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Chevron to acquire Pasadena refining assets from Petrobras

Chevron U.S.A. Inc. (CUSA), a wholly owned subsidiary of Chevron Corp. (San Ramon, Calif.; www.chevron.com), announced that it has signed a Share Purchase Agreement with Petrobras America Inc. (Petrobras) to acquire all the outstanding shares and equity interests of Pasadena…

Invista completes sale of its Apparel & Advanced Textiles business

Invista (Wichita, Kan.; www.invista.com) has completed the previously announced sale of its Apparel & Advanced Textiles business to an affiliate of Shandong Ruyi Investment Holding.The transaction includes: The Apparel & Advanced Textiles business’s portfolio of apparel-focused fibers and brands, including…

Ending plastic waste

Last month, almost 30 global companies announced the formation of an alliance to address the impact that plastic waste is having on our environment, with particular focus on our oceans. The Alliance to End Plastic Waste (AEPW; www.endplasticwaste.org) has committed…

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A low-pressure process to leach metals from laterite ores

Queensland Pacific Metals (Brisbane, Australia), a subsidiary of Pure Minerals (Perth, Australia; www.pureminerals.com.au) will use Direct Nickel Projects’ (Perth, Australia) proprietary technology to process New Caledonian nickel and cobalt ore, following favorable test results. Core Metallurgy (Brisbane, Australia) has assessed…

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A photocatalyst for reducing CO2 without precious metals

The research group of professor Osamu Ishitani at the Tokyo Institute of Technology (Japan; www.titech.ac.jp), in collaboration with the Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), has successfully demonstrated highly efficient, selective and durable photocatalytic CO2-reduction systems that only…

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Co-electrolysis makes ‘green’ syngas in a single step

Last month, Sunfire GmbH (Dresden, Germany; www.sunfire.de) reported the successful startup and test run (more than 500 h) of a high-temperature, co-electrolysis system at its Dresden site since November 2018. The technology, called Sunfire-Synlink, is based on solid-oxide cells and…

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New catalysts enable CO2-neutral olefins production via methane reforming

Today, olefins are mainly made either by naphtha cracking or by the catalytic conversion of dimethyl ether (DME), which is in-situ made from synthesis-gas- (syngas) derived methanol (methanol-to-olefin processes). Both naphtha cracking and syngas production (from steam-methane reforming; SMR) require…

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Plasma-based electrolysis makes ammonia at ambient conditions

Researchers from Case Western Reserve University (CWR; Cleveland, Ohio; www.case.edu) have shown that a hybrid electrolytic system using a gaseous plasma electrode can produce ammonia from water and nitrogen at ambient temperature and pressure — without any catalytic material surface.…

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CO2-to-chemicals effort boosted by electrocatalytic process

The quest to generate chemicals and fuels from exhaust or atmospheric carbon dioxide got a boost from a series of recent studies by researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBL; Berkeley, Calif.; www.lbl.gov), in which the scientists proved the viability…

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Artificial enzyme shows multiple selectivity

Professor Kazuaki Ishigreo and colleagues at Nagoya University (Nagoya, Japan; http://en.nagoya-u.ac.jp) have shown that a chiral, supramolecular, U-shaped, boron Lewis acid catalyst (diagram) promotes the unprecedented multi-selective Diels–Alder reaction of propargyl aldehyde with cyclic dienes. The Diels–Alder reaction, which is…