Search

Pembina Pipeline says it has suspended work on a propane dehydrogenation and polypropylene plant in Alberta. A joint venture with Petrochemical Industries Company of Kuwait, the project was to cost...

The Mexican state-owned firm Cenagas is cutting off natural gas supplies to Braskem Idesa, an ethylene and polyethylene joint venture in Coatzacoalcos, Mexico, controlled by the Brazilian petrochem...

Sasol will sell Ineos its 50% interest in the companies’ polyethylene joint venture, Gemini HDPE, for $400 million. The high-density polyethylene plant, inside Ineos’s Battleground Manufacturing Co...

Dow has agreed to sell marine terminal operations on the US Gulf Coast to Vopak Industrial Infrastructure Americas—a joint venture between the logistics firm Vopak and the investment company BlackR...

Celanese is selling its 45% stake in the Asian engineering plastics joint venture Polyplastics to its partner, Daicel, for $1.6 billion. Established in 1964, Polyplastics has about $1.2 billion in ...

The Swedish battery start-up Northvolt and Norwegian metal producer Hydro have created a joint venture firm, Hydro Volt, that will build a recycling plant in Fredrikstad, Norway, for lithium-ion ba...

Shell and China National Offshore Oil Corp. (CNOOC) have agreed to expand their petrochemical joint venture in Huizhou, China. The project will include a 1.5 million-metric-ton-per-year ethylene cr...

Ube Industries and Mitsubishi Chemical are expanding their lithium-ion battery electrolyte collaboration in China by forming a joint venture in Japan. The Chinese venture, formed in 2018, will beco...

Corpus Christi Polymers, a polyester joint venture of Indorama Ventures, Alpek, and Far Eastern Investment, is putting construction of its Texas plant on hold. The partners paid $1.1 billion for th...

New Zealand’s government is investing $11.5 million in a wind-powered hydrogen generation plant on North Island. The facility is a joint venture between Hiringa Energy and Ballance Agri-Nutrients. ...

Calysta, a California start-up, has formed an aquaculture feed joint venture with the feed additives firm Bluestar Adisseo. Calysta’s bacteria turn methane into protein for fish, reducing the need ...

The steel company Posco has formed a joint venture with the South Korean chemical firm OCI to make hydrogen peroxide from coke-oven gas, a by-product of steelmaking that is rich in hydrogen. The 50...

GF Biochemicals and Towell Engineering have formed a joint venture to make and sell derivatives of levulinic acid. The partnership, called Nxtlevvel, expects to open a plant in Europe or India that will produce 30,000 metric tons per year of biodegradable solvents and plasticizers for cleaning, personal care, coatings, and agriculture markets. GF’s core business is the production of levulinic acid from cellulosic biomass.

Two chemical deals that were under heavy regulatory scrutiny have finally closed. BASF has completed its purchase of Solvay’s nylon 6,6 business, while Evonik Industries has closed its acquisition of PeroxyChem. BASF faced concerns from the European Commission that buying the Solvay nylon business would give the company too commanding a market share. To address those fears, Solvay sold a big chunk of its European nylon 6,6 engineering polymer business to Germany’s Domo Chemicals. For $1.4 billion, BASF is still getting nylon 6,6 polymer operations, as well as a stake in an adiponitrile and hexamethylene diamine joint venture in France with Invista. Back integrating into adiponitrile—a nylon 6,6 precursor sometimes in short supply—was a key deal objective for BASF. The German giant will have a joint venture in adipic acid, another nylon 6,6 raw material, with Domo. Meanwhile, after a victory in US District Court in Washington, DC, Evonik has

Gulf Coast Ammonia is getting off the ground in Texas City. The $600 million ammonia project is a joint venture of the private equity firm Starwood Energy and the holding company Mabanaft and was initiated by Agrifos Partners. Its 1.3 million metric tons of annual capacity will make it the largest single-train ammonia synthesis loop in the world. Construction is set to begin later this year and be completed in 2023. Air Products and Chemicals will spend $500 million to build a steam methane reformer to supply hydrogen, an air separation unit for nitrogen, and a steam turbine generator for power.

Over the past 3 years, petrochemical makers started up nine new ethylene crackers in the US with a combined annual capacity of nearly 10 million metric tons. The projects, meant to take advantage of cheap and plentiful ethane derived from shale gas, have expanded US capacity for the basic chemical by about 30%. Five of the projects started up in the past year and are currently ramping up production. The biggest is Sasol’s complex in Lake Charles, Louisiana, which includes ethylene, polyethylene, α-olefin, and alcohol plants. The project ended up costing $12.9 billion, about $4 billion over budget, and led to the ouster of the company’s co-CEOs. Two more projects—a modest Dow expansion and a joint venture among Total, Nova Chemicals, and Borealis—are scheduled to begin operations this year. With all the new capacity for ethylene and derivatives coming on line, petrochemical makers report slimming profits. Dow’s packaging and specialty

Can Avantium do it again? In 2016, the Dutch renewable chemical developer snagged a deal worth up to $700 million with the big chemical maker BASF. The two firms formed a joint venture to bring a sugar-derived polymer, polyethylene furanoate (PEF), to market. On the strengths of that deal, Avantium raised more than $100 million last year in an initial public offering of stock. The joint venture, called Synvina, will use a large chunk of that cash to commercialize PEF as a renewable alternative to the ubiquitous petroleum-derived polymer polyethylene terephthalate. But Avantium also has three other renewable chemical projects under way: making sugars from nonfood biomass, converting sugar to ethylene glycol, and electrochemically converting carbon dioxide to chemical building blocks. It now seeks a repeat performance in biobased chemicals despite heightened competition from traditional chemicals because of low oil prices. Gert-Jan Gruter, Avantium’s chief technology officer, says the firm

LanzaTech’s technology to convert industrial emissions into ethanol with microbes is being used to make polyester. A joint venture between LanzaTech, the Chinese steel maker Shougang Group, and New Zealand’s TangMing has produced about 35 million L of ethanol from the emissions of a steel recycling mill in its first year of operations. The alcohol has been used as a fuel so far, but it will now go to India Glycols for conversion into ethylene glycol. Far Eastern New Century will react the glycol with terephthalic acid to make polyester for fiber use.

Fuzionaire Diagnostics has formed a joint venture with Japan Medical Isotope Technology Development to commercialize its fluorine-18 radiolabeling technology in Japan. Fuzionaire was founded last year on the basis of alkali metal catalysis discoveries made by Anton Toutov while working in the laboratory of chemistry Nobel laureate Robert Grubbs. The California-based company says the first application of the technique is producing 18F-labeled compounds for PET scans quickly and easily.

DSM has finished forming a vitamin E joint venture with the Chinese firm Nenter & Co. The Dutch firm says the venture will shut down the former Nenter plant in Jingzhou, China, to upgrade it to DSM’s safety, health, and environmental standards. Following the refurbishment, the venture will produce vitamin E exclusively for DSM. The firm is in the midst of a similar upgrade of a vitamin C plant in Jiangshan, China, that it acquired in 2015.

BASF and Solvay have found a buyer for Solvay’s European nylon 6,6 business: the German nylon 6 producer Domo Chemicals, which will buy the assets for about $335 million, not including debt. The European Commission approved BASF’s $1.8 billion purchase of Solvay’s global nylon 6,6 business in January. But given that the nylon 6,6 industry is already concentrated, with only a handful of players, the EC demanded that the companies sell off the bulk of Solvay’s European nylon 6,6 assets. Included in the sale to Domo are polymer and intermediate operations in France, Spain, and Poland; engineering plastics plants in France and Poland; and a nylon fiber plant in France. BASF will also form a joint venture with Domo to produce the nylon 6,6 raw material adipic acid. Not included in the deal is Solvay’s interest in an adiponitrile joint venture with Invista in France. Back integrating into this nylon

Joyn Bio, a joint venture of Ginkgo Bioworks and agriculture giant Bayer, has brought on another partner in its quest to develop microbes that fix nitrogen for crops. It has turned to NewLeaf Symbiotics for its database of pink, methanol-munching, plant-colonizing organisms. The licensing deal is worth up to $75 million in up-front and milestone payments to NewLeaf, which is also developing crop microbe products. Joyn plans to use the library, containing over 12,000 strains of methylotrophs, as a starting point for its own microbe-engineering work. Joyn says the partnership will reduce the time it takes to bring its first product to market by 2–3 years. Methylotrophs are found on the surfaces of all plants and even inside plant cells. They readily attach to plant tissue because they use methanol, generated as a by-product of plant metabolism, as food. The data in NewLeaf’s collection include microbe genomes, phenotypes, and the

Veramaris, a joint venture between DSM and Evonik Industries, has opened a $200 million facility in Blair, Nebraska, dedicated to making omega-3 algal oils as food for farm-raised salmon. Omega-3 levels in farmed salmon have been declining over the past decade, Veramaris says. The joint venture says it can help the aquaculture industry reverse this decline without having to harvest more wild fish as an omega-3 source.

Chevron Phillips Chemical (CPChem) is moving forward with another ethylene cracker project with Qatar Petroleum, this time on the US Gulf Coast. At a signing ceremony held at the White House, CPChem CEO Mark Lashier and Qatar Petroleum CEO Saad Sherida Al-Kaabi inked an agreement to pursue the $8 billion petrochemical complex. To be owned 51% by CPChem, it would have a 2-million-metric-ton-per-year ethylene cracker and two 1-million-metric-ton-per-year polyethylene plants. The companies expect to make a final investment decision by 2021 and start up the complex in 2024. Just last month, the two companies announced they would build a nearly identical petrochemical joint venture in Qatar by 2025. “The proposed US project is part of a trend of Middle Eastern oil companies looking to diversify across regions and expand their footprint in the growing chemicals industry,” says John Maselli, senior research analyst at Wood Mackenzie. Similarly, ExxonMobil and Sabic are

Chevron Phillips Chemical is forming a petrochemical joint venture with one Middle Eastern company and, according to a published news report, negotiating with another Middle Eastern firm to acquire the Canadian chemical maker Nova Chemicals. Chevron Phillips says it has joined with Qatar Petroleum to develop an ethylene complex in Qatar. The multibillion-dollar facility would be 70% owned by the state-owned oil company and 30% owned by Chevron Phillips. It would include a 1,900-metric-ton-per-year ethane-based ethylene cracker and two high-density polyethylene plants. Engineering is set to begin shortly, leading to a planned start-up in late 2025, the companies say. The agreement follows an invitation that Qatar Petroleum put out in May 2018 looking for an international partner with which to build a new cracker. Chevron Phillips—a joint venture between the oil companies Chevron and Phillips 66—earlier partnered with Qatar Petroleum to create Qatar Chemical, a maker of ethylene and derivatives.

Four months after breaking with partner BASF, Avantium says it will proceed on its own to commercialize polyethylene furanoate (PEF), a biobased alternative to the beverage-bottle polymer polyethylene terephthalate (PET). At a meeting with investors on June 6, Avantium said it plans to make PEF and its raw material, furandicarboxylic acid (FDCA), at a plant with an annual capacity of 5,000 metric tons (t). The firm said it has engaged the engineering firm Worley to draw up engineering studies for the roughly $170 million facility, which it hopes to start up in 2023 at a still-to-be-determined site in northwestern Europe. Avantium CEO Tom van Aken told investors that his firm continues to believe in the technology and “the unique properties of PEF.” The Dutch firm originally planned a much larger project when it partnered with BASF in 2016. Their joint venture, Synvina, expected to build a 50,000 t FDCA plant

Polymer recycling specialist Loop Industries has received a $35 million investment from Toronto-based private equity firm Northern Private Capital. As a result, it will own a 10.5% stake in Loop. The firm can also invest another $45 million in Loop over the next three years. Loop will use the funds to finance a joint venture with polyester maker Indorama that would break polyethylene terephthalate into its raw materials, dimethyl terephthalate and ethylene glycol. The two hope to start up a plant in 2020.

Bayer has signed on with Arvinas to explore the use of protein degradation for both human therapeutic and agricultural applications. The funds from the deal, worth $110 million, will cover a drug discovery collaboration, an agricultural joint venture, and a roughly 4% stake in the New Haven, Connecticut–based biotech firm. Whereas small-molecule drugs typically block the activity of their protein target, degraders prompt a protein to be broken down altogether. These bifunctional molecules feature one end that tethers to a protein of interest and another that links to an E3 ubiquitin ligase, which then earmarks the protein for the cell’s trash compactor, the proteasome. Drug companies have in recent years invested heavily in the technology, which could allow chemists to tackle long-elusive proteins. Arvinas, which was founded in 2013 to commercialize research emerging from the labs of Yale University chemical biologist Craig Crews, earlier this year became the first biotech

The British livestock breeding firm Genus has inked a deal with Beijing Capital Agribusiness (BCA) to develop pigs gene-edited to resist the porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome virus. BCA is part of a Chinese state-owned conglomerate. The firm will provide Genus with up-front and milestone payments of $20 million. Once China approves the gene-edited pig, the two firms plan to launch a joint venture. China, the world’s largest pork market, is working to modernize pork production but has been hindered by disease outbreaks.

DuPont, which will separate from DowDuPont on June 1, has disclosed the 10% of its business portfolio that it no longer wants and is likely to sell. DowDuPont officials previously said they wanted to divest 10% of the DuPont portfolio but were scant on details. DuPont will transfer the businesses, which have combined annual sales of about $2 billion, to a new “noncore” operating segment. Included in this group is DuPont’s stake in Hemlock Semiconductor, a silicon joint venture with Corning and Shin-Etsu Handotai. Also in the mix is its biomaterials business, which has a 1,3-propanediol fermentation joint venture with the sugar maker Tate & Lyle. The biomaterials business also makes polytrimethylene terephthalate, a propanediol derivative used in fibers and engineering polymers. Another noncore business is Photovoltaic Solutions and Advanced Materials, which makes metallization pastes and silicone encapsulants. DuPont Clean Technologies, a supplier of technologies for sulfuric acid production and

Trinseo is seeking alternatives for its last major polycarbonate asset: its plant in Stade, Germany. The company, once the styrenic polymer arm of Dow, exited its Japanese polycarbonate joint venture with Sumitomo Chemical, Sumika Styron Polycarbonate, in 2017. A Dow plant that had been making polycarbonate for Trinseo in Freeport, Texas, under contract shuttered in 2014. Trinseo says it will continue to sell polycarbonate compounds and blends. Separately, Trinseo is buying a latex plant from Dow in Rheinmunster, Germany. The transaction only requires Trinseo to assume $45 million in employee pension liabilities. The facility employs 114 people. Trinseo expects to complete the deal during the second half of the year.

Two polymer companies have taken steps toward recycled polystyrene products. Americas Styrenics is using styrene made at Agilyx’s polystyrene depolymerization plant in Tigard, Oregon. AmSty will process the recycled monomer at its facility in St. James, Louisiana, and then polymerize it into polystyrene. Agilyx and AmSty will form a joint venture later this year to operate the Tigard plant. Separately, AmSty rival Ineos Styrolution says it has made laboratory-scale quantities of polystyrene from recycled monomer at its site in Antwerp, Belgium.

Seeking to enter the business of gene-therapy manufacturing, the drug service firm Catalent Pharma Solutions has agreed to pay $1.2 billion for the custom manufacturer Paragon Bioservices. Paragon will put Catalent in the business of making adeno-associated virus vectors, plasmids, and lentivirus vectors used to deliver gene and cell therapies. Earlier this month, Paragon opened a gene-therapy manufacturing facility in Maryland’s Anne Arundel County, complementing the production capacity at its headquarters at University of Maryland’s BioPark. The new capacity will support customers’ clinical- and commercial-stage programs. After the Catalent deal was unveiled, Paragon announced it will expand its relationship with a key customer, Sarepta Therapeutics. In October, Sarepta enlisted Paragon to help make its experimental Duchenne muscular dystrophy gene therapy; now, Paragon and Sarepta are considering a joint venture to manufacture gene therapies at a new site. The deal for Paragon, which expects to have sa...

Local officials are beginning to opt for the chemical conversion of plastics into fuels as a means of processing difficult plastic waste. The City of Phoenix is working with Salt Lake City–based start-up Renewlogy to build a conversion plant. And the British firm Plastic Energy has a deal to build plants using its technology in West Java, Indonesia. Renewlogy, which has pyrolysis technology for converting waste plastics into fuels, will form a joint venture with a local waste management firm to build its plant. The plant will process plastics coded 3 through 7—materials such as polystyrene and polypropylene that aren’t mechanically recycled as widely as polyethylene terephthalate and high-density polyethylene, which are coded 1 and 2, respectively. The plant will have the capacity to process about 10 metric tons per day of the material into 60 barrels of liquid fuel. Phoenix officials say their plan is a reaction to National

Lonza and the Danish food cultures and enzymes producer Chr. Hansen have formed a joint venture to make live therapeutic microbes for the nascent microbiome drug sector. It is the first and only company in the world to offer end-to-end contract manufacturing services for live biotherapeutics, Lonza CEO Marc Funk says. Some of the microbes populating the intestine, which constitute the bulk of the human microbiome, may have therapeutic effects and could be used to treat gastrointestinal diseases as well as some cancers, liver diseases, and more. No such drugs are yet on the market, but by 2025 the supply of anaerobic microbes for pharmaceutical trials will be worth about $200 million annually, Funk says. By 2035, he forecasts, the overall clinical trial and commercial market will be worth more than $1.1 billion. Initially, the partners will put a combined $50 million in the joint venture to meet demand from

In a move that will instantly make it one of the world’s largest chemical companies, the Saudi state oil company Saudi Aramco is buying a 70% stake in the petrochemical maker Sabic from the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia, the country’s sovereign wealth fund, for $69 billion. Aramco has been pushing into petrochemicals in recent years to diversify the Saudi economy away from crude oil exploration and export, especially given the expectation of slowing fuel demand in the coming decades. Late last year, Aramco pledged $100 billion toward petrochemical projects, including a proposed crude-to-chemicals complex in Saudi Arabia with Sabic. The company recently started up a $20 billion joint venture, Sadara, with Dow Chemical. H.E. Yasir Othman Al-Rumayyan, managing director of the Public Investment Fund, says the purchase “will introduce a strategic owner that can add consid Sabic had sales last year of $45 billion. It’s the world’s fourth-largest

The recent news that DSM and Roquette are dissolving their succinic acid joint venture may be the final chapter for a product that was once going to change the chemical industry but turned out to be an expensive disappointment. The joint venture, Reverdia, is one of four projects launched about a decade ago to make succinic acid from biomass. Chemical companies have long synthesized the four-carbon carboxylic acid in modest amounts as an intermediate for dyes and pharmaceuticals. The goal of the new projects was to use biotechnology to ferment carbohydrates into succinic acid at a cost low enough to open up large-volume polymer markets. BioAmber may have been the most ambitious of the projects. The company raised about $80 million in a 2013 stock offering and put the funds into building a succinic acid plant in Sarnia, Ontario. However, saddled with a heavy debt load and few customers, it

BASF and the Dutch technology firm Avantium are forming a joint venture company to make polyethylenefuranoate (PEF), a biobased polyester, and its precursor furandicarboxylic acid (FDCA). Produced ...

Judging from the headlines of the past few months, the appetite of international firms for doing R&D in China is fading. In October, General Electric said that it would close its R&D center in Shanghai, one of three big facilities that it operates worldwide. The following month, AstraZeneca said it was spinning off its China R&D into a joint venture with a Chinese partner. Earlier last year, Eli Lilly & Co. said it would close the Shanghai R&D center it had opened five years before and GlaxoSmithKline announced that it was ending R&D in China on neuroscience, the company’s main research theme in the country. The quick succession of news gave the impression that international firms’ R&D investment in China was turning into divestment. That would be the wrong conclusion, at least as far as chemical companies are concerned. For them, R&D in China continues to grow. China is the

The Sadara joint venture between Dow Chemical and Saudi Aramco has agreed to supply ethylene oxide and propylene oxide to a $40 million specialty chemical plant planned by the German chemical maker Ilco Chemikalien and the Saudi firm Sadig Industries. The plant will make chemicals used in coatings, adhesives, personal care, and other applications. It will be built in PlasChem Park, an industrial property near Sadara in Jubail, Saudi Arabia. The park is intended to promote the chemical and downstream conversion industries.

Talk about cyanide, and images of a lethal pill used by spies to avoid capture come to mind. Few people outside the gold mining industry know that sodium cyanide is used in most of the world’s production of the precious metal. The days of panning for gold nuggets in California and Alaska are long gone. The public’s enduring love affair with gold can be satisfied only by extracting tiny amounts from ores with a chemical like cyanide that binds to gold and separates it in a modern-day version of alchemy. Though controversial because it is deadly if handled improperly, sodium cyanide is the most efficient—and some say the most environmentally safe—way to satisfy growing global demand for gold. More of it is now on the way, and much of it is destined for Mexico. In February, a joint venture of Grupo Idesa and Evonik Industries’ CyPlus subsidiary opened Mexico’s first

A public-private effort to advance biobased industries in Europe will work to establish a manufacturing supply chain for polyethylene furanoate (PEF), a polymer that can be made completely from plants. The European Union’s Bio-Based Industries Joint Undertaking has awarded the effort a $28 million grant. Like polyethylene terephthalate, PEF is a recyclable polyester that can be used to make beverage bottles and films. The consortium includes U.K. chemical firm Croda, Danish toy maker Lego, and Synvina, a PEF raw materials joint venture between BASF and Avantium.

Last week was a busy one for BASF in China. In just a few days, BASF announced a new R&D facility, sold off an electrolyte plant, agreed to expand production at a joint venture, and opened a new pe...

Dow Chemical CEO Andrew N. Liveris had a visible role in President Donald J. Trump’s recent visit to Saudi Arabia, and he brought with him a pledge for further specialty chemical investment in the country. Dow announced it will build an acrylic polymers plant in Jubail, Saudi Arabia, to serve the coatings industry and water treatment and detergent markets. The company said the facility will cost more than $100 million and create 100 full-time jobs. Dow, which last year took over the Dow Corning silicones joint venture, also plans to conduct a feasibility study for a siloxanes and silicones plant in Saudi Arabia. If it moves forward, the plant will support 350 full-time jobs, Dow said. The announcements were part of a series of agreements signed between U.S. firms and Saudi authorities at the Saudi-U.S. CEO Forum, held in Riyadh on May 20 and cochaired by Liveris. President Trump and

A European polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottle industry group has given interim approval to bottles made out of polyethylene furanoate (PEF), a polymer being developed by Synvina, a joint venture of BASF and Avantium. Whereas PET is made with purified terephthalic acid, a petrochemical, PEF is made with furandicarboxylic acid, which is derived from renewable resources. The industry group concluded that PEF bottles can be recycled alongside PET bottles.

BP will sell its 50% stake in the Shanghai SECCO Petrochemical olefins and derivatives joint venture to its partner, China’s Sinopec, for $1.68 billion. BP and Sinopec started up SECCO in 2005 at a cost of close to $3 billion. BP now says it is focusing its Chinese petrochemicals business in areas where it has proprietary technology—mainly purified terephthalic acid and acetyls. The company sold its olefins business in the U.S. and Europe to Ineos in 2006.

ExxonMobil and Saudi Basic Industries Corp. have selected San Patricio County, Texas, near Corpus Christi, as the site for a planned ethylene cracker joint venture. The complex is expected to have 1.8 million metric tons per year of ethylene capacity and downstream polyethylene and ethylene glycol plants. The companies also considered sites in Louisiana and elsewhere in Texas. The San Patricio County location was supported by local officials but opposed by many residents weary of the oil and gas projects in the region. The partners will make a final investment decision after they receive environmental permits.