Latest News
Ma’aden selects Outotec for gold-processing plant
In a major international competitive bidding process, the Saudi Arabian Mining Company (Ma'aden) has awarded the consortium of Outotec Oyj (Espoo, Finland; www.outotec.com) and Larsen & Toubro with an engineering, procurement and construction contract to build a greenfield mineral concentrator…
New joint venture to tackle polystyrene recycling
AmSty (The Woodlands, Tex.; www.amsty.com), a joint venture equally owned by Chevron Phillips Chemical Company LP and Trinseo LLC, and Agilyx (Tigard, Oregon; www.agilyx.com) have formed a joint venture, Regenyx LLC, dedicated to fully recycling post-consumer polystyrene materials back to…
Recently Published Books for the CPI: May 2019
The following titles are selected recently published books relevant for professionals in the chemical process industries (CPI) . . . Chemical Engineering in the Pharmaceutical Industry: Drug Product Design, Development, and Modeling 2nd ed. Edited by Mary Am Ende, and David…
Chementator Briefs
Depolymerization Last month, DuPont Teijin Films Ltd. (DTF; Contern, Luxembourg; www.dupontteijinfilms.com) launched its new LuxCR depolymerization process, which upcycles post-consumer waste into a variety of biaxially oriented polyethylene terephthalate (BOPET) films. The LuxCR process depolymerizes mechanically recovered PET flake back…
Taking a stand on sustainability
Last month, Royal Dutch Shell (The Hague, the Netherlands; www.shell.com) released a report1 that assesses the company’s alignment with 19 industry associations on climate-related policy. In the report, Shell CEO Ben van Beurden states “The need for urgent action in…
Impinging jet mixers are applied to bio-crude harvesting from algae
Microalgae have been investigated as a source of “bio-crude” — fatty acid molecules (lipids) that can be refined into renewable transportation fuels — but harvesting lipids from the algae cells economically remains the most challenging and energy-intensive step in the…
A low-temperature catalyst for dry methane reforming
A catalyst that performs low-temperature reforming of methane with carbon dioxide (dry methane reforming) into synthesis gas (syngas) has been developed by Japanese researchers, led by Hideki Abe at the National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS, Tsukuba City, www.nims.go.jp), in…
Nano-coated salts for energy storage
A new energy-storage process has begun operations at a large-scale pilot plant in Berlin, Germany. At the combined heat and power (CHP) facility of Swedish energy company Vattenfall, SaltX Technology AB (Hägersten, Sweden; www.saltxtechnology.com) constructed one 0.5-MW/10-MWh energy-storage unit using…
Converting CO2 to carbon at mild conditions
An international research team led by RMIT University (Melbourne, Australia; www.rmit.edu.au) has developed a technique for efficiently converting CO2 to carbon. The team included researchers from the University of Münster (Germany), Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics (China), North Carolina…
Enzyme engineering enables bio-based hydrogen peroxide
Borne out of a cancer research project at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Cambridge; www.mit.edu), a new enzymatic process technology can co-produce gluconic acid and hydrogen peroxide without the safety risks and complexity of typical large-scale peroxide-manufacturing processes. Solugen Inc. (Houston;…