Water and wastewater treatment are extremely important at liquefied natural gas (LNG) facilities and other industries that are blossoming due to the shale-gas boom. Engineering concerns are similar to those of other industrial water-treatment and power-generation systems, but with the…
Crystal Solar Inc. (Santa Clara, Calif.; www.xstalsolar.com) is preparing for high-volume production of silicon wafers using a process that forms the wafers directly from trichlorosilane (TCS) gas using a chemical vapor deposition (CVD) epitaxy process that can significantly lower the…
Edeniq Inc. (Visalia, Calif.; www.edeniq.com) announced progress in building demonstration facilities in Brazil and China that feature the company’s proprietary process for converting cellulosic biomass into industrial sugar for fermentation or catalytic conversion (diagram). In Brazil’s São Paulo state, Edeniq…
CO2-to-syngas . . . Scientists from the University of Illinois at Chicago ( www.uic.edu) have developed a catalytic system — molybdenum disulfide and an ionic liquid — to convert CO2 into synthesis gas, (syngas; a mixture of CO and…
The effective removal of Cs+ ions from contaminated groundwater, seawater, and radioactive nuclear waste is crucial for public health and for the operation of nuclear power plants. Although several methods for the removal of Cs+ ions have been developed, there…
Chemists from the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and technology (AIST; Tsukuba City, Japan; www.aist.go.jp) have developed a procedure for making the catalysts used in catalytic converters for treating the exhaust from diesel engines. The process, developed with support…
What is said to be the world’s first fermentation pathway from methane to lactic acid has been demonstrated by Calysta, Inc. (Menlo Park, Calif.; www.calysta.com). The fermentation process begins with an organism that feeds off of methane rather than typical…
The research group of Shigeki Matsunaga, associate professor at the University of Tokyo (Japan; www.f.u-tokyo.ac.jp/~kanai), in collaboration with Ken Sakata at Hoshi University, has developed a new Co-based catalyst system that outperforms the existing rhodium-based catalyst system for the production…
Outotec Oyj (Espoo, Finland; www.outotec.com) has developed a new chloride-based leaching process for recovering nickel from nickel matte — a commercial intermediate product of nickel smelting that contains about 65% of nickel. Developed since the 1980s, originally for Cu recovery…
A new remediation approach for industrial heavy-metal waste has been developed by Lewis Environmental Services, Inc. (LES; Pittsburgh, Pa.; www.lesvc.com). The patented Enviro-Clean process adsorbs heavy metals from liquid waste streams onto a bed of specially treated granular activated carbon.…