BASF announced today that it has signed a purchase agreement to acquire the styrene catalysts business of CRI/Criterion, a wholly owned subsidiary of Shell based in Houston, Texas. Financial details of the transaction are not being disclosed.

Anyone planning investment projects in China must follow the clearly-specified rules of the game, otherwise he is pre-programmed to fail. Without support from Chinese Design Institutes, nothing gets off the ground at all in China. The reason for this was illuminated at a DECHEMA information day.

The leading chemical companies in the world come from Germany and the US: BASF with a turnover of 73.5 billion euros in 2011 was well ahead of US-based Dow Chemical which had a turnover of 46.28 billion euros. Nevertheless, BASF only came 71st in Fortune magazine’s rankings of the world's major corporations. Currently, no company from the emerging economies of India, China or Brazil made it intoi the Top-10---

The Supervisory Board of BASF SE has appointed Sanjeev Gandhi to the Board of Executive Directors effective December 1, 2014. He has been head of BASF’s Intermediates division since 2010

Powerful, intuitively operated documentation tool proves its usefulness in practice — Documenting the actual as-built status of a large process plant is a Herculean task. It is not unusual for the change to the plant itself to take less time than the subsequent changes in the documentation. With myriads of copies and handwritten notes, important information is easily ge lost. For all these reasons, BASF in Ludwigshafen decided on the successive installation of an electronic documentation system — and the results speak for themselves …

American engineering specialists CB&I will work on the expansion of BASF's process plant in Antwerp, Belgium: The company announced today that it has been awarded a contract for the engineering, procurement and construction management for a new butadiene extraction plant at the site.

BASF published an update on the the fire at the North Harbor in Ludwigshafen. Two employees of the company's fire department and an employee of a tanker which was anchored in the harbor died in the accident.

BASF has launched the commercial production of LFP (lithium iron phosphate) cathode materials in Weimar, Germany. The chemicals giant is operating a 3,000 metric ton (MT) per year plant in Weimar, leveraging LFP precursors produced at the BASF headquarters site in Ludwigshafen, Germany.

The digital factory, which in this context refers to the convergence of process and facilities infrastructure planning in an integrated 3D model, is not exactly a new issue for the big players in the process industry. However, many small and medium-size companies do not yet have seamless data management. A comprehensive 3D model can be extremely useful during the design of pharmaceutical production lines.

Crude oil, coal, natural gas and biomass — discussions about the future mix of raw materials in the chemical industry has only just begun. PROCESS has compiled the key findings for you.