BASF has plans to expand its e-coat manufacturing facility in Mangalore, India. With this project, the company aims to manufacture the latest generation of e-coat products which offer lower consumption, increased efficiency, and higher reactivity for electric vehicles.

BASF has commenced operations of its prototype metal refinery for battery recycling in Schwarzheide, Germany. The plant aims to optimize innovative battery recycling technology as well as optimize the processing of end-of-life lithium-ion batteries and battery production scrap.

With an aim to optimize forage analyses without the need to send samples to a laboratory, Eurofins Agro Testing has collaborated with trinamix. With this partnership, both the firms will offer on-the-spot analytics for samples that need to be analyzed.

PROCESS Worldwide brings to you the ‘Top 10 plant engineering projects of April 2024’ from all over the world. Right from the MOL Group inaugurating one of the largest green hydrogen plants in Europe to BASF, Sabic and Linde starting up the world’s first large-scale electrically heated steam cracking furnace, find out all the projects making headlines here.

BASF, Sabic, and Linde have started-up the world’s first large-scale electrically heated steam cracking furnace at BASF’s Verbund site in Ludwigshafen, Germany. The project makes use of electricity from renewable sources and has the potential to reduce CO2 emissions by at least 90 % compared to the technologies commonly used today in the chemical industry.

The startup firm Heartland specializes in the production of natural fiber plastic additives. The hemp-based materials have the capacity to reduce the carbon footprint of plastics on an industrial scale.

Christoph Kowitz who currently heads Wacker’s Corporate Research Department has been appointed as the President and CEO of Wacker Chemical Corporation in the USA. He will succeed David Wilhoit who is retiring from the firm.

It is a mammoth undertaking: Most nations want to become climate-neutral by 2050 – and with them the companies in the chemical industry. Because on the one hand it produces energy-intensively, and on the other it cannot do without carbon, the chemical industry is having a particularly hard time decarbonizing. But this only spurs the industry's researchers and engineers on even more.

With chemical and chemical processing industries aiming to forge ahead in their automation and digitalization drive to develop their respective ‘Factory of the future’ or ‘Smart factory’, one thing is certain – it can’t be done without the use of robots at least for the time being. The concept of robots is not new but they have been transformed time and again to meet the challenges of today’s industrial plants especially with regard to plant inspection as well as maintenance and it won’t be wrong to term this phase as the ‘return and rise of robots.’

These are the birth pangs of a new economy: the increasing demand for chemical products is bringing growth to the industry, which at the same time has to cope with the necessary transformation towards climate neutrality. For chemical plant construction, both of these factors mean a lot of work in the coming years - in addition to enormous challenges, huge opportunities await.