Latest News: Technologies
Products from natural gas
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.…
Making solar steam and salts from brine
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…
Chementator Briefs
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…
Underground oxidation of hydrocarbons and gas separation yields hydrogen
A process for in-situ oxidation of hydrocarbons in low-quality oilfields, and subsequent gas separation, offers a path to generating hydrogen for fuel and chemicals that avoids any greenhouse gas emissions. Known as Hygienic Earth Energy (HEE), the process has been…
Reduction of carbon dioxide to methane
Electrochemical reduction of carbon dioxide to hydrocarbons and oxygenates on copper involves reduction to a carbon monoxide adsorbate followed by transformation to hydrocarbons and oxygenates. To ensure the sustainability of the process, the electrochemical CO2 reduction is typically conducted in…
Multi-state switchable stationary phase for chiral separation
High-pressure liquid chromatography (HPLC) using a chiral stationary phase (CSP) is the most effective method for separating enantiomers of chiral molecules. However, the limited number of CSPs available puts a constraint on applying this technology universally. Now, researchers from the…
Ionic liquids enable lower-cost desalination with forward osmosis
Membrane-based forward osmosis (FO) desalination could be a lower-cost alternative to conventional reverse osmosis (RO) technology, which can desalinate ocean water effectively, but requires electricity to drive the separation, and so remains expensive. Scientists from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBL;…
New research solves debate over water-gas shift reaction mechanism
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…
New oxocatalyst demonstrated for vinyl chloride monomer production
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…
Commercial debut for an upgrading process
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…