This year’s European Responsible Care Awards are dominated by projects promoting digitalisation and circularity in the chemical industry. The 2019 winners are essenscia, Kemira Oyj, Solvay and Neste Oyj.

Rockwell Automation and Schlumberger have announced the closing of their previously announced Sensia joint venture. The JV will become the first digitally focused provider of integrated automation solutions for the oil and gas industry.

With an aim to deliver technical as well as operational solutions and also support its members across the global pharmaceutical industry in manufacturing quality medicines for patients worldwide, the International Society for Pharmaceutical Engineering has announced new knowledge tools and educational resources.

China is heavily investing in AI in order to help the growth of its innovative pharmaceutical industry. The move is in line with the government’s initiative of ‘Made in China 2025’, under which the country looks to heavily invest in R&D to boost innovation.

Takeda Pharmaceutical broke into the list of top 20 publicly traded innovative global pharmaceutical companies based on market capitalization (Market Cap) during the first quarter (Q1), according to Global Data.

Arlanxeo has successfully completed turnaround of its CR plant in Germany, allowing for an annual production of up to 70,000 metric tonnes of CR. In France, the firm owns the largest NBR facility in the world and is currently undergoing modernisation.

Covestro is already actively exploiting the benefits of digital transformation. The company now announced that important progress had been made in two areas: A pilot project has provided new findings for the predictive, intelligent maintenance of systems and is now continued at the production site in Caojing, China. Also, the global project for digitalizing and integrating the system landscape in production, "Optimized System Integration" (OSI2020) for short, is entering the next project phase.

While food lovers immediately think of cherry gateau and the regional ham, measurement and control engineers all around the world associate the Black Forest with level and pressure measurement. With close regional ties to its site in Schiltach right in the heart of the Black Forest, Vega has been focusing on these two measuring methods for decades and is regarded an innovation driver in the field. Radar measurement technology in particular has made a major contribution to the success of the company.

Anyone designing, building, operating or further developing plants today must at the same time depict state-of-the-art process technology, anticipate the paths of digitisation, take into account accelerated innovation cycles and be meaningful to all disciplines involved at all times. The advantages of the universal data model of Aucotec's cooperative engineering platform EB 2019 become clear in demanding engineering phases such as FEED or during the cause-and-effect check.

The consortium aims to produce base chemicals and also significantly reduce carbon emissions. Leading companies such as BASF, Borealis, BP, Lyondell Basell, Sabic and Total are part of this new Group.