The National Food Research Institute (NFRI) of the National Agriculture and Food Research Organization (NARO; Tsukuba City, Japan; www.naro.affrc.go.jp) has developed an enzymatic pretreatment process for producing highly concentrated sugar solution from fibrous materials containing rice straw and starch. The…
Construction of a large-scale waste-to-energy plant will start in the middle of next year in Port Hedland, Western Australia, and operation is scheduled to commence in the second quarter of 2015. The plant will be built by the New Energy…
Last month, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Ltd. (MHI; www.mhi.co.jp) and Tokyo Gas Co. (both Tokyo, Japan; www.tokyo-gas.co.jop) began marketing a jointly developed 1,000-kW gas-engine cogeneration system. Based on the conventional 930-kW system, the new systems engine operates at a reduced speed…
Acetic acid from syngas A new process for the production of acetic acid claims to be more efficient and cost-effective than current technologies. Carbonylation of methanol has been the leading acetic acid technology for several decades, but BP plc…
The effluent discharged by domestic industries in Japan amounts to approximately 11.1 billion ton/yr. Most of this waste is comprised of relatively low concentrations of organic matter. Today, most of this effluent is treated by aerobic biotreatment (activated sludge). However,…
A research team from the University of Western Australia (Perth; www.uwa.edu.au), led by professor Dongke Zhang, has pioneered the application of higher plants for new-generation biofuel production. Metabolic engineering of Arabidopsis thaliana — a small flowering plant native to Europe…
Last month, the synthesis stage of the bioliq (biomass to liquid Karlsruhe) pilot plant produced gasoline for the first time at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT; Germany; www.kit.edu). The achievement is a milestone in that all stages of the…
New gas-cloud imaging technology from Rebellion Photonics (Houston; www.rebellionphotonics.com) monitors facilities for gas leaks and is capable of imaging chemical releases in realtime, identifying and quantifying gas clouds over large sections of a facility (photo). The company’s technology aims to…
Researchers from the Australian National University (ANU; Canberra; www.anu.edu.au), and the University of New South Wales (Sydney, Australia; www.unsw.edu.au) claim to have obtained a temperature- and frequency-independent colossal permittivity (CP) material with a low dielectric loss, making it strikingly superior…
Reforming catalyst Haldor Topsøe A/S (Lyngby, Denmark; www.topsoe.com) has introduced a new alkali-promoted steam-reforming catalyst, dubbed RK-400. RK-400 is engineered to protect against unwanted carbon formation while achieving a higher level of catalytic activity than those previously seen in…