Clariant, a focused, sustainable and innovative specialty chemical company, last Friday announced the official completion of its sunliquid® cellulosic ethanol plant in Podari, Romania. The completed construction is an important next step for the commercial deployment of sunliquid® technology and thus supports Clariant’s sunliquid® licensing business strategy. The facility will be operational in the fourth quarter, producing cellulosic ethanol from agricultural residues.
LanzaTech and LanzaJet last Monday welcomed Secretary of Energy Jennifer M. Granholm and Senator Jon Ossoff to the Freedom Pines Biorefinery in Soperton, Georgia. The site is a center of research, development, and scale-up for LanzaTech’s commercial carbon capture and utilization technology with a specialized biomanufacturing center producing the “secret sauce” that is shipped from the United States to commercial partners around the world.
In addition to mattresses, sports floors and textile fibres, Covestro has opened up a further area of application for the use of CO2 in plastics production: now foams for the automotive industry can also be produced partly using carbon dioxide instead of fossil raw materials such as crude oil. The innovative precursor cardyon® is used for this purpose, with which the Swiss company FoamPartner produces foams for various areas in the vehicle interior.
Metsä Group is planning to construct a new Kerto® LVL mill on its expanding mill area in Äänekoski, Finland. The final decision on the investment, the value of which is approximately EUR 200 million, is pending the completion of a local detailed plan for the area. The new Kerto LVL mill is expected to use around 375,000 cubic metres of log procured from Finland.
Evoco is an innovative cleantech company. Its CEO, Jason Robinson, talks to Il Bioeconomista. “We’re focused on developing and producing renewable, sustainable and plant-based chemistry as alternatives to petroleum-based materials and products”, he tells us.
Interview by Mario Bonaccorso
Houston-based Kinder Morgan is partnering with Finnish company Neste to create a raw material storage and logistics hub in the United States that will support increased production of renewable diesel, sustainable aviation fuel, and renewable feedstock for polymers and chemicals.
Upon completion of the project, Kinder Morgan’s Harvey, La., facility will serve as the primary hub where Neste will store a variety of raw materials, including, for example, the used cooking oil it collects from more than 40,000 restaurants across the United States, the company said.
Univar Solutions Inc., a global chemical and ingredient distributor and provider of value-added services, signed a new agreement with Novozymes, expanding their relationship to include biological solutions for waste and wastewater treatment in the United States and Canada. Longtime global partners, the new agreement follows previous announcements expanding the partnership into a range of markets in the United States, Canada and Latin America.
Over the last seven years, the BBI JU has established itself as a game-changer in the European bio-based economy. By replacing fossil-based materials and products with bio-based ones, using local, sustainably sourced feedstock and developing circular production processes, the BBI JU-funded projects have given an important contribution to the green transition in Europe. A new publication takes stock of BBI JU’s achievements and impacts in the 2014-2020 period.
Braskem the largest biopolymer producer in the world has signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the SCG Chemicals, one of the largest integrated petrochemical companies in Thailand and an industry leader in Asia, to perform studies to jointly invest in a new bio-ethanol dehydration plant in Thailand to produce bio-ethylene and I’m greenTM bio-based Polyethylene. If implemented, this cooperation could double the existing capacity of I’m greenTM bio-based PE.
Total Corbion PLA’s plant in Rayong Thailand has, since its grand opening in 2019, earlier this summer reached a cumulative production volume of 100kT of Luminy® PLA. The plant is now running at name plate capacity of 75kT annually in order to meet the evergrowing demand for PLA bioplastics.
