KBR, Inc. (Houston, www.kbr.com) announced that it has entered into an agreement to provide its proprietary Ammonia InSite Technology to PT Panca Amara Utama (PAU) for the Sulawesi, Indonesia ammonia plant complex. Ammonia InSite Technology is a KBR integrated solution…
CB&I (The Woodlands, Tex.; www.cbi.com) announced that its CDAlky technology has been selected by Valero Refining – New Orleans LLC for its St. Charles Alkylation Project located in Norco, Louisiana. CB&I's overall scope of supply on the project includes CDAlky…
The following titles are recently published books with relevance to the chemical process industries (CPI) . . . Carbon Dioxide to Chemicals and Fuels. By Aulice Scibioh and B. Viswanathan, Elsevier, 2018, 510 pages, $170.00. Polymer-based Nanocomposites for Energy…
Major efforts are underway to develop new process technology for making chemicals using sunlight and the products of combustion No one can deny that the sun provides more than enough energy to supply the world’s energy and materials needs. After…
One of the first experiments I ever conducted in my basement chemistry lab was to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, using the transformer from my train set as the power sup- ply and platinum ribbon strips as electrodes. Although…
Acrylonitrile (ACN) — a precursor in nearly all carbon fibers — is typically produced from propylene and ammonia, but a new method uses biomass-derived second-generation sugars. The process was developed by Southern Research (Durham, N.C.; www.southernresearch.org) and seeks to provide…
A team from Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (Ulsan, South Korea; www.unist.ac.kr), led by professor Jong-Beom Baek has introduced a synthetic methodology for fabricating a three-dimensional porous organic network with a high specific surface area via a solid-state…
New membranes developed at Tufts University (Medford, Mass.; www.tufts.edu) can effectively separate similar chemicals based on not only size but on electrostatic charge. “Currently, there are no commercial membranes that are designed to separate organic molecules of similar size but…
Using a simple, ligand-free palladium catalyst system, researchers at McGill University (Montreal, Que., Canada; www.mcgill.ca) have demonstrated that metal carbonylation — a core chemical reaction for many industrial products — can be used to synthesize ketones directly from hydrocarbons. The…
Last month, the so-called Hybrit initiative (www.hybritdevelopment.com) was given the go-ahead to build a pilot plant for making fossil-free steel. The announcement follows a pre-feasibility study conducted by Swedish partners SSAB AB (Stockholm; www.ssab.com), LKAB (Luleå; www.lkab.com) and Vattenfall AB…