The increasingly relevant climate change coupled with the worldwide static increase in energy consumption by industry and private households requires us to rethink. New climate-neutral alternatives are being promoted more and more. One of the biggest hopes in the field of climate neutrality is hydrogen. But what is hydrogen? How can we produce it and where can it help us?

Can hydrogen play out as chlorine chemistry’s trump card? — Safe, clean, and sustainable — Eurochlor’s position paper on its Mid-Century Strategy for the chlorine industry reads like green buzzword bingo. Yet it’s clear that if the European Union wants to become carbon-neutral by 2050, it will have to take chlorine chemistry into account. It’s just as well that electrolysis provides a sought-after co-product.

Berthold Technologies has introduced measurement solutions for the sugar industry. The solutions help to optimize the production process with enhanced quality and efficiency. Accurate and reliable, these solutions do not require regular maintenance.

Stand in many an oil field and you will feel yourself transported back to the early 1970s. Despite past price crises and predictions of “peak oil”, little has changed in terms of measurement data acquisition, monitoring, and automation. Employees travel long distances every day; their most important tools are pen and clipboard. Yet efficiency can be significantly increased simply by equipping the measuring points with radio systems. This is the first step on the road to the digital oilfield, at the end of which lies greater added value. The principle of Open Process Automation provides future-proofing.

Artificial intelligence start-ups have begun to revolutionize the Chinese pharmaceutical industry. With the help of algorithms and ‘Big Data,’ the development time for new drugs is being radically reduced, in some cases from ten to 15 years to just one to one and a half years. The Chinese start-ups with the best prospects are currently being showered with billions of dollars in investment. The general technological trend fueling this development is called bio convergence.

Vulcan wants to produce lithium in a climate-neutral and CO2-free way. The company has now produced battery-grade lithium hydroxide monohydrate in a German pilot plant.

Pumps are the workhorses of every process plant, not to mention plenty of auxiliary equipment and even portable test gear too. This run-round of recent developments takes in centrifugals, vacuum pumps, positive-displacement pumps and gas sampling units.

BASF is working with authorities in China to use more electricity from renewable sources at its chemical plants. The company has just announced a particularly ambitious goal for the new Verbund site in Zhanjiang, in the southern province of Guangdong: The first plants at the Verbund site, which is currently under construction, are to be operated entirely with renewable energies.

The global chemical process industries are aware of this trend and some of them are already undertaking mega projects to accelerate their energy transition.

Construction work on the largest coal chemical plant on earth has just been suspended in the Shaanxi province, reports the business magazine Caixin. In Inner Mongolia, another province with many coal-chemical projects, new approvals have also recently become more difficult, the magazine reports. Across the country, not only large-scale coal chemical projects but also petrochemical projects are falling victim to the axe of the newly strengthened climate change activists.