A plasma-based process has achieved a 30% yield of methanol from methane in a microreactor system developed by a research team led by Tomohiro Nozaki, associate professor at Tokyo Institute of Technology (TiTech; Tokyo, www.mech.titech.ac.jp). The yield is nearly the…
Westec Environmental Solutions, LLC (WES; Chicago, Ill.; www.wes-worldwide.com) has developed a gas-liquid absorption technology that can dramatically enhance mass transfer in gas-liquid absorption, extraction and scrubbing systems. The patented WES Absorber operates co-currently and creates a micro-froth matrix that intensifies…
Enerkem Inc. (Montreal, Can-ada; www.enerkem.com) has broken ground in Edmonton, Alberta, on what is said to be the world’s first industrial-scale plant to produce liquid fuel from municipal solid waste. When the plant starts up at the end of 2011,…
Plastic derived from corn, used mostly for bottles and cups, costs about 20% more than petroleum-based plastics, but has two desirable qualities: it comes from a renewable resource and is biodegradable. However, the use of the plastic — polylactic acid…
Graphene Laboratories Inc. (Reading, Mass.; www.graphenelab.com) and CVD Equipment Corp. (Ronkonkoma, N.Y.; www.cvdequipment.com) recently announced the commercial launch of single-layer graphene films, marketed as CVDGraphene, grown by a chemical vapor deposition (CVD) process. Using slightly modified CVD equipment that has…
Last month at the IFAT Entsorga trade fair (September 13–17; Munich, Germany), Süd-Chemie AG (Munich; www.sud-chemie.com) introduced a chemical-free process that increases the energy production of wastewater-purification and biogas plants by as much as 30% while significantly reducing the disposal…
Improved C5 use Some 106,000 ton/yr of so-called spent C5 fraction is generated at Mitsui Chemicals Inc.’s (Mitsui; Tokyo, Japan; www.mitsuichem.com) naphtha cracker at its Chiba Factory. Presently, the company is selling about half of the C5 fraction (50,000 ton/yr)…
TNO (Delft; www.tno.nl) and Ingrepro Renewables B.V. (Borculo, both the Netherlands; www.ingrepro.nl) have started a joint-research project to extract food ingredients from algae. Proteins, which account for up to 60 wt.% of algae, could serve as a sustainable alternative to…
Professor George John and graduate student Swapnil Jadhav at the City College of New York (www.ccny.cuny.edu) are lead authors of a paper on a class of compounds, known as phase-selective gelators, that can selectively solidify an oil phase in water.…
Worlds largest PDH unit Lummus Technology (Bloomfield, N.J.), a CB&I company (The Woodlands, Tex.; www.cbi.com), has been awarded a contract by Tianjin Bohua Petrochemical Co. for the license and engineering design of a grassroots propane dehydrogenation (PDH) unit to…