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…
To meet strict sulfur specifications and reduce emissions, amine scrubbing and caustic treatment are frequently used to remove hydrogen sulfide from gas and liquid streams, but these methods are not effective for handling more complex organo-sulfur compounds, such as thiophenes…
The development of denitrification catalysts that can reduce nitrate and nitrite to N2 is critical for sustaining the nitrogen cycle. However, regulating the catalytic selectivity has proven to be a challenge, due to the difficulty of controlling complex multi-electron/proton reactions.…
A thermal-membrane process system, based on the Joule-Thompson effect (JTE) for treating wastewater with high salinity or with a high-level of inorganic contents has been developed by Thermosift Engineering Pvt. Ltd. (Asaripallam, Tamil Nadu, India; www.thermosift.com). The system operates at…
C2H2 hydrogenation Last month, Clariant (Munich, Germany; www.clariant.com) launched OleMax 260, a new selective acetylene-hydrogenation catalyst, which is said to have extremely high ethylene selectivity and operational stability. Specially developed for ethylene producers with “front-end” process configurations, OleMax 260 offers…
One of the major obstacles to making hydrogen economically by splitting water is the high cost of noble-metal electrodes. Less expensive, non-noble metals only function as electrocatalysts under alkaline conditions, where the reaction requires more electricity. Now, professor Ryoichi Ito…