Plant Watch Petrobras to build ‘green’ hydrogen pilot plant with Senai ISI-ER February 12, 2024 — Petrobras (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; www.petrobras.com.br) entered into a cooperation agreement with Instituto Senai de Energias Renováveis to build a pilot electrolysis plant to…
A new electrocatalytic technology (diagram) is said to be the first to produce methanol from CO2 at ambient temperature and pressure in a commercially viable reactor design. Oxylus Energy (New Haven, Conn.; www.oxylusenergy.com) recently unveiled a 5-cm2 electrolysis cell to…
Click chemistry — the subject of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Chemistry — is a powerful and efficient method for rapidly connecting chemical fragments. One highly versatile type of click chemistry involves the so-called SuFEx [sulfur(VI) fluoride exchange] reaction, which…
Researchers at Asahi Kasei Corp. (Düsseldorf, Germany and Tokyo, Japan; www.asahi-kasei.com) are developing a membrane-based system that dehydrates organic solvents without heat or pressure. The system is targeting pharmaceutical-manufacturing applications, where organic solvents are commonly used in performing reactions, as…
Plant Watch Solenis to build new polyvinylamine production facility in Virginia January 12, 2024 — Solenis, LLC (Wilmington, Del.; www.solenis.com) will invest $193 million to expand production capacity of polyvinylamine (PVAm) in Suffolk, Va. The company will build a new…
ExxonMobil affiliate Esso Nederland B.V. (Rotterdam, the Netherlands; www.esso.nl) is planning to build a pilot plant at its Rotterdam manufacturing complex to generate performance and operability data for a modular carbon-capture and storage (CCS) technology based on carbonate fuel cells…
A new electrochemical technology for direct-air capture (DAC) of atmospheric CO2 can also produce freshwater from brackish water or brine waste from desalination or wastewater treatment facilities (diagram). The technology, developed by Capture6 (Berkeley, Calif.; www.capture6.org), splits the salt content…
Researchers of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT; Germany; www.kit.edu) and the SMS group GmbH (Düsseldorf, Germany; www.sms-group.com) have developed a new process to reduce CO2 emissions from worldwide steel production by several hundred million tons per year. It is based…
A new pilot plant is demonstrating a proprietary technology for recycling magnet materials from end-of-life (EOL) products, such as electric motors, automobile parts and hard-disk drives. Developed by Cyclic Materials Inc. (Toronto, Ont., Canada; www.cyclicmaterials.earth), the Mag-Xtract process is said…
Composites of copper and graphene have been explored as a way to improve electrical conductivity, but researchers have not been successful at enhancing conductivity with a corresponding reduction in the temperature coefficient of resistance (TCR), and have not been able…