AMT International Inc. (Plano, Texas; www.amtintl.com) and LG Chem, Ltd. (Seoul, Korea; www.lgchem.com) have successfully converted an existing sulfolane liquid-liquid extraction (LLE) unit at LG Chem’s Yeosu plant using a new extractive-distillation (ED) process for aromatics recovery. This technology was…
Cement manufacturing is a major source of greenhouse gas emissions due to two factors: carbon dioxide is released when calcium carbonate calcines to lime (CaO) in the cement manufacturing process; and cement kilns are operated at temperatures of 1,500°C, which…
The selective, one-step biocatalytic hydroxylation of benzene to phenol — at ambient pressure and temperature — has been demonstrated by professors Yoshihito Watanabe and Osamu Shoji at Nagoya University (Nagoya, Japan; bioinorg.chem.nagoya-u.ac.jp). The achievement was made using a wild-type of…
Solar steam The Middle East’s first solar enhanced-oil-recovery (EOR) project was recently commissioned by Petroleum Development Oman (PDO; Muscat, Oman; www.pdo.co.om). The project uses Enclosed Trough technology from GlassPoint (Fremont, Calif.; www.glasspoint.com) to produce an average of 50 ton/d of…
Sapphire Energy, Inc. (San Diego, Calif.; www.sapphireenergy.com) and The Linde Group (Munich; www.linde.com) have signed an agreement, with a minimum span of five years, to commercialize Sapphire’s process for producing crude oil from algae. The agreement expands an existing partnership…
CSIRO Minerals Down Under Flagship (Perth, Western Australia; www.csiro.au/MDU) has developed a method that uses hydrotalcite formation to simultaneously remove contaminants from mining and industrial wastewaters in a single step. Current wastewater-treatment processes typically produce lime-based slurries, often with large…
Researchers from the University of Texas at Austin (www.utexas.edu) and the University of Marburg (Germany; www.uni-marburg.de) are developing a process, called electrochemically mediated seawater desalination, that promises to be an inexpensive way to desalinate small volumes of water. The patent-pending…
A process that is expected to produce high-octane gasoline from non-food biomass for an average cost of $1.50/gal, depending on feed costs, will be commercialized by Cool Planet Energy Systems (Denver, Colo.; www.coolplanet.com). The company has tested the process in…
Last month, Southwest Research Institute (SWRI; San Antonio, Tex.; www.swri.org) was awarded $1.5 million by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA; Arlington, Va.; www.darpa.mil) for a three-year project to develop alternative technologies for depositing thin films. The project is…
A typical fluid catalytic cracking unit (FCC) generates about 200 tons/d of dry gas — a mixture of off-gases that is burned as refinery fuel. However, about 40 tons of that gas is ethylene, which would have much greater value…