.com) constructed one 0.5-MW/10-MWh energy-storage unit using…
‘Green’ steelmaking Seamlessly following the successful completion of the GrInHy project (Green Industrial Hydrogen via reversible high-temperature electrolysis) in February, the GrInHy2.0 project was launched last month at the Salzgitter Flachstahl GmbH steelworks (Germany; www.salzgitter-flachstahl.de). Together with partners Sunfire GmbH…
The novel performance characteristics and tunability of quantum dots make them a promising nanomaterial in numerous emerging applications Quantum dots (QDs) represent a broad group of semiconducting nanoparticles that feature a unique combination of optical and electronic properties. For example,…
At PowTech 2019 this month (Nuremberg, Germany), Glatt Ingenieurtechnik GmbH (Weimar, Germany; www.glatt.com) introduced a waste-free process that recycles the phosphorus from sewage-sludge ash to produce ready-to-use, high-quality fertilizers. The market-ready process fulfills the legal obligation of the German fertilizer…
New column internals boost efficiency and improve reliability of distillation towers In the chemical process industries (CPI), the majority of separations are done via distillation columns. And, when the rest of the process relies upon those columns, inefficiencies, bottlenecks and…