A ‘liquid battery’ advance

“We are developing a new strategy for selectively converting and long-term storing of electrical energy in liquid fuels”

14-Jun-2024 - As California transitions rapidly to renewable fuels, it needs new technologies that can store power for the electric grid. Solar power drops at night and declines in winter. Wind power ebbs and flows. As a result, the state depends heavily on natural gas to smooth out highs and lows of renewable ...

Covestro, Neste and Borealis aim at closing loop for automotive industry

Discarded tires liquified via chemical recycling, then processed into base chemicals and further into polycarbonates of high purity

13-Jun-2024 - Neste, Borealis and Covestro have signed a project agreement to enable the recycling of discarded tires into high-quality plastics for automotive applications. The collaboration aims at driving circularity in plastics value chains and the automotive industry. When no longer fit for use, tires are ...

Fermentation revolution?

Trash becomes treasure as bio-waste yields valuable acetone and isopropanol

07-Feb-2024 - In a major stride towards sustainable industrial fermentation, a team of researchers at Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) in The Netherlands, has unveiled pioneering advancements in the purification of isopropanol and acetone from the fermentation of waste gases. The study, published in ...

Success in synthesizing biodegradable plastic materials using sunlight and CO₂

80% yield!

12-Oct-2022 - Tremendous effort has been put into making plastics not only durable and convenient but also environmentally-friendly materials for everyday products. Osaka Metropolitan University scientists made a significant advance in this journey with their innovative artificial photosynthesis technology ...

Bacteria upcycle carbon waste into valuable chemicals

Engineered bacteria convert captured carbon dioxide into chemicals for fuels, fabric and cosmetics

23-Feb-2022 - Bacteria are known for breaking down lactose to make yogurt and sugar to make beer. Now researchersled by Northwestern University and LanzaTech have harnessed bacteria to break down waste carbon dioxide (CO2) to make valuable industrial chemicals. In a new pilot study, the researchers selected, ...

Liquid Fuels from Carbon Dioxide

Electrocatalyst converts CO2 into multicarbon products

18-Nov-2021 - A new electrocatalyst called a-CuTi@Cu converts carbon dioxide (CO2 ) into liquid fuels. As reported by a team of Chinese researchers in the journal Angewandte Chemie, active copper centered on an amorphous copper/titanium alloy produces ethanol, acetone, and n-butanol with high efficiency. Most ...

Brenntag acquires North American acetone specialist Matrix Chemical

04-Aug-2021 - Brenntag acquires all operating assets and business of Matrix Chemical, LLC (“Matrix”). The company is a solvents distributor and the largest distributor of acetone in North America with sales of around USD 200 million year to date in 2021. Steven Terwindt, Member of the Management Board of ...

New simulation-experiment combination allows deeper insights into ultrafast light-induced processes

14-Feb-2020 - Researchers from Graz University of Technology and the University of Vienna are demonstrating for the first time how the energy flow between strongly interacting molecular states can be better described. Since the 1990s, femtochemistry has been researching ultrafast processes at the molecular ...

Dow announces divestiture of its Acetone Derivatives business

15-Aug-2019 - Dow announced that it has reached an agreement for the divestiture of its Acetone Derivatives business to ALTIVIA Ketones & Additives, LLC, an affiliate of ALTIVIA, a privately held producer of chemicals headquartered in Houston, Texas. “This divestiture illustrates Dow’s disciplined approach to ...

'Flipped' metal oxide cage can sort CO2 from CO

Spherical vanadium oxide clusters that can trap and hold carbon dioxide

10-Jan-2019 - How do you separate carbon dioxide from carbon monoxide? One way, showcased by a new study from Kanazawa University, is to use a bowl of vanadium. More precisely, a hollow, spherical cluster of vanadate molecules can discriminate between CO and CO2, allowing potential uses in CO2 storage and ...