Renewable jet fuel Houston-based bioenergy company Terrabon Inc. (www.terrabon.com) has been awarded a $9.6-million, 18-month contract from Logos Technologies (Arlington, Va.; www.logos-technologies) to produce 6,000 L of renewable jet fuel for the Defense Advanced Research Products Agency (DARPA; Arlington,…
An underground coal-to-liquids (UCTL) technology is undergoing pilot testing at Oak Park, near Melbourne Australia, where a metric ton of brown coal is expected to yield about one barrel of oil suitable for use as refinery feedstock on an oil-parity…
At the 2nd Annual ChemInnovations Conference and Expo (Houston; September 13–15), Hemi-O Technologies LLC (Corpus Christi, Tex.; dixonengineering@gmail.com) introduced its patent-pending technology that enables external access to individual tubes in a heat exchanger while the exchanger is in service and…
A technique that improves the efficiency of ethanol plants by lowering the cost of dewatering the byproduct stillage (a slurry of corn solids and water) from the fermentation process has been developed by scientists at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s…
Professor Yuki Taniguchi at the Chemicals Research Institute, Tokyo Institute of Technology (Japan, www.res.titech.ac.jp/~gosei/taniguchi/index.html) has developed a new catalyst system that decomposes volatile organic compounds (VOCs) at lower temperatures than that required by conventional catalysts. The SILP (supported ionic liquid…
Cellulosic biomass pretreated with ammonia undergoes structural changes that make it more susceptible to enzymatic attack, scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory (Los Alamos, N.M.; www.lanl.gov) and collaborators at the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center (Madison, Wisc.; www.glbrc.org) have found.…
Anew process to make BTX (benzene, toluene and xylenes) from light cycle oil (LCO), an oversupplied product of petroleum refineries that can supplement the dwindling supply of BTX precursors, is being developed by JX Nippon Oil & Energy (JX Energy;…
A project aimed at using geothermal heat to power an electricity-producing turbine with supercritical carbon dioxide has received a $5 million grant from the U.S. Dept. of Energy (DOE; Washington, D.C.; www.energy.gov). The project also incorporates an element of CO2…
Phosgenation scaleup At the end of July, Bayer MaterialScience AG (BMS; Leverkusen, Germany; www.bayerbms.com) successfully tested its new gas-phase phosgenation technology at a new plant being commissioned for making toluene diisocyanate (TDI) — a raw material for making polyurethane —…
A process to greatly enhance the ability of sand to filter heavy metals from water has been developed by researchers from Monash University, of Melbourne, Australia (www.monash.edu.au), Rice University (Houston; www.rice.edu) and Nanoholdings LLC (Marietta, Ga.; www.nanoholdings.com). Historically, the researchers…