Ethylene Toyo Engineering Corp. (Chiba, Japan; www.toyo-eng.com) has been awarded a contract for a project to construct an ethylene pilot plant, using waste-derived ethanol as raw material. The project is planned by Sumitomo Chemical Co. at its Chiba Works. Sumitomo…
As digitalization becomes more common and remote operations become necessary, guarding against cybersecurity breaches grows even more critical The hacking of a Florida water plant, which made headlines in February, was a poignant reminder of the dangers posed by breaches…
As application demands evolve, battery materials have gotten more complex, incorporating not only lithium, but higher nickel, manganese and cobalt content, while also including various dopants like aluminum or zirconium and stabilizing coatings. Processing all of these disparate components into…
U.S. Vanadium LLC (Hot Springs, Ark.; www.usvanadium.com) has successfully demonstrated the ability to recycle the liquid electrolyte used in vanadium redox-flow batteries (VRFB), a rapidly growing commercial technology that promises to enable intermittent renewable energy technologies, such as solar and…
A closed-loop, long-duration energy-storage system (diagram) developed by Malta, Inc. (Cambridge, Mass.; www.maltainc.com) could provide a carbon-neutral path to industrial heating. “One of the exciting facets of this technology is that it generates a lot of discharge heat. When we…
Engineering design of a demonstration plant is underway for a process that pyrolyzes natural gas into hydrogen and solid carbon. The process was developed by C-Zero Inc. (Goleta, Calif.; www.czero.energy), a company set up in 2018 to develop and commercialize…
Last month, Amarillo Gold Corp. (Toronto, Canada; www.amarillogold.com) selected Metso Outotec’s (Helsinki, Finland; www.mogroup.com) modular FIT Station for its Posse Gold greenfield mining project in the state of Goiás in central Brazil. This will be the first commercial installation of…
L-Alanine DMC Biotechnologies, Inc. (DMC; Boulder, Colo.; www.dmcbio.com) has successfully demonstrated full commercial scale (85 m3) fermentation for its first product, the amino acid L-alanine. The scaleup results identically tracked the performance at bench and pilot scales, further validating the…
Atomic-layer deposition (ALD), a surface engineering technique that applies layers of coatings in a conformal way at single-atom thicknesses, is being investigated for its potential to improve the selectivity and durability of industrial catalysts under a U.S. Dept. of Energy…
Researchers at the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology (Empa; Dübendorf; www.empa.ch) and ETH Zurich (both Switzerland; www.ethz.ch) have made wood compressible and turned it into a piezoelectric generator. The research, reported last month in the journal Science…