Roughly 80% of the heavy oil in Alberta’s oil sands is too deep for open-pit mining, the most common production method at present. Consequently, this oil will have to be recovered by in situ methods, such as steam-assisted gravity drainage…
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…
Codexis (Redwood City, Calif.; www.codexis.com) and CO2 Solution (Quebec City, Canada; www.co2solution.com) have jointly developed a cost-effective method for capturing carbon dioxide from coal-fired power plants. Solvent-based systems for capturing CO2 are relatively well-understood, but they have not been widely…
A magnetic composite based on reduced graphene oxide (RGO) has been developed by a Korean team with an exceptional capacity to remove arsenic from drinking water. The team, headed by professor Kwang S. Kim from the Center for Superfunctional Materials,…
An enhanced reactor technology that boosts the speed of producing bioethanol by a factor of four while decreasing production costs by 25% compared to a stirred batch fermenter has been developed by IHI Corp. (IHI; Tokyo; www.ihi.co.jp). The technology features…
Dow Water and Process Solutions (DW&PS; Minneapolis, Minn.; www.dowwaterandprocess.com), a business unit of The Dow Chemical Co., unveiled a simplified electrodeionization (EDI) product at the recent Singapore International Water Week event. The new version of the product reduces operating costs…
Calsmelt Pty Ltd. (Melbourne, Australia; www.calsmelt.com) is marketing a new carbothermic process for producing metallic aluminum. Tradenamed Thermical, the process is said to entail significant advantages over Alcoa’s carbothermic process, the Advanced Reactor Process (ARP). Under development for several years,…
A process that promises a significant reduction in the cost of removing sulfur from coal-derived synthesis gas (syngas) will be tested in a 50-MWe demonstration unit at Tampa (Fla.) Electric Company’s 250-MWe integrated gasification-combined cycle (IGCC) power plant. RTI International…