🏭 Green chlor-alkali?

Good morning. Is anyone familiar with Aztlán Chemicals? They talked about attempting green chlor-alkali with Forbes and now their website doesn't work.

From the condenser:

· Olin and green hydrogen

· BASF and Sinopec's expansion plan

· POTD: toothpaste

Olin is interested in green hydrogen

Integrated chlor-alkali company, Olin, and hydrogen fuel cell producer, Plug Power, might form a joint venture and build a green hydrogen plant at Olin's site in St. Gabriel, Louisiana.

What's going on here?

Plug Power makes and markets hydrogen fuel cells. They are now integrating upstream by providing operating companies with small scale plants that produce hydrogen by the electrolysis of water (ideally for use in Plug Power's fuel cells). Olin, an operating company, produces chlorine, hydrogen, and sodium hydroxide by the electrolysis of brine.

Taking a step back:

The chlor-alkali process has been producing hydrogen as a by-product for over a century. That hydrogen is typically used for heat in other parts of the process, integrated with other hydrogen-consuming processes (like hydrogen chloride production), or sold to other hydrogen consumers. In cases where a downstream market for hydrogen doesn't exist the hydrogen is actually just vented to the atmosphere.

Looking forward:

The fact that Olin is considering building additional hydrogen capacity indicates that they've already found markets for their existing hydrogen production. In the long run it would make a lot more sense for the company to figure out how to power its chlor-alkali process with renewable energy (more on that idea here).

BASF and Sinopec started construction

German chemical company, BASF, and Chinese petroleum company, Sinopec, just broke ground on their joint venture petrochemical complex expansion in Nanjing, China.

Bringing you up to speed:

BASF has been operating this (huge) site in Nanjing with Sinopec since 2005. A few years ago BASF made two big announcements—a $10 billion expansion of a wholly owned site nearby, and an expansion of this JV site in Nanjing. Limited details on the Nanjing site were provided until last fall when the two companies spelled out the specific capacity expansions (but still no financial details).

So, what's the plan?

The plan is to expand production of propionic acid (food preservative), propionic aldehyde, ethyleneamines (chelants for polyamide/epoxy resins), ethanolamines (for surfactants), ethylene oxide (many things). A new plant is being built to make tert-butyl acrylate from existing acrylic acid and isobutene production. All of these expansions should be up and running by the end of next year.

Some more headlines:

• BASF decided to pull its potential Wintershall Dea IPO off the table

• Neste's engineering subsidiary is going to be mergedwith the larger corporation

• CJ BIO started up a 5,000 ton per year polyhydroxyalkanoate (PHA) plant in Indonesia

• TA’ZIZ And Reliance are making progress on their upcoming chlor-alkali and derivatives joint venture

• The American Chemistry Council doesn't want the EPA to ban asbestos

Product of The Day:

Today, we're breaking down toothpaste.

Okay, everyone has used toothpaste (or at least hopefully that's the case), so everyone should at least have an idea about what's in these tubes. Something to do with flourine... right?

You can think of toothpaste as a blend mostly consisting of abrasives (such as sodium bicarbonate and calcium carbonate), humectants (like propylene glycol), water, a surfactant (usually sodium lauryl sulfate), and then all the goodies like flavors, colors, and a tiny amount of calcium fluoride. The abrasives rub the gunk off your teeth, the humectants keep the paste moist, and the surfactants to create bubbles to evenly distribute everything.

In case you're interested:

• Course: We think of chemical plants in terms of unit operations. To understand the industry you need to learn about those units.*

• Podcast: Check out this episode featuring Dr. Frank Slejko on water treatment in various industries, incumbent technologies, and innovations.

• Safety Moment: Leverage this flowchart to help with logically identifying chemical reactivity hazards.

• Book: You need to understand the forces behind the oil industry to understand the chemical industry. Daniel Yergin's The New Map does a great job breaking it down.*

The bottoms: