CSIRO (Perth, Australia; www.csiro.au) and the University of Western Australia (www.uwa.edu.au) have developed a first-of-its-kind pilot plant for high-pressure cryogenic distillation processes. “Although cryogenic distillation is practiced in industry and there are some models that can be applied to cryogenic…
The growing demand for lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) has created incentives to improve processes for extracting lithium from brine. Current Li-extraction processes involve pumping brine from underground into shallow pools for evaporation and concentration. But the traditional method has several significant…
Membranes present a lower-energy alternative to distillation for the separation of hydrocarbons, but these processes are often limited by prohibitively expensive materials or intricate fabrication steps. Now, a team of researchers from Texas A&M University (TAMU; College Station, Tex.; www.tamu.edu)…
Nordic Blue Crude A/S (NBC; Porsgrunn, Norway; www.nordicbluecrude.no) intends to build the first power-to-liquids (PtL) plant in the Norwegian industrial park of Heroya, located 140 km southeast of Oslo. Although the date for the startup has not yet been released,…
Each year, more than 1 billion automobile tires are replaced worldwide. Together, the used tires contain 4.4 million metric tons of valuable products, such as carbon black, metals, fuels and chemicals. In an effort to recover these materials, the University…
Amine-containing solids have been investigated as promising adsorbents for CO2 capture, but existing amine-containing adsorbents degrade by oxidation, making them unreliable for repeated CO2 adsorption-desorption cycles over a long period. The low stability requires the continuous addition of fresh adsorbents,…
Forward Osmosis Last month, Bioindustrial Innovation Canada (BIC; Sarnia, Ont.; www.bincanada.ca), Forward Water Technologies (FWT; www.forwardwater.com) and GreenCentre Canada (GCC; Kingston, Ont.; www.greencentrecanada.com) announced a private investment into FWT, supporting the commercial scaleup of a proprietary forward-osmosis technology. The initial…
A filter for water purification that can replace, with a single step, the complex, time-consuming and multi-stage processes currently needed, has been developed by a team from CSIRO Manufacturing (Sydney, Australia; www.csiro.au), led by Dong Han Seo. The team has…
Plant Watch Arkema to expand polyamide powder production capacity in France June 6, 2018 — Arkema (Colombes, France; www.arkema.com) plans to expand its global production capacity for specialty polyamide powders marketed under the brand name Orgasol by more than 50%…
Shipping and transport of chemicals require specialized packaging to mitigate the hazards that the chemicals may present. Only packages that are certified to have met testing standards issued by the United Nations (UN) Economic and Social Council (New York, N.Y.;…