With the commercial licensure approval, Novartis’ new manufacturing facility in North Carolina, USA will be able to develop and test gene therapy products for current as well as future clinical trials, thus expanding its production capabilities for these solutions.

PROCESS Worldwide brings to you the ‘Top 10 plant engineering projects of February 2022’ from all over the world. Right from China’s first megaton CCUS project to developing Europe’s first lithium refinery, find out all the projects making headlines here.

A new study by Fertilizers Europe and Dechema has revealed that CO2 emissions from ammonia production in Europe could be reduced by almost a fifth in 2030. It also highlights that the adoption of blue hydrogen in the production of ammonia could lead to a reduction of 3,000 kt of CO2 emissions annually from 2030 onwards.

With the new plant, Sumitomo Chemical plans to strengthen its supply of high-quality active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) and intermediates in the background of rising demand for small molecule drugs.

Mitsubishi Power Americas has ordered 40 electrolyzers from HydrogenPro to produce green hydrogen which will be used for power generation, transportation and industrial applications. With this move, the companies aim to deploy utility-scale green hydrogen in the U.S. in order to support the country to achieve its global decarbonization targets.

With an aim to expand the existing production capacity of its synthetic pharmaceutical CDMO business by 30 %, AGC has plans to invest 100 million dollars to develop a new facility in Spain for its subsidiary AGC Pharma Chemicals Europe. The new facility will focus on highly potent active pharmaceutical ingredients due to its high market demand.

The restructuring of Korea Engineering Plastics, a joint venture of Celanese and Mitsubishi Gas Chemical, has successfully been carried out by the owners. Under the new change, the joint venture company will now only focus on manufacturing and supplying high quality polyoxymethylene products to its shareholders who will then market them around the world.

The European Union relies heavily on natural gas imports from Russia and the recent invasion of Ukraine by the Putin Government has changed the dynamics of the global energy market. In this background, the International Energy Agency (IEA) has listed out a 10-point plan on how Europe can significantly cut natural gas imports from Russia within a year.

China’s GDP shrunk 6.8 % in the last quarter as compared with a year earlier. The country’s chemical manufacturing output declined by 21 % and profits by 66 % in the first two months of 2020 due to the coronavirus scenario. However, now with the virus defeated, the East Asian nation hopes to improve these figures.

Repsol has already begun construction work for developing the first advanced biofuels plant in Spain. The company will be investing 221 million dollars in this project which is expected to supply 250,000 tons per year of advanced biofuels.