Good morning. I'm interested in how engineers actually use plant cost indexes like CEPCI in practice—curious how widely it's actually used vs. how it's talked about in textbooks. If you work with plant cost estimation or capital project budgeting, I'd love to hear how you actually use it, or if you don't, why not. Just reply to this email!

Making room for domestic BDO

A couple of weeks ago The European Commission introduced anti-dumping duties on imports of 1,4-butanediol (BDO) originating from the US, Saudi Arabia, and China, because overcapacity in China (and they just keep building more) plus low energy costs in the petrostates were making it impossible for the four BDO plants in the EU to compete. Following that decision, BASF immediately announced plans to expand its BDO production at its enormous site in Ludwigshafen, Germany. Lobbying at its finest! (That’s not a knock on lobbying.) [LINK]

More ethylene, chlor-alkali, and VCM

It was just a couple of months ago that Westlake announced plans to shutter some of its chlor-alkali plants along the US Gulf Coast, so it surprised me to see Shintech (Shin-Etsu's US subsidiary) announce a $3.4 billion expansion at its Plaquemine, Louisiana complex—a 625 KTA ethylene plant, a 310 KTA caustic soda plant, and a 500 KTA vinyl chloride monomer (VCM) plant, all targeting completion by 2030. The two moves aren't contradictory, though, they're two sides of the same rationalization. Westlake's assets have been pieced together through acquisitions over the years, while Shintech's Plaquemine complex was purpose-built and recently expanded by a single owner with deep pockets and a long time horizon. Shintech also benefits from a much larger captive market: Shin-Etsu is the world's largest PVC producer, so the VCM rolling off these new plants already has a home. [LINK]

Cyclo-olefin polymers and semiconductors

Tokyo-based specialty chemical company, Zeon, is building a second cyclo-olefin polymer (COP) plant in Japan to expand its capacity by 30%, likely in the low single-digit KTA range. This is a niche ultra-transparent material with near-zero water absorption—initially valuable for precision optics like smartphone lenses, but now the growth is tied to replacing glass in prefilled syringes and diagnostic chips, and its purity and low dielectric properties make it well suited for wafer transport containers. It’s a quiet bet that healthcare and chipmaking will keep pulling demand for a material most people have never heard of. [LINK]

Other Things Happened:

South Korea approved the Lotte-HD Hyundai Daesan merger, which includes shuttering Lotte's 1.1 million mt/y cracker. INEOS secured €300M in French government grants to decarbonize its Lavera cracker. AGC Vinythai commissioned an expanded chlor-alkali plant in Thailand, adding 220 KTA of caustic soda and doubling PVC capacity to 700 KTA. Fibrant is closing its 135 KTA caprolactam plant in the Netherlands — high costs, Asian competition. Indorama Ventures shut down a PTA plant in Rayong, Thailand. Nextchem launched a new PTMEG process technology for spandex production. UBE invested in Immaterial, a Cambridge spin-out doing CO₂ capture with monolithic metal-organic frameworks. UBE also backed CheomdanLab, a Korean startup upcycling semiconductor silicon waste into silicon nitride for EV bearings. De Nora and Tuleva signed a deal to build a major US electrochemical lithium hydroxide plant targeting 11 KTA. Clariant is partnering with Vertimass to scale zeolite catalysts for converting bio-alcohols into drop-in jet and diesel fuels. Carbon Direct and C2X are building a Louisiana plant to convert forestry residue into biomethanol, with Microsoft committed to 3.6M mt of carbon removal credits over 12 years.

Good morning. Thanks to everyone who reached out about joining us at Solugen (we’re hiring)—I know I haven’t replied to everyone yet, but I will shortly.

Lithium from the oilfield’s produced water

Just a couple of month’s ago, we saw LibertyStream’s 10 ton per year direct lithium extraction (DLE) unit working as expected. Today, the startup announced an agreement with Select Water Solutions (an oilfield water recycler and disposer) to build a 1,000 ton per year site at one of Select’s sites outside of Midland, Texas. I want to pause here: this is not the same “DLE” that we talked about last week, and it’s not the same as what Exxon is talking about doing. Those guys want to drill for lithium-containing brine trapped in carbonate formations—which means that they need to put up the capital to drill and build the entire water processing infrastructure before attempting to extract any lithium. But Select already owns water processing infrastructure and is already being paid to process water, so strapping on a LibertyStream lithium extraction unit in exchange for a royalty is a cheap option for Select: they keep getting paid to process water regardless, and if lithium economics hold up, they pick up incremental upside without having to drill a single well. [LINK]

Synthomer wants bio-based butanol

UK-based polymer binder producer, Synthomer, announced that they’re forming a partnership with Godavari Biorefineries to commercialize bio-based butyl acrylate, which Synthomer would make from Godavari’s bio-based butanol. Nothing crazy is going on here, it’s just nice to see that despite the sustainability trend that seems to be waning, things are still happening. I’m not sure what is ultimately driving this: how much of it is push from Godavari (who recently licensed Catalyxx’s new ethanol-to-butanol process technology) versus pull from Synthomer’s end customers? Or is Godavari’s bio-based butanol cheap enough that Synthomer can eat the green premium (or at least part of it) in exchange for growth? At the end of the day, Synthomer sells binders that are part of final formulations, so they can only do so much to make their customer’s final product bio-based. [LINK]

Converting more uranium in the US

Honeywell spinout, Solstice Advanced Materials, just announced that they’ll be expanding their site in Metropolis, Illinois to convert 20% more yellow cake (that’s mined U₃O₈) into uranium hexafluoride (UF₆). This makes sense: the US is interested in securing critical supply chains (which includes nuclear fuel) and this site in Illinois is the US’s only uranium hexafluoride conversion facility. I’m pretty sure that uranium hexafluoride is sold in gas cylinders to enrichment sites like Urenco’s in New Mexico, who then sell it to someone like Westinghouse who will convert it into uranium dioxide powder, which is pressed and sintered into hard fuel pellets for nuclear reactors—but if you’re more familiar with nuclear supply chains and want to fill me in, let me know! [LINK]

Vibe code with your voice

Vibe code by voice. Wispr Flow lets you dictate prompts, PRDs, bug reproductions, and code review notes directly in Cursor, Warp, or your editor of choice. Speak instructions and Flow will auto-tag file names, preserve variable names and inline identifiers, and format lists and steps for immediate pasting into GitHub, Jira, or Docs. That means less retyping, fewer copy and paste errors, and faster triage. Use voice to dictate prompts and directions inside Cursor or Warp and get developer-ready text with file name recognition and variable recognition built in. For deeper context and examples, see our Vibe Coding article on wisprflow.ai. Try Wispr Flow for engineers.

Try Wispr Flow

Other Things Happened:

Suez is looking to convert sewage sludge into biochar. BASF declared a force majeure on several Oxo-C4 products from the winter storm. Evonik is expanding its hydroxyl-terminated polybutadiene (HTPB) capacity. The EU is expanding its recycling definition to include chemical recycling. India is getting another hydrofluoroolefin plant. Invista is building a demonstration-scale nylon 66 recycling plant. Aduro’s hydrochemolytic recycling pilot plant started up. Gurjarat Fluorochemicals is building a battery materials plant in Oman. Hydrite is expanding its site in South Carolina. Nextchem is launching a new process technology for making polytetramethylene ether glycol (PTMEG). Kemira is acquiring a coagulant manufacturer in Germany.

Good morning. Some good news in the world of chemical startups today! Also, if you’re interested in joining me full-time at Solugen, we’re looking to hire an analytical generalist with deck and model-making chops to help me with business operations (and more). Let me know if you’re interested.

Ammobia raised a seed round

We may be an entire century down the ammonia production learning curve, but Ammobia thinks we still have a ways to go: the startup just raised a $7.5m seed round (primarily from the corporate venture world, e.g. including Shell and Chevron) to build a pilot scale version of their novel reactor, which they expect to deliver at 50% lower capex and with 10-40% lower opex per pound. They aren’t being explicit about what drives that innovation, but their pending patent suggests that they are using a blend of catalyst and sorbent to effectively remove ammonia as it forms (driving the reaction forward, increasing single pass conversion, reducing recycle, and therefore reducing reactor size). Not sure if this concept has been tried in another process… let me know if you’re familiar. [LINK]

Syzygy’s offtake agreement

Trafigura, a Singapore-based commodities trading firm, just signed a binding 6-year offtake agreement to buy 100% of the biogas-derived sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) from Syzygy’s first commercial site (which will be located in Uruguay). Syzygy is trying to commercialize a photocatalytic alternative to syngas production—which, to me, sounds like pseudoscience (mostly because photocatalysis wasn’t part of my undergraduate chemical engineering education), but I’m not sure it actually matters—Uruguay lacks domestic oil production, imports all of their jet fuel, and has an ample supply of biogas from dairy farms (Syzygy is going from biogas to syngas). This looks like a match made in heaven to me: it’s a cheap option for Trafigura that costs enough to finance Syzygy’s experiment, and I hope the best for them because I prefer the world where photocatalysis works at scale. [LINK]

Lilac’s offtake agreement

Similarly, Traxys, a Luxembourg-based commodities trading firm, signed a binding 10-year offtake agreement to buy 100% of the lithium carbonate from Lilac Solutions’ first commercial site (which will be located at Utah’s Great Salt Lake). Lilac is commercializing a direct lithium extraction (DLE) process technology that performed well at both pilot and demonstration scale. Like Syzygy, this is generally low risk for the trading company, but it’s the sort of thing that makes FIDs happen. And we want more FIDs. [LINK]

Other Things Happened:

Cemvita and Radix want to convert glycerol into SAF. Lummus is now licensing a PMMA depolymerization process. Arlanxeo started up a new hydrogenated nitrile butadiene rubber plant in China. ExxonMobil started up its third plastic recycling unit at its Baytown, Texas site. Givaudan is going to blend more fragrances in Mexico. Sika is building five (5) new sites across the globe. Covestro just debottlenecked their TDI plant in China. Dow Chemical laid of 13% of its workforce. New Iridium is rebranding as Kemvera. Nigeria will be home to the world’s largest urea plant.

Good morning. Sending out a very brief Saturday edition this time—work is just a little busy right now. In fact, it’s so busy that we’re hiring! If you’re interested in joining me full-time at Solugen, we’re looking to hire an analytical generalist with deck and model-making chops to help me with business operations (and more). Let me know if you’re interested.

UPM is making sugars from wood

At a high level, you can think of biomass (plants, trees, etc.) as being composed of two types of polymers: polymers for energy storage, and polymers for structure. Your energy storage polymers are amylose and amylopectin (jointly referred to as starch) and your structural polymers are cellulose, hemicellulose, and lignin (jointly referred to as lignocellulose). In an ideal world striving for sustainability, we’d attempt to replace petroleum-derived products with lignocellulose-derived products because lignocellulose doesn’t compete with demand for food (i.e. we can eat starch, but we can’t eat lignocellulose). However, lignocellulose is difficult to valorize chemically: the Kraft pulping process uses caustic to separate cellulose from the lignin and hemicellulose, but the remaining lignin and hemicellulose mixture (which is called “black liquor”) has historically been too costly to separate. So, to solve that separation issue, Finland’s premier pulping company, UPM, is rethinking the entire process—instead of using caustic up front, they are doing a hydrothermal step that doesn’t modify the lignin and hemicellulose so much that the black liquor is rendered inseparable. The details aren’t clear to me, but after about a year of commissioning, that separation unit is officially up and running, and UPM is officially converting all of that cellulose and hemicellulose into sugars. This could be a big deal. UPM intends on converting those sugars into glycols (MEG and MPG), and they can still bring that lignin to market by selling it as a functional filler. [LINK]

Other Things Happened:

A new maleic anhydride, malic acid, and fumaric acid plant is coming to West Virginia. Loop Industries and its JV partner awarded Toyo with the EPC contract for its first plant, set to be built in India. Capchem is building a carbonate solvent plant (for lithium ion batteries) in Saudia Arabia. Domo Chemicals filed for insolvency in Germany. Westlake is closing three chlorovinyl plants along the US Gulf Coast. Mitsubishi Chemical is increasing its carbon fiber production. SABIC is divesting its European petrochemical business and some of its engineering thermoplastic business. BASF is starting up its new steam cracker in Zhanjiang, China. Corteva and BP just formed a biofuel feedstock joint venture. Syensqo and Axens are working together on solid-state batteries. Phillips66 is going to handle the decommissioning of the Lindsey Refinery next door to its refinery in the UK. Mosaic sold its potash mine in New Mexico. Clariant is divesting its business in Venezuela.

Good morning. Today we’re talking about valorizing the magnesium found in brine under Arkansas, and valorizing the lithium found in oilfield brine in the Permian. Brines are where it’s at, apparently.

Magrathea is putting capital to work

Up until the late 1990s, the US was the world’s leading producer of magnesium thanks to Dow Chemical, who had pioneered an electrochemical process to extract it from seawater. The tide shifted at the turn of the millennium when China began commercializing the Pidgeon process—a method that crushes dolomite and ferrosilicon, throws them into coal-fired furnaces, and distills magnesium metal off as a vapor. Now, two decades later, China produces over 90% of the world’s magnesium, while the US produces none (literally zero, we just closed the last magneisum plant). This is a big deal. Even if magnesium never becomes a sustainable, lightweight “Aluminum 2.0,” it is already essential for aluminum alloy, titanium sponge, and high-quality steel production—all of which are inputs used to produce aircraft, ships, and missiles. That’s why the US Department of War handed Magrathea $19.6m a few years ago: the bet is that an optimized version of Dow’s electrochemical process can be re-commercialized domestically. (Of course, we could just stand up Pidgeon-based plants, but maybe those are best kept in regions where coal, labor, and environmental externalities are cheap.) Anyways, the exciting news I have for you today is that Magrathea plans to build its first commercial-scale site using tail brine from the Smackover Formation in Arkansas, and they will do this in partnership with Tetra Technologies. [LINK]

LibertyStream wants dirty oilfield water

“Oilfield brine” is a relatively new concept to me. I didn’t know that for every barrel of oil produced from fracked Permian shale in West Texas, at least four barrels of water come up with it. That’s a lot of water. Wouldn’t it be nice if that water came up crystal clear and free of impurities? Suddenly oil production would have an undeniably positive externality (in this case: converting Texas desert into an oasis). Unfortunately that’s not reality—this water is extremely salty, contains dissolved hydrocarbons, metals (including lithium), radioisotopes, and trace oilfield fracking chemicals. It needs to be cleaned up before it can be used or re-injected deep underground (via salt water disposals). Much of this water treatment infrastructure exists in the Permian simply out of necessity, and because the demand for lithium-ion batteries is booming (primarily driven by electric vehicle demand), some folks are looking to strap direct lithium extraction (DLE) units onto these water treatment facilities. Of course, the price of lithium is wildly variable, as is the lithium concentration in these oilfield brines, but that hasn’t stopped LibertyStream from taking a stab at the opportunity. They just announced that they commissioned a unit capable of processing 10,000 barrels of brine per day into a lithium chloride eluate. They’ll need to convert that to lithium carbonate or hydroxide to sell it, but at the very least this is a great example of a company trying to valorize a waste stream, which is basically the mantra for all ChemEs. [LINK]

Other Things Happened:

ExxonMobil and BASF are teaming up on methane pyrolysis. UPM is launching a bio-based pigment as an alternative to carbon black. LanzaJet successfully produced jet fuel from ethanol at their site in Georgia. Air Liquide started up an ammonia-cracking pilot plant. Ineos is investing in their cracker site in France. Novonesis and Thyssenkrupp Uhde are trying to commercialize a new fat-splitting enzyme for fatty acid producers. Ford Motors and SK On have decided to end their joint venture, which had plans to build battery factories in Kentucky and Tennessee. Ascend has decided on a new CEO and is set to emerge from bankruptcy soon. ADNOC completed its acquisition of Covestro. Cargill sold its chlor-alkali plant in Eddyville, Iowa. Japan’s Asahi Kasei has decided to wind down its HMD production. AkzoNobel and Axalta are merging to create an even more enormous coatings company. Hexion sold its US Gulf Coast formalin business to Ancala. Stepan sold its plant in Lake Providence, Louisiana. Kazakhstan (number one exporter of potassium) is about to get its first urea plant. BASF expanded its production of alkyl polyglucosides in Thailand.

Good morning. Lots of commentary in this one, but that’s just how it goes when the news itself isn’t all that interesting. Hope everyone has a great weekend!

Electrochemical CO2 capture

I don’t cover CO2 capture quite as much anymore. This is partly because companies aren’t pushing as many emission-related press releases as they were a few years ago, and partly because I’m marginally less naive and don’t want to broadcast what I deem as merely PR. Sadly, the fact of the matter is that capturing CO2 is a cost nobody wants to incur, and converting CO2 into something useful is very expensive, so investment in the space generally tracks with government interest. That being said, something in the news did pique my interest: there’s a start up called Verdox that is capturing CO2 in a sort of electrochemical swing system, where two electrolyzers operate in parallel, alternating which one captures CO2 on its electrodes and which releases it. My interest here is borne out of first principles: the operational cost of capturing CO2 is roughly equal to the cost of energy, and, in isolation, electrochemical systems have lower theoretical energy requirements than thermochemical systems. Now, that doesn’t mean that electrochemistry is the right way to scale CO2 capture, nor does it mean that there will only one solution—it just seems like the right technology to be developing. Anyways, Verdox recently demonstrated that their technology works at an aluminum smelting plant. [LINK]

Origin Materials secured some financing

When I began writing this newsletter 5 years ago, Origin Materials had yet to go public via SPAC, and they were focused on the valorization of lignocellulose to furans (where furans would serve as platform molecules for markets that Origin could develop). Post-SPAC, Origin had the cash to build a demonstration-scale site, which started up and saw some success, but the macro environment changed and the cost of capital soared, which made an investment into a full-scale site look more like a death wish. Fortunately Origin was already iterating product development downstream from furan production, and PET bottle caps suddenly became the company’s best route to cash flow break even. This seems to be going fairly well for them—they just secured some debt and equipment-backed financing and expect to be run rate EBITDA break even sometime in 2027. This is a big deal! It’s not like raising money from VCs or SPACs is easy, but those sources of capital don’t require the same cold hard facts that banks do. [LINK]

MP Materials CEO talks down the hype

Last month we talked about how MP Materials was one of a few US-based companies seeing direct investment from the US government. Since then, apparently the share price for various stocks in the rare earth metals supply chain have seen huge swings as retail investors speculate that yet another Department of Defense (DoD) partnership announcement is on the horizon. The CEO of MP Materials recently spoke up on the issue, urging investors to keep structural economics in mind. In short: the market price for rare earths is simply not high enough for US-based miners to become profitable, and a key reason why MP Materials has a fighting chance is simply because they are vertically integrated. He’s basically saying that not all future DoD partnerships have nearly as much potential as the one he’s in charge of. [LINK]

Other Things Happened:

The Chemical Safety Board (CSB) is opening an investigation into the recent explosion at a C-4 and TNT producer’s site in Tennessee. Ascend agreed to purchase lithium carbonate from Trafigura. Lotte Chemical just finished building a new petrochemical complex in Indonesia. Indorama formed a new JV to continue its growth into textile recycling. Mitsubishi Chemical increased their electronic material production capacity in Thailand. TotalEnergies’ refinery in Port Arthur tested out a new AI-assisted control room technology that Honeywell developed. Turkmenistan is getting a new ammonia and urea plant. LyondellBasell built a new cast film line at their technology center in Cincinnati. Clariant and Fuhua are developing novel flame retardants together. LG Chem and Zeiss are working together on photopolymers and holographic displays. Evonik doubled its capacity for long chain polyamides in China. Syensqo is divesting its oil and gas business to SNF Group.

Good morning, and Happy Halloween! Today’s edition is all about a weird line of business called catalyst “rejuvenation” (not to be confused with regeneration). It’s tied to some interesting history and I think it’s pretty cool. Let me know if you agree!

Bringing catalysts back to life

So the news here is that Axens is buying Ketjen out of their joint venture, Eurecat. That’s notable for two reasons: (a) Eurecat is one of only two companies in the world (Evonik is the other) that can rejuvenate spent hydrotreating catalysts, and (b) Ketjen (formerly Albemarle’s catalysts business) is the company that pioneered this rejuvenation technology in the first place. But the real reason I’m writing about it is because there’s some fun history behind this whole “rejuvenation” thing and I wasn’t sure if this topic would ever come up.

If you studied ChemE in undergrad, you probably learned that catalysts work by lowering the activation energy of the reaction, and that this magic occurs at actual physical sites on the surface of the catalyst—but that’s about it. It turns out that in the world of supported heterogeneous catalysis, optimizing the morphology of these surface sites is the name of the game.

For context: throughout the 20th century, hydrotreating catalysts were the workhorse for cleaning up fuels, particularly removing sulfur from diesel. They worked well enough, and could reliably get sulfur levels down to ~500 ppm. But in the early 2000s, governments introduced new regulations that mandated sulfur levels in diesel to be <10 ppm. To hit that number with the existing catalyst (referred to as “Type I”), refiners were going to need roughly 3x as much—which implies bigger reactors (CapEx!).

But fortunately some clever folks at Albemarle figured out a way for refiners to defer that CapEx and absorb the cost in OpEx instead. The key was changing the mechanism by which the metals (nickel and molybdenum) were deposited onto the support surface (alumina). Historically, metals were deposited onto the catalyst support as dissolved salts. Albemarle switched to chelated metal precursors, which allowed the metal to form longer, more active structures on the surface. That shift unlocked a step-change in activity, which meant that refiners could use their same reactors as long as they started using Albemarle’s new “Type II” catalyst.

Catalysts still age, though. Active metal sites agglomerate, migrate, and lose dispersion. So a few years after they were brought to the market, refiners started seeing activation fall, and they looked to a traditional technique for extending spent catalyst lifetime: thermal regeneration. But this basically brought the catalyst back to Type I activity, not Type II. The only way back go Type II activity was if you redispersed those metals with a chelant solution again—and thus “rejuvenation” was born, and rejuvenating catalyst became Eurecat’s core business.

Now, as to why Ketjen wants out of this business and why Axens wants more of it, I have no idea. If you have a clue, let me know. [LINK]

Other Things Happened:

Aclara Resources is separating heavy rare earth metals in Louisiana. BASF built an ammonium hydroxide plant in Germany. Celanese is divesting its electronic inks and pastes business for $500m. Elkem is curtailing its ferrosilicon production in Norway and Iceland. ExxonMobil secured permits from the EPA to sequester CO2 with injection wells near Beaumont, Texas. Sumitomo is acquiring Tanaka Chemical, a cathode material producer. Kraton will no longer make hydrogenated styrenic block copolymers at its site in Berre, France. Braskem’s board approved an ethylene and polyethylene expansion. Evonik is starting up a new fumed alumina plant in Yokkaichi, Japan. Saint-Gobain opened a new gypsum mine in British Columbia and expanded its existing mine in Florida. Venator is selling its titanium oxide site in Greatham, England. Malaysia’s first melamine plant is about to start up. BASF is starting up their new neopentyl glycol plant in Zhanjiang, China.

Good morning. If you’re in the market for an unused electrolyzer/liquefaction plant (or any of the relevant equipment), let me know. Happy to put you in touch with someone who can help you out.

Teamwork to make 5-HMF work

Furans have been mentioned in this newsletter quite a few times. Origin Materials was trying to convert cellulose into chloromethylfurfural (CMF), Avantium was trying to convert fructose into HMF, and together they were working to convert either CMF or HMF into FDCA—which would then be polymerized with ethylene glycol (MEG) to make a polyethylene terephthalate replacement: polyethylene furanoate (PEF). But the real story here is that furans (CMF and its reduced forms) can be converted into a wide variety of chemicals, giving furans the potential to be platform molecules in the same way that ethylene or propylene are platform molecules. And while Origin is currently commercializing PET-based bottle caps (so they can generate cash soon), the furan dream lives on: Michelin is leading an EU-funded project to build a 3 KTA HMF plant with help from various research centers and universities, Arkema, Avantium, and now Kraton. The idea being that the joint effort will produce enough HMF to expand application development. [LINK]

Replacing coal with wood-based pellets

While the aggressive push towards sustainability has flamed out a bit in the US, plenty of other nations are still pursuing their decarbonization goals. For example, Japan is targeting a 60% reduction in emissions by 2035 (from 2013 levels), and part of that plan involves tackling the low hanging fruit: coal power plants. But instead of shutting down plants, another way to reduce their emission footprint is to replace some of that coal feedstock with thermally-upgraded wood pellets (which can be blended with coal at levels between 5-20%). There is some precedent for this—there’s a 70 KTA plant in Norway and a 75 KTA plant in Thailand—but now Japan’s Idemitsu has started up a 120 KTA plant in Vietnam to valorize their abundant supply of acacia trees, with hopes of scaling up to 3,000 KTA. [LINK]

Nouryon is making more metal alkyls

I saw that Nouryon doubled its production of triethylaluminum (TEA)—the primary catalyst used to polymerize propylene—at its site in Jiaxing, China, which reminded me of a fun demonstration I saw while interning at a polypropylene plant about 6 years ago: TEA made contact with water, which resulted in a violent explosion. It was very Red Asphalt in spirit. The point was just to impress on us how dangerous even a little water can be for a polypropylene plant. Anyways, expanding TEA production just tracks packaging and automotive-driven demand for polyolefins. A mildly more interesting tidbit is that Nouryon now plans to make modified methylaluminoxane (MMAO) at this same site in a couple of years. MMAO is the main catalyst used to produce various polyolefin elastomers (POEs), which are used as encapsulant layers in solar panels. [LINK]

Other Things Happened:

Sasol is commercializing a new non-ionic surfactant made from oil derived from black soldier fly larvae. According to a local union, Braskem has stopped chlor-alkali production. Polyplastics is being absorbed into Daicel. An India-based company is expanding its dilute hydrofluoric acid plant from 5 to 10 KTA, and another just started up a 35 KTA ECH plant. LG Chem is no longer producing HDPE in Daesan, South Korea. The US dropped new sanctions to limit Iran’s ability to export petroleum-based products. Clariant is expanding production of its halogen-free flame retardants in China. Poland’s Orlen offered $280m to buy Grupa Azoty’s polyolefin business.

Good morning. If you happen to know something about MXDA or PET catalysis, please respond to this email! Hope everyone has a great weekend.

European MXDA is on pause

Meta-xylylenediamine (MXDA) is new to me. I hadn’t heard of it until someone mentioned it to me last week. I did a little digging and didn’t find much. But what I did find still interests me: MXDA is an aromatic diamine with very limited production—from what I can tell, only Mitsubishi Chemical actually manufactures this stuff (they commercialized it in the late 1970s), and they do it exclusively in Japan. It’s been quietly used in high-performance coatings, adhesives, and related systems for decades as a sort of “premium” curing agent in cases where a conventional aliphatic or fully aromatic amine doesn’t meet the mark. Anyways, apparently the largest end market for MXDA is in Europe, so Mitsubishi started building a new plant in the Netherlands in 2022. But now, citing delays, increased labor costs, and “changes in the MXDA market environment”, Mitsubishi is pausing the project. [LINK]

The US government is taking stakes

Over the last 4 months the US government has started acting less like a passive regulator or subsidy-provider and more like a capital investor in strategically vital sectors (e.g. lithium, rare earths, semiconductors). It was MP Materials in July, Intel in August, and now both Trilogy Metals and Lithium Americas in October; it’s a big shift—instead of using strictly carrots and sticks, the US is directly acquiring parts of the means of production. The hope is that by sharing upside (via warrants, equity, offtake guarantees) the government can better steer private investment, internalize externalities (security, supply chain sovereignty), and ensure alignment of incentives. [LINK]

A new PET catalyst

PET, aka recycling number 1, is one of the world’s favorite plastics. It makes up pretty much all your water bottles and the polyester in your clothes. We make a whopping 90,000 KTA of this stuff every year. Anyways, nearly all of it is made using antimony (Sb)-based homogeneous catalysis (e.g. antimony trioxide or antimony acetate). Antimony works great, but it’s a heavy metal with toxicity and regulatory baggage, and it’s also a strategically tight element (China controls most of the supply and has started restricting exports). For decades researchers have tried to swap it out, but nobody has managed to find a scalable alternative—until now! Clariant says it’s figured it out with titanium while simultaneously claiming lower reaction temps (lowering OpEx is a great pitch if you’re asking someone to spend CapEx). [LINK]

Other Things Happened:

The Carlyle Group is acquiring a majority stake in BASF’s coatings business at an $8.9bn valuation. LG Chem is buying Toray out of their Hungary-based battery separator JV for $204m. Sibur is expanding its synthetic rubber catalyst capacity in Tatarstand, Russia. The U.S. government is taking a 5% stake in the Lithium Americas Thacker Pass project. Lion Elastomers is closing its butadiene-based elastomers plant in Orange, Texas. Borealis is expanding its XLPE production in Sweden. Sojitz invested in Genomatica in hopes brining bio-based nylon-6 to market faster. Givaudan, a flavor and fragrance company, just started construction of a new plant for the food and beverage industry outside of Cincinnati, Ohio. Dow Chemical had a fire at its polyethylene plant in Freeport, Texas. Clariant unveiled some new titanium-based catalysts for polyester production. The 2025 chemistry Nobel was awarded to the developers of metal-organic frameworks (MOFs). Plastic Energy is selling its plastic pyrolysis by-product as a carbon black substitute. Ineos is shutting down two more plants in Europe.

Good morning. A few interesting bits of news today! Heads up: I tried to explain how magnets are critical in our electrified world in the second story. I’m sure a few experts who read this newsletter will have a critique or two, but hopefully it gets the point across.

Occidental is selling OxyChem

After more than half a century under Occidental Petroleum’s umbrella, OxyChem (the business built around its 1968 acquisition of chlor-alkali pioneer Hooker Chemical) will soon stand on its own—Buffet’s Berkshire is aquiring OxyChem for $9.7 billion in an all-cash transaction. The split is mostly administrative: the production of chlorine and caustic soda (sodium hydroxide) has little overlap with Occidental’s upstream operations—the largest tangible overlap is probably the use of these chemicals to treat produced water from fracking, but the benefits of that cost advantage are far outweighed by the balance sheet benefit that Occidental will reap from paying down a third of its long term debt, even if they need to write down some of those direct air capture (DAC) projects. [LINK]

New magnets in Minnesota

My model for electricity generation is crude: natural gas is burned to make steam, the steam rotates turbine blades on a shaft, the shaft spins magnets around coils of wire, and the changing field pushes electrons back and forth, producing an alternating current. The reverse is also true: a battery can push electrons through coil wire near a magnet, and the interaction between the coil’s field and the magnet’s field creates torque. The point I’m trying to make here is that magnets are important in an electrified world, and I’m making that point because there’s a startup called Niron Magnetics trying to make permanent magnets from iron nitride (instead of relying on rare-earths, which present various supply chain issues), and they just broke ground in Minnesota. [LINK]

Progress for a pilot scale electric cracker

A quick primer: steam crackers break down relatively stable hydrocarbons (like naphtha or ethane) into reactive components (ethylene, propylene, etc.) that are later combined to make most of the world's chemicals and materials. It’s a very-valuable operation, but also a very-energy-intensive one, and right now we provide that energy via heat, and we make that heat by combusting hydrocarbons like natural gas (which produces a lot of CO2). That heat production is responsible for about half of all petrochemical emissions, which makes “electric cracking” something like the holy grail of the petrochemical industry. Scaling such a transformational technology is the sort of thing that happens over the course of decades, and Coolbrook keeps chugging along: they just demonstrated that its pilot-scale electric cracker can handle plastic waste pyrolysis oil. [LINK]

Other Things Happened:

Röhm replaced the sulfuric acid plant that was damaged by a fire in Worms, Germany. Thanks to some new tariffs and anti-dumping duties, Syensqo restarted its synthetic vanillin unit in France. Solvay doubled its electronic-grade hydrogen peroxide production. ExxonMobil bought a US-based synthetic graphite producer. Southern Ionics is expanding its sodium metabisulfite production in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. LyondellBasell is now offering its medical-grade polymers to healthcare and pharmaceutical companies in the US. Advancion plans to make more 3-(n-morpholino)propanesulfonic acid (a zwitterionic biological buffer) at its site in Louisiana. Mitsui acquired Ketjen’s polyolefin co-catalyst business, and Ketjen just expanded its zeolite plant in Bayport, Texas. Formosa just commissioned a horizontal polypropylene reactor at its site in Point Comfort, Texas. CPChem agreed to buy graphene from NanoXplore for a new oil and gas drilling lubricant. Mitsubishi Heavy Industries piloted a membrane dehydration system for ethanol. Ineos decided to mothball its chloromethane plant in France.

Good morning. Today I’m just covering Cascade Bio because it’s no longer and everyday thing that a startup secures more funding (unless, of course, your startup is doing something related to AI).

Cascade closed their seed round

Most large-scale chemical production still relies on traditional metal catalysts, but at the high-value end of the chain—in fragrances, flavors, and pharmaceuticals—you’ll find nature’s catalyst in use: enzymes. Their appeal is clear: near-perfect selectivity under mild conditions. The drawback is cost. Enzymes are expensive to design, produce, and stabilize, which is why they usually show up in two places: inside cells, where metabolic pathways churn out products like citric acid from sugar, or outside cells, immobilized on a solid support to make a reusable biocatalyst.

Immobilization is the more interesting of the two. Once an enzyme is fixed to a support, it can be reused across many cycles, which makes it behave more like a catalyst than a consumable. That shifts costs toward CapEx instead of OpEx and avoids the inefficiency of moving excess water through the product stream.

The problem is that immobilization is hard. Most enzymes can’t be stabilized effectively, and even when they can, performance tends to collapse outside of narrow temperature or pH windows. That’s why only a handful of robust enzymes have made it into industrial use, with Novozymes’ 435 lipase (which is widely used in the flavor and fragrance industry) being the classic example.

Cascade Bio is trying to expand that set. And to date, they’ve proven that they’re new polymeric supports can improve enzyme stability on over 30 different enzymes—which means that if the price is right, it’s likely that they’ll be able to convert customers using existing biocatalysts (like Novozymes 435) to a Cascade equivalent. (Tony has a good write up that includes some of Cascade’s data over here!)

I’m writing about them today because I’m happy to see that they raised a $2.8 million seed round (in this economy??) and secured another $3.2 million in non-dilutive funding to move from lab to pilot scale. My hope is that immobilization shifts from a fragile, case-specific exercise to something closer to a systematic design problem: engineer the enzyme, match it with a suitable polymer, and run it at scale. Time will tell! [LINK]

Other Things Happened:

DuPont is selling their Aramids Business (Kevlar and Nomex) to Arclin at a $1.8bn valuation. Lanxess is going to start making rubber processing promoters at its site in Goose Creek, South Carolina. Ingevity is selling their South Carolina crude tall oil refinery to Mainstream Pine Products. Clariant is going to supply the catalyst for the world’s largest electric steam methane reformer. Ecovyst is selling its advanced materials and catalyst business to Technip Energies. USA BioEnergy is planning to use Johnson Matthey and Honeywell’s technology to make synthetic paraffinic kerosene (SPK) at its Bon Wier, Texas site. Symrise just started up a new bio-based pentylene glycol unit at their site in Granada, Spain. Metsa is capturing carbon at one of its pulp mills in Finland.

Good morning. Today I’m reverting to an older format of The Column in which I cover a few stories very lightly. Let me know what you think!

Arkema’s new HFO plant

After 4 years of construction and commissioning, Arkema has officially transitioned its Calvert City, Kentucky hydrofluorocarbon (HFC) plant into a 15 KTA hydrofluoroolefin (HFO) plant. This is a sort of a big deal—HFOs are basically 4th generation refrigerants (think air conditioners) and blowing agents (think sprayable insulation foam). Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) were the worst for the ozone layer, hydrochlorofluorocarbons (HCFCs) were marginally better, then came HFCs, and now HFOs (which are highly reactive in the troposphere because of their double-bonded backbone, which prevents them from reaching ozone in the stratosphere). It’s also only one of two HFO plants in the US! [LINK]

Selling germanium to Lockhead Martin

Right now China is responsible for ~70% of the world’s germanium production (most of the rest is in Canada and Belgium), which is a concern for Lockhead Martin, who needs germanium optical blanks, polished lenses, and IR detector wafers from their tier-1 suppliers for the thermal imagers, night-vision, and targeting systems used in Lockhead’s portfolio of aircraft and missiles. So, as the march towards a “China-free” critical minerals supply chain for the US continues, Korea Zinc has signed an agreement (it’s just an MOU) with Lockhead to ensure that all of Lockhead’s tier-1 suppliers can get their hands on the germanium they need. [LINK]

Mura to recycle plastic in Singapore

When it comes to the molecular recycling of plastic waste, we mostly talk about polymer-generic pyrolysis or some polymer-specific depolymerization (like methanolysis for PET). Mura’s process sits closer to polymer-generic pyrolysis, but it has a twist: instead of applying heat externally to a reactor filled with plastic (via steam jackets), they plan to apply that heat internally (via supercritical steam). Rumor has it that internal heat scales well (case in point: giant steam cracker complexes), which is why I believe Dow Chemical wanted to partner with Mura a few years ago. The two companies were planning on building a 120 KTA plant at Dow’s site in Germany, but now Dow is shutting down that site, so that partnership is currently in limbo. Regardless, it seems that Mura has enough interest from other folks to keep the party going—they just announced plans to build a new site in Singapore. [LINK]

Other Things Happened:

Covestro has officially acquired a Swiss multilayer adhesive films company. Sibur produced its first test batch of hexene at its plant in Nizhnekamsk. Ketjen introduced an iron-tolerant catalyst for FCC units. Poet acquired an ethanol plant from Green Plains located in northwestern Tennessee. ABB will handle the automations at Citroniq’s new bio-based polypropylene plant. Evonik completed the construction of its 100 KTA alkoxides plant in Singapore. Vietnam might switch to ethanol-blended gasoline, opening the door to more US imports. ExxonMobil is now producing Group III base oils at its Baytown facility. A new PET recycling plant was just built in Florida. CB&I won the contract to supply Lithium Nevada with 36 tanks for their Thacker Pass lithium site. Asahi Kasei is expanding its production of photosensitive polyimides in Japan. Kao completed construction of a 20 KTA tertiary amine plant in Pasadena, Texas.

Good morning. Today we’re talking about the valorization of CO2! It’s a notoriously hard molecule to make money from, but that isn’t stopping people from trying.

Trying to make money from CO2

Using CO2 as a feedstock almost never makes economic sense: it costs a lot of energy to break those carbon-oxygen bonds, and your potential products are all low-value C1 molecules (carbon monoxide, formic acid, methanol, or methane). The story changes in the few cases where CO2 is integrated into a larger chemical process (e.g. in the production of urea or polycarbonate polyols), but those niche cases don’t scale to a broader climate solution—the CO2 sources are rarely co-located with the right large plants, and the mass balance between emissions and chemical demand just doesn’t line up.

But if you were able to reduce that CO2 to a C1 molecule, such as formic acid, in an extremely efficient manner, then maybe you could break even at competitive market prices (roughly $0.20-$0.50/lb). It’s just hard to sell low-value chemicals like this because when prices are this low, the cost to transport the product (let’s call it $0.05-$0.10/lb) ends up being a large fraction of the delivered price, so you need to be close to your customer.

In principle I like electrolysis as a means of reducing CO2 because it has the lowest theoretical energy cost (thermochemical processes aren’t particularly efficient, they just scale well on the CapEx side), and when your feedstock is free, almost all of your OpEx is energy, so it’s the only lever we really have to reduce production costs. After that it really just comes down to getting creative with your product.

Anyways, all of that is just a prelude to this news: OCOChem, a Washington-based startup using CO2 and water to produce formic acid via electrolysis, just signed a deal with ADM to set up their first demonstration-scale plant at ADM’s ethanol plant in Decatur, Illinois. This is a big deal in the world of chemicals! And while the market for formic acid isn’t particularly enticing, if the technology works well at ethanol-plant-scale I have faith in ADM and OCOChem’s joint ability to develop a market for formic acid or some derivative of it. [LINK]

Other Things Happened:

Corbion just signed an agreement to develop Astaxanthin from algae fermentation. A graphene producer is moving its headquarters to Austin, Texas. Sumitomo started up its pilot-scale ethanol to propylene plant. Eastman Chemical is going to build a cellulose acetate yarn manufacturing facility in China. CPChem finished building its low viscosity PAO expansion in Belgium. Clariant is expanding its portfolio of plastics stabilizers. Imperial Oil just started making renewable diesel at a refinery in Canada. IFF is selling its soy and lecithin business to Bunge. LG Chem and Eni broke ground on South Korea’s first renewable diesel and SAF plant. BASF and CATL signed an agreement related to cathode active materials. Anellotech is looking to commercialize it’s proven plastic-waste-recycling technology. SNF acquired Midland-based Obsidian Chemical Solutions.

Good morning. Today we’re talking about molybdenum—a metal that has never been mentioned in the 5 years of this newsletter’s existence. (No shade to molybdenum, it’s just not the most eventful corner of the metals world.) Also, quick programming note: I’ll be traveling next week and won’t be able to send out an update. So expect the next edition on August 8th!

Making the switch to moly

Industrial gas producer, Air Liquide, just started up a new plant in Hwaseong, South Korea to produce molybdenum‑containing precursors for two early adopters in the semiconductor industry. It’s the second plant of its kind, with the first being built in Japan just two years ago.

For context, the world consumes roughly 300 KTA of molybdenum every year—roughly on par with metals like cobalt and tin, but an order of magnitude below nickel and lead, and two orders of magnitude below copper and iron. All of it starts the same way: mining molybdenite ore (MoS₂), concentrating it, roasting to molybdenum trioxide (MoO₃), and then reducing or converting that oxide into metal or ferromolybdenum. Almost all of this ends up in steel alloys, where small moly additions (roughly 1-10% of the alloy) boost high‑temperature strength, hardenability, and corrosion resistance.

Air Liquide isn’t doing any mining or roasting; they are likely buying molybdenum oxide or metal, and using it to synthesize and refine a solid molybdenum oxychloride–type precursor (perhaps molybdenum dichloride dioxide). They then sell that precursor to someone like Samsung, who loads the solid into a canister and vaporizes it in a process called atomic layer deposition, depositing a thin film of molybdenum still bound to oxygen and chlorine ligands. In a subsequent step, those ligands are stripped away, leaving behind an ultra-thin film of pure metallic molybdenum.

At this point, the use of molybdenum in semiconductor production is still in the R&D stage, but most industry experts seem to think that a shift from tungsten to molybdenum is inevitable because tungsten presents issues as transistors get smaller (issues that moly solves!). So if moly does graduate from promising to production, Air Liquide’s bet is that controlling both the molecule and the delivery hardware at scale will lock them in as the default supplier when the industry finally flips the switch. [LINK]

Other Things Happened:

Shell restarted their hydrodesulfurization unit after an unplanned outage earlier last weekend. BASF completed the construction of their new glacial acetic acid (GAA) and butyl acrylate plants at their Zhanjiang Verbund site. Sumitomo acquired AGC Group’s polycarbonate business. Mangrove Lithium announced plans to build a new lithium hydroxide and carbonate plant in Canada. Par Pacific formed a joint venture with Mitsubishi and ENEOS to make renewable diesel and SAF in Hawaii. Kemira announced plans to produce more aluminum chlorohydrate (ACH) in Spain. Veolia acquired Chameleon Industries. A new caustic soda plant in India will use Thyssenkrupp Nucera’s process technology. Syensqo and Cylib produced high-purity lithium hydroxide from battery waste.

Good morning. Today we’re talking about a Cargill joint venture that just started up a new chemical plant in Iowa that will use their corn-based dextrose as a feedstock.

Bio-based Spandex begins in Iowa

What we call “Spandex” is actually an elastomeric polyether-polyurea copolymer invented by DuPont in the late 1950s. DuPont sold the business to Invista in the early 2000s, which in turn sold it to a Chinese private equity firm in 2019. That firm rebranded the company as The LYCRA Company (fun fact: DuPont never marketed it as “Spandex”—they called it Lycra).

Spandex is made by reacting polytetramethylene ether glycol (PTMEG) with methylene diphenyl diisocyanate (MDI). PTMEG is produced by polymerizing tetrahydrofuran (THF), which is made by dehydrating 1,4-butanediol (BDO). And while BDO is produced through a few different routes today, they all currently trace back to petroleum—but that might not be true for much longer.

In the early 2010s, the U.S.-based biotech firm Genomatica began developing a bio-based route to BDO by fermenting dextrose with genetically engineered microbes. By 2016, they had licensed the process to Novamont, which used it to build a 30 KTA plant in northeast Italy. Then, just four years ago, Cargill and HELM formed a joint venture and announced plans to invest $300 million to build a 70 KTA BDO plant adjacent to Cargill’s dextrose production facility in Eddyville, Iowa—based on Genomatica’s process.

That plant in Eddyville is now built and scheduled to be commissioned in the coming months. It’s a big deal. While producing chemicals via dextrose fermentation isn’t new (e.g., all citric and lactic acid is made that way), it’s rare for a grain processor like Cargill to open up an entirely new channel to market for corn. Pulling something like this off usually requires commitment from the downstream value chain—and that’s exactly what happened here: BASF (the world’s largest BDO producer) agreed to purchase bio-based BDO from the site, and The LYCRA Company signed on to work with them.

I’m curious to see how this plays out. The BDO market is currently oversupplied due to excess capacity in China, but perhaps there's enough marketing power at the consumer end of the chain (e.g., Lululemon launching bio-based stretchy clothes?) to justify the higher production costs and lift BDO prices. It's at least compelling enough for Hyosung—the world’s largest Spandex producer—to commit $1 billion to build an even larger facility using Genomatica’s process. [LINK]

Other Things Happened:

Chevron is planning on building a $5bn blue hydrogen and ammonia plant in Port Arthur, Texas. Braskem just received their second ethane carrier so they can ship overseas. Shell and Technip Energies agreed to license their CO2 capture technologies together. A new fertilizer plant will be built in Iraq. More semiconductor-grade polysilicon is coming to Malaysia and Germany. CF Industries started up a CO2 dehydration and compression plant. Arkema is going to triple its production of transparent polyamides in Singapore.

Good morning. I hope everyone had a nice long 4th of July weekend! Today we’re talking about a start-up in the chemical sector that is looking to valorize a waste stream in the lithium-ion battery value chain with an electrochemical process.

Aepnus wants to address the sulfate problem

For many manufacturers, production is as straightforward as assembly: combine the right parts the right way and you’ll get your finished product. The chemical process industries, however, face a far more complex reality—in most cases, by-products are an inherent and unavoidable part of production.

The value chain behind lithium-ion batteries is no exception—in fact, for every one ton of cathode active material (CAM) produced (e.g. NMC or LFP), the value chain produces roughly two tons of sodium sulfate. Miners make it when they leach lithium-containing spodumene with sulfuric acid, pre-cursor CAM (pCAM) producers make it when they add caustic to metal sulfates, and battery recyclers make it when they treat black mass with sulfuric acid. And since sodium sulfate isn’t particularly useful, this stuff is usually treated as waste (i.e. it’s dumped into a large body of water).

Chemical engineers typically handle chronic by-product problems via mass integration (i.e. figuring out a way to recycle this stuff back into the process), or by going further, and using the by-product as a feedstock to make some other higher-value chemical. Aepnus is approaching the problem via mass integration: they are scaling an electrochemical process that splits sodium sulfate into sodium hydroxide (caustic) and sulfuric acid, which can then be recycled into mining, pCAM producing, or battery recycling processes.

This looks like a perfect storm to me. In some cases I see strong market pull due to regulatory pressure (e.g. battery projects like BASF’s up in Finland could avoid delays), and in other cases I just see straight up product market fit (caustic is so cheap that freight becomes a large cost contributor, giving on-site producers a leg up). Plus, electrochemical processes scale with less risk from 10 to 100 than thermochemical and biological processes, which makes it much easier to license out the technology after reaching demonstration scale (and licensing is a far more profitable endeavor than attempting to be a world-dominating sodium sulfate splitting production company).

In short: even though Aepnus is super early-stage (they raised $2M pre-seed, $8M in their seed round, and are currently operating pilot-scale units), they are definitely worth keeping an eye on. [LINK]

Other Things Happened:

The U.S. Department of Defense will become the largest shareholder of MP Materials, who operates the largest rare earths mine in the U.S., and is building a rare earth magnet facility in Texas. Dow Chemical is going to shut down 3 units in Europe. Nobian and Veolia just signed a JDA for a lithium chloride conversion technology. Röhm has officially closed its Westwego, Louisiana MMA production facility. Eneos and Mitsubishi started up their plastic pyrolysis plant. Orion is looking at shutting down three to five of its carbon black production lines within the next year. The Aditya Birla Group acquired a US-based specialty alumina producer. BASF finalized the sale of their extruded polystyrene business. Vynova is shutting down its PVC production site in the Netherlands.

Good morning. After yet another unplanned 2-month hiatus, The Column has returned! I apologize for disappearing—life decided to throw me a health curveball this spring, and sometimes you just need to take a step back. Let’s get back into it:

Veolia is removing PFAS from your water

I’m sure most of you have heard of per- and poly-fluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), but in case you haven’t, these are the carcinogenic and endocrine disrupting molecules made famous for their use in the production of Teflon (the 2019 movie Dark Waters provides great context!). Dealing with PFAS is particularly difficult because these molecules don’t degrade in the environment—which is what earned them the nickname “forever chemicals”. That means that even though we can use activated carbon to get PFAS down to parts-per-trillion (ppt) levels, the carbon used to capture that PFAS will eventually become saturated with PFAS, and then that PFAS-containing-carbon needs to be disposed of properly (by blasting it in a furnace) and replaced with fresh carbon. Anyways, thanks to some regulation that passed last year, water utilities are now required to either a) reduce PFAS to ppt levels by 2029, or b) face fines for failing to do so. But while the cost of those fines will be at least partially offset by those billion dollar class-action settlements with 3M, Chemours, Dupont, and Corteva, someone still has to put up the capital to build and operate PFAS-treatment facilities. In the case of investor-owned utilities (IOUs), such as the one Veolia operates in Delaware, that capital will be provided by Veolia and returned to Veolia by charging customers more. All they need to do now is get a water bill increase approved by the Delaware Public Service Commission, which they will do because the law now requires PFAS removal. I’m curious to see how this plays out since only ~10% of the US is served water by IOUs, the rest are municipalities that will be more reliant on taxes and bonds for raising the capital needed to make these plants a reality. I suppose that means it will happen faster in populated wealthy areas (such as Orange County, which is also getting a new PFAS-treatment plant) and slower elsewhere. [LINK]

Other Things Happened:

Eastman Chemical lost a $375M grant from the U.S. DOE, as did 23 other companies pursuing various decarbonization initiatives. Braskem decided to exit its Netherlands-based recycling joint venture. Stepan started up a new 75 KTA alkoxylation plant in Pasadena, Texas and expanded its alpha olefin sulfonate capacity. IFF divested its nitrocellulose business (which primarily serves coatings and ink customers today, but let’s not forget this polymer’s original application: photographic film!). Kraton is exiting their dimer and polyamide business lines. Umicore is expanding its catalyst production in Catoosa, Oklahoma. Honeywell acquired Johnson Matthey’s catalyst business. LyondellBasell sold a bunch of their European olefins and polyolefins plants. OCOchem started up its CO2 electrolysis pilot plant. BASF started up a new hexamethylenediamine (HMD) plant in France. Kemira expanded its sodium borohydride powder production at its site in Finland. Tosoh is going to build a new 22 KTA chloroprene rubber plant in Japan. An MDI producer in South Korea decided to build their own chlor-alkali plant to reduce their reliance on chlorine imports. Ineos is shutting down its phenol and acetone production site in Gladbeck, Germany. PureCycle raised $300M and will now build a plant in the Netherlands and in Thailand. Veolia started up a new PFAS treatment plant in Delaware. Halliburton will drill for lithium in the Smackover before the end of the year. A huge seawater desalination plant in the US is being built in Corpus Christi, Texas. LG Energy and Toyota are forming a battery recycling joint venture. Gradiant is producing lithium carbonate from the produced water by-product of oil and gas production in Pennsylvania. Two players in the water treatment market, Solenis and NCH, are merging.

Good morning. Today we’re talking about a success story in the world of chemical startups—which is not something I’ve been able to do very often!

Things Happened:

A happy exit for Holocene

It’s pretty rare that we get to talk about a happy exit for a chemical startup, but today we have one to highlight: Holocene, who has been developing a unique direct-air-capture (DAC) process, just got acquired by Occidental Petroleum (Oxy) for an undisclosed sum (for reference, Oxy bought another DAC startup in 2023 for $1.1bn). Now, I know a lot of you roll your eyes at DAC because separating ppm levels of CO2 from air is an energy-intensive thing to do, but if you could meet those energy requirements with waste heat, and if that waste heat was coming from someone with an incentive to capture CO2, then DAC can start to make sense. That’s exactly what Holocene is going for—their process starts out just like Carbon Engineering’s (by pulling air into the system with large fans), but instead of absorbing CO2 with potassium hydroxide and requiring a 900°C calciner to release the CO2, Holocene absorbs CO2 with an amino acid (perhaps potassium glycinate or sarcosinate) and uses bis‑iminoguanidines (BIGs) to precipitate carbonate crystals that be separated from the solution and will release CO2 with low grade heat (70-100°C). In any case, regardless of whether or not DAC is ever used at scale for climate-related matters, Oxy makes for a great investor in this space because their downside is covered (even if DAC is a flop, at least the technology is relevant for enhanced oil recovery). [LINK]

Other Things Happened:

Amogy is trying to commercialize an ammonia cracking catalyst. Orbia just inaugurated its new electrolyte production facility in Wisconsin. The UAE is building a polylactic acid plant. Axens expanded its hydrogenation tail gas treatment catalyst plant in Saudi Arabia. Sika is making more mortar and concrete admixtures in Kazakhstan (aka the #1 exporter of potassium). Perstorp started making esters at its site in Amsterdam. Neste started making sustainable aviation fuel at its plant in the Netherlands. Nippon Shokubai plans on building a LiFSI battery electrolyte plant.

Good morning. Today we’re talking about a startup that I’m pretty skeptical of—I don’t typically share these opinions, but I’ve seen one too many press releases to let it slide. Curious to know your thoughts, so shoot me a reply if you want to talk about it!

Things Happened:

Bio-based isoprene and SAF

A couple of years ago I wrote about how Visolis—who acquired BioAmber’s assets with Taiwan’s LCY Group for $4.8 million after they went bankrupt in 2018—was now trying to making bio-based isoprene and sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) with help from Ginko Bioworks. This sort of threw me off, because I figured that Visolis was interested in commercializing BioAmber’s process technology, but maybe Visolis was just interested in those cheap fermentation assets and the option to utilize them differently in the future. And perhaps that time has come! Visolis and Zeon just completed a joint feasibility study for the production of bio-based isoprene and SAF, and are now evaluating potential site locations. For what it’s worth, I’m extremely skeptical of this announcement; it genuinely makes no sense to try to produce SAF at scale via fermentation (as in, it will never be cost competitive with other SAF production processes), and throwing it in there alongside isoprene makes me think there’s really just some by-product hydrocarbon stream they hope they can upgrade to SAF. There’s nothing inherently wrong about that, and it’s not even misleading—I just don’t think we should be allocating capital to SAF-processes that will never scale as well as hydrotreating vegetable oil. As for the isoprene part of this equation, sure, I can get behind that. Tire makers would love to partner with a startup looking to decarbonize one of their primary feedstocks, and there isn’t a clearly better option out there for bio-based isoprene. [LINK]

Other Things Happened:

Clariant and Technip Energies just revealed a new styrene monomer catalyst breakthrough. Solvay started up a new rare earths production line in France for permanent magnets. Sika started up a new mortar production facility in Quito, Ecuador. The EU is banning the use of PFAS and other endocrine disruptors in toys. Brenntag divested its liquid chlorine distribution business in Spain. Panasonic and Mitsubishi Gas Chemical are making urea resins with methanol produced from CO2. Mitsubishi Chemical also increased their production of flame retardants. Some private equity firms acquired OQ Chemicals (and will be changing its name back to Oxea).

Good morning. Quick error correction to start us off: last week I wrote that all of the increased propylene oxide capacity built in the last 6 years has been built in China, but that’s not true—a reader pointed out to me that LyondellBasell started up their PO/TBA plant outside of Houston just 2 years ago. My apologies!

Things Happened:

Making used oil new again

If you’ve ever wondered where your used motor oil (UMO) goes after you get an oil change, the short answer is “to a network of small collectors who sell the used oil to re-refiners, who remove impurities and sell it to lubricant producers as a base oil”. It’s a fairly straightforward industry, but it’s helpful to know some basics: a typical lubricant formulation is something like 90% base oil and 10% additive (things like antioxidants, detergents, anti-wear additives, rust/corrosion inhibitors, etc.). Base oils are categorized into groups according to their viscosity and impurity content. Groups I, II, and III base oils are produced at refineries from the vacuum gas oil (VGO) fraction after crude oil distillation, but they can also be made by recycling UMO—which is done through a series of processes that remove solids, metals, and broken down additives, leaving a virgin-like base oil behind. It’s “re-refiners” like Safety-Kleen and Heritage-Crystal Clean who do this UMO recycling, but I’m writing about it today because a Shell joint venture with Blue Tide Environmental just started up their new 5,000 barrel per day re-refining site in Baytown, Texas. [LINK]

Other Things Happened:

Kemira acquired Thatcher’s very small (<$10m/yr) iron sulfate business. Ineos acquired CNOOC’s oil and gas assets in the US gulf coast. Lanxess sold its urethane systems business to Japan’s Ube. Shell sold its Singapore Energy and Chemicals park to Chandra Asri and Glencore. Lummus started up a PFAS-destroying pilot plant. Panasonic and Sumitomo are working together on a nickel recycling project. BASF is scaling up its US production of anode binders. Shin-Etsu is expanding its pharmaceutical cellulose business. A new anhydrous hydrogen fluoride plant is coming to South Korea.