Linde Engineering (Pullach, Germany; www.linde-engineering.com) has developed a process to recover helium, hydrocarbons and purified carbon dioxide from natural gas, while conditioning the natural gas for pipeline transport by adjusting the water and heavy-hydrocarbon dew point and the CO2 concentration.…
A low-cost “green” technology for water desalination and zero liquid discharge of industrial wastewater that has been drawing increasing attention is solar steam generation using nanostructured photothermal materials. However, the crystallization of salts on the surface of photothermal materials during…
Carbyne transfer Marcos G. Suero and his research group at the Institute of Chemical Research of Catalonia (ICIQ; Tarragona, Spain; www.iciq.es) have reported a new reaction that inserts a monovalent carbon unit between both sp2-hybridized carbons of alkenes. For the…
Although it contains many valuable metals, electronic waste (e-waste) is an exceedingly difficult material stream to process, and the vast majority of e-waste is not recycled. EnviroLeach Technologies Inc. (Vancouver, B.C.; www.enviroleach.com) is currently preparing to start up a first-of-its-kind…
Oxysulfide semiconductors have narrow bandgaps — a property that makes them suitable photocatalysts for water splitting under irradiation with visible light (640 nm wavelength). That’s because the electronegative sulfide ions negatively shift the valence band edges of the corresponding oxides.…
Many countries are now making rapid advances in hydrogen energy technologies and strategy, and the rest of the world has much to learn from their experience, according to a new report — Advancing Hydrogen — compiled by a team from…
Microplastics — a subgroup of plastics with an effective diameter less than 5 mm — are ubiquitous pollutants. They adsorb organic and metal pollutants that are ingested by aquatic organisms, and accumulated all the way up the food chain. Using…
The water-gas shift reaction (WGS; in which water vapor is reacted with carbon monoxide over a copper-chromium-iron-oxide catalyst to yield hydrogen and CO2) is of paramount importance to the chemical industry, as it is a primary route to producing H2…
Recently, Tosoh Corp. (Tokyo, Japan; www.tosoh.com) has applied a new, proprietary oxocatalyst in the oxychlorination process for making ethylene dichloride (EDC) from ethylene, HCl, and O2 in its vinyl chloride monomer (VCM) manufacturing process. The performance boost anticipated from simulation…
After four years of project development and execution, the new PolyFuel unit at Petrobrazi petroleum refinery in Romania has been started-up and is fully functional since April 2019. Based on the PolyFuel technology licensed by Axens (Rueil-Malmaison, France; www.axens.net), the…