Bahrain gets down to business: The Gulf-country aims to push its transformation towards a knowledge based economy by establishing a a series of National Occupational Standards (NOS). This is only the latest steps in a series of attempts to assess and improve the performance and skills of the country’s current and future workforce - already the most highly skilled workforce is the region.

Praxair, an industrial gases company, builds a new 300tons per day air separation plant near Mumbai, India. With this new plant the company aims to profit from the growing demand for industrial gases in the Indian steel and chemical industry.

Fluor will provide project management contractor services for a oil-gas processing and petrochemical complex. The contract was awarded by Socar, the state oil company of the Azerbaijan Republic.

French based Technip will work on a new grassroots fertilizer project in Gabon, Western Africa. The company will provide design and cost estimates for the project with options for a lump sum turnkey contract.

Borealis will move to the Feed-phase for a new, world-scale propane dehydrogenation (PDH) plant, after concluding a pre-Feed feasibility study in June 2017. The facility is planned to be located at the existing Borealis production site in Kallo, Belgium.

Exxon boosts its petrochemical hub Singapore: The company plans to expand the production capacity for halobutyl rubber and hydrogenated hydrocarbon resins by a total of 230,000 tons/year.

Coperion moves its Chinese extruder production to a new location: By February 2015, the company will have located to a new facility in the Nanjing Jiangning District. It's current production site in China will focus on R&D and Technology, Coperion explained.

Lanxess modernises its synthetic rubber business: after recent plans to introduce an EPDM bioplastic, the company now announced its intention to modernise the future headquarter facility of its global EPDM headquarter in Geleen, the Netherlands.

Akzo Nobel's paint and coatings production in the Netherlands is now completely powered by renewable energy. This step is part of the company's aim to become carbon neutral by 2050.

Speciality Chemicals company Lanxess announced plans to produce bioplastic EPDM from renewable sources by the end of 2011 at Triunfo, Brazil.