Latest News
Shin-Etsu announces significant investment to expand silicones production
Shin-Etsu Chemical Co., Ltd. (Tokyo; www. shinetsu.co.jp) implement close to ¥110 billion in facility investments for its silicones business, one of its main businesses. It will expand its production capacity of silicone monomer, the intermediate product of silicones, and various…
BASF to increase capacity for hexanediol at its Ludwigshafen site
BASF SE (Ludwigshafen, Germany, www.basf.com) intends to increase the production capacity of 1,6-hexanediol (HDO) at its Ludwigshafen Verbund site by more than 50%. After the start-up in 2021, BASF’s global annual nameplate capacity of HDO will be more than 70,000…
Pöyry awarded contract from Biozin Holding for the pre-engineering phase of biozin production plant in Norway
Biozin Holding AS (www.biozin.no) has awarded Pöyry Oyj (www.poyry.com) with the Owner's Engineering Services assignment for the pre-engineering phase for the planned biozin production plant in Jordoya, Åmli, Norway. The new plant will convert biomass to liquid biocrude that will…
GEA supplies two plants for waste-heat utilization to India and Italy
GEA (Düsseldorf, Germany; www.gea.com) supplies Saint-Gobain with two Waste Heat Recovery Systems (WHRS) each for the utilization of waste heat from the float-glass production lines in Pisa, Italy and Sriperumbudur, India. Commissioning is planned for the first half of 2019.…
CPI Booklist for September 2018
The following list of recently published book titles shown here are relevant to professionals in various parts of the chemical process industries (CPI) Biotechnology of Metals: Principles, Recovery Methods and Environmental Concerns, By K.A. Natarajan, Elsevier ScienceDirect, 2018, 502 pages,…
Focusing on the workplace
The results of a recent survey (2018 Pulse of Engineering Survey*) give a snapshot of how over 2,200 survey respondents view their current work environments. The respondents were predominantly design engineers (37%), followed by those in research and development, consulting,…
Co-located Facilities: Untangling Environmental Compliance, Liability and Accountability Issues
When multiple operators, co-owners, co-operators and third-party contractors are all managing different engineered systems at the same location, extra care is needed to manage potential environmental issues that may arise The obligations facing facilities throughout the chemical process industries (CPI)…
CO2-to-methanol
Researchers from Penn State University (State College, Pa.; www.psu.edu) and Dalian University of Technology (Dalian, China; www.dlut.edu.cn) have improved the CO2-to-methanol process by using a catalyst that combines copper and palladium. Using a palladium-to-copper atomic ratio range of 0.3 to…
Solvent-based process to recycle multilayered film
Later this year (Q4 2018), APK AG (Merseburg, Germany; www.apk-ag.de) will start up the first commercial plant to recycle multilayer packaging using the company’s solvent-based Newcycling process. The plant will process 8,000 metric tons per year (m.t./yr) of post-industrial multilayer…
Non-thermal treatment method for high-salinity produced water
A new pilot project brings together advanced membrane filtration with non-thermal, zero-liquid-discharge (ZLD) solvent exchange to efficiently treat high-salinity produced water from oil-and-gas operations. PetroH2O Recovery (Southlake, Tex.; www.petroh2o.com) is currently building a pilot plant with the capacity to process…