Thai-headquartered petrochemicals and polyester giant Indorama Ventures (IVL) and Capchem USA, a subsidiary of China’s Shenzhen Capchem Technology, are reviewing options for jointly building and operating a carbonate plant to supply the North American lithium-ion battery market.
US conglomerate 3M is to spin off its healthcare business in a move that chairman and CEO Mike Roman said will result in “two well-capitalized, world-class public companies, well positioned to pursue their respective priorities.”
Major Brazilian chemical company Unigel is planning to invest $120 million in developing a site for green hydrogen production.
DuPont has officially opened its expanded Liveo Healthcare Solutions biopharmaceutical tubing extrusion plant at its Cooper River site in the US state of South Carolina.
Dow and Saudi family business Al-Hejailan Group have signed a Memorandum of Understanding to form a joint venture to design, build and operate a methyl diethanolamine (MDEA) plant in PlasChem Park in Jubail.
Air Products is strengthening its sustainability goals, pledging to allot at least $4 billion in fresh capital for the transition to clean energy over the next five years. This builds on the more than $11 billion already commited to real zero- and low-carbon hydrogen projects.
It has gone somewhat quiet around new European joint ventures in China of late, but Ineos has just announced three back-to-back projects with Chinese state-owned Sinopec that it said are worth altogether $7 billion and will lead to sales of around $10 billion from 7 million tonnes of production.
EuroAPI has announced it will spend €24 million to build a state-of-the-art biomass boiler at its Saint-Aubin-lès-Elbeuf (Seine-Maritime, France) site, planned to be installed by 2025.
WeylChem is investing about €15 million to upgrade glyoxal production at its site in Lamotte, France. A new plant, which will increase capacity by approximately a third, is expected to start operating in early 2024.
After Russia announced further cuts in its gas supply to Germany starting Jul. 27, ammonia producers were weighing plans to curb output of the commodity, for which natural gas is the key feedstock.
Trinseo has suspended plans for the sale of its styrenics business because of the current macroeconomic and geopolitical uncertainty. The company announced last November that it had begun exploring a potential divestment of the business, formally launching a sales process in the first quarter of this year.
Financed in part by the French government’s France Relance plan, Novasep‐PharmaZell is investing €7.3 million in production of active pharmaceuticals (APIs) at its Mourenx, France, site.
Germany-based OQ Chemicals, the former Oxea, has made a final investment decision to add capacity for propionic aldehyde and production infrastructure to support a new 250,000 t/y methyl methacrylate (MMA) plant being built by German acrylics specialist Röhm at OQ’s US site in Bay City, Texas.
Solvay has announced plans to build a new plant in Casa Grande, Arizona, USA, for producing electronic-grade hydrogen peroxide. The investment in its seventh such unit has been prompted by growing demand from the US semiconductor industry.
Canadian fertilizer producer Nutrien has agreed to buy Brazil’s Casa do Adubo, boosting its growth in both Brazil and the Latin American region. Financial terms were not revealed.
Lummus Technology has launched what it terms “a major enhancement” to its technology that allows ethane-based steam crackers to achieve zero CO2 emissions.
The 1 million t/y ethane cracker built by US-headquartered Bayport Polymers (also known as Baystar), a 50:50 joint venture of Borealis and TotalEnergies, has begun commercial scale production at Total’s refinery in Port Arthur, Texas.
French specialty chemicals producer Arkema has announced it will acquire privately owned Mexican company Polimeros Especiales, a producer of high performance waterborne resins for applications in architectural and decorative paints, textiles, pressure sensitive adhesives and construction.
The World Health Organization (WHO) has declared the global monkey pox outbreak to be a “public health emergency of international concern.” This is the organization’s second such declaration of the past two years, after Covid-19 in 2020.
Dow has announced several new steps in its plans to accelerate the deployment of plastics recycling technologies in Europe and the US.
Shanghai Chemical Industry Park Industrial Gases (SCIPIG), a subsidiary of French industrial gases group Air Liquide, will invest more than €200 million in two hydrogen plants and related infrastructure in China’s Shanghai Chemical Industry Park (SCIP).
WuXi AppTec and its subsidiary Wuxi STA have announced several investments in manufacturing and research in Asia, with the Changzou campus in China’s Jiangsu Province a focal point.
Germany’s Röhm has begun construction of a capacity expansion in China for its Plexiglas polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA) molding compounds. A groundbreaking ceremony took place at the Shanghai site on Jul. 18 and the expanded plant is due to start operating by the second quarter of 2023.
UK sustainable technologies group Johnson Matthey plans to invest £80 million in a gigafactory at its site in Royston to scale up the manufacture of hydrogen fuel cell components. The facility is expected to be in operation by the first half of 2024.
Shell Chemicals has announced it will earmark “billions of euros” from its current capital spending budget to make production assets more sustainable as it works to achieve net zero emissions by 2032.
The Jul.18 launch of GSK’s consumer healthcare spinoff Haleon on the London Stock Exchange – said to be the largest London listing in more than a decade – seems to have gone off more like a whimper than a bang.
Life science company Cytiva has acquired a chromatography resins factory in Muskegon, Michigan, USA, marking its first investment in new capacity outside its manufacturing base of Sweden.
Azelis is acquiring Chemical Solutions (ChemSol), a distributor of raw materials for the personal care, cosmetics and household market segments in Malaysia.
BASF has kicked off the third and final round of its expansion project for polyurethanes precursor MDI at Geismar, Louisiana.
US-based ABL, which bills itself as a pure play CDMO specialized in the development and manufacturing of viruses for vaccine candidates, gene and cancer therapies, is partnering with KaliVir Immunotherapeutics on oncolytic viruses.
Pfizer and BioNTech have filed an application with the European Medicines Agency (EMA) for approval of the Comirnaty Covid-19 vaccine in children aged six months to five years.
US-based Vertex Pharmaceuticals has agreed to pay $320 million in cash to acquire ViaCyte, a compatriot private cellular therapy company specializing in a treatment for type-1 diabetes (T1D). The transaction is expected to close later this year.
To further increase its capabilities in serving Life Science customers in Europe, STAXS is expanding its facility in Heerenveen, specifically designed for this customer segment and with carbon neutrality in mind.
Solvias, a Swiss CDMO serving the pharmaceutical, biotechnology, material science and cosmetic industries, has acquired Dutch biotech Cergentis for an undisclosed sum. The deal bolsters Solvias’ platform of biologics and cell and gene therapy (CGT) testing solutions.
Project Air, a production facility for sustainable methanol in Stenungsund, Sweden, described by the project’s partners Perstorp, Fortum and Uniper as “unique,” has been selected as one of 17 large-scale “green tech” projects that will share more than €1.8 billion in aid from the EU Innovation Fund.
