A metal membrane system developed by Eltron Research and Development (Boulder, Colo., www.eltronresearch.com) separates hydrogen from mixed-gas feed streams that result from gasification, steam reforming and petrochemical processes. Based on a proprietary, dense metal alloy with hydrogen permeability that is…
Roughly 80% of the heavy oil in Alberta’s oil sands is too deep for open-pit mining, the most common production method at present. Consequently, this oil will have to be recovered by in situ methods, such as steam-assisted gravity drainage…
TNO (Delft; www.tno.nl) and Ingrepro Renewables B.V. (Borculo, both the Netherlands; www.ingrepro.nl) have started a joint-research project to extract food ingredients from algae. Proteins, which account for up to 60 wt.% of algae, could serve as a sustainable alternative to…
Professor George John and graduate student Swapnil Jadhav at the City College of New York (www.ccny.cuny.edu) are lead authors of a paper on a class of compounds, known as phase-selective gelators, that can selectively solidify an oil phase in water.…
Worlds largest PDH unit Lummus Technology (Bloomfield, N.J.), a CB&I company (The Woodlands, Tex.; www.cbi.com), has been awarded a contract by Tianjin Bohua Petrochemical Co. for the license and engineering design of a grassroots propane dehydrogenation (PDH) unit to…
The research group of Kazuo Tajima at Kanagawa University (Yokohama, Japan; apchem2.kanagawa-u.ac.jp) have developed a new emulsification process that enables biodiesel fuels (BDFs) to be used without any purification process, thereby reducing production costs by one fourth. Tajima estimates that…
Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Mechanics of Materials (IWM; Halle, Germany; www.fraunhofer.de) have developed ceramic membranes with uniform pore structure and tight pore-size distribution, which makes them more stable and delivers considerably higher flowrates than existing ceramic membranes, which…
Strata Technology Ltd. (Sunbury-on-Thames, U.K.; www.stratatec.co.uk) has commercialized the Cambridge Multipass Rheometer (MPR), which was developed by professor Malcolm Mackley at the Dept. of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology, Cambridge University (www.ceb.cam.ac.uk) for advanced studies of the rheological properties of melts,…
ADA-ES, Inc. (Littleton, Colo.; www.adaes.com) and Arch Coal, Inc. (St. Louis, Mo.), the U.S.’s second-largest coal producer, have signed an exclusive development and licensing agreement for an ADA-ES process that reduces mercury emissions from coal-fired plants by pretreating the coal.…
Graphene Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI; Troy, N.Y.; www.rpi.edu) have developed an inexpensive way to produce large quantities of graphene. Using acid treatment and ultrasound, the method is a step toward mass production of the atom-thick, honeycomb-shaped nanomaterial,…