Category: Europe

INEOS Enterprises has announced the completion of the sale of its Sulphur Chemicals business to International Chemical Investors Group, for an undisclosed sum. INEOS Sulphur Chemicals business is Spain’s largest dedicated manufacturer of sulphuric acid and oleum, serving clients in both agriculture and chemical intermediates via its 400,000 t/a plant in Bilbao. The business will become part of WeylChem’s advanced intermediates and reagents portfolio, which includes an existing sulphuric acid and oleum plant located in Lamotte, northern France. WeylChem is wholly owned by the International Chemical Investors Group (ICIG).

Preliminary engineering work has started on a renewable powerto-fertilizer plant in Kenya.

A consortium has unveiled plans to build one of the largest green hydrogen plants in the world in a bid to make Oman a leader in renewable energy technology. The $30 billion project is being developed by Oman’s state-owned oil firm OQ, green fuels developer InterContinental Energy and Kuwait government-backed renewables investor EnerTech. Construction is scheduled to start in 2028 in Al Wusta governorate on the Arabian Sea. It will be built in stages, with the aim to be at full capacity by 2038, powered by 25 GW of wind and solar energy. Two years has already been spent on solar and wind monitoring analysis for the development. According to the consortium, the site chosen has the optimal diurnal profile of strong wind at night and reliable sun during the day, and is also located near the coast for seawater intake and electrolysis.

Maire Tecnimont SpA says that its subsidiaries MET Development, Stamicarbon and NextChem have collectively begun work on a renewable power-to-fertilizer plant in Kenya. MET Development has signed an agreement with Oserian Development Company for the development of the plant at the Oserian Two lakes Industrial Park, on the southern banks of Lake Naivasha, 100 km north of Nairobi.

Production has begun at Ivanhoe Mines’ Kakula copper mine in the DRC. The company says that total production for this year is expected to be 80-95,000 t/a of copper in concentrate, with a phase two expansion to 400,000 t/a due to be completed by Q2 2022. Ivanhoe is working with China’s Zijin Mining on the development plan for phases 2 and 3 of the mine, as well as a feasibility study for the Kipushi zinc mine further to the east. Both projects lie close to the DRC’s southern border, with Angola and Zambia respectively. Phase 3 of Kamoa will lift capacity to an anticipated 600-800,000 t/a of copper in concentrate, making it the second largest copper mine in the world after Escondida in Chile. Canadian-based Ivanhoe expects to be digging 3.8 million t/a of ore at Kakula with 6% copper content in Phase 1.

The Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC) has awarded a $510 million engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) contract to Italy’s Saipem to expand production capacity at the Shah sour gas plant, as the UAE looks to increase its output of gas by 2030. The Optimum Shah Gas Expansion (OSGE) & Gas Gathering project has been awarded by ADNOC Sour Gas, a joint venture between ADNOC and US energy major Occidental. The contract will increase gas processing capacity at the Shah plant by 13% per cent to 1.45 bcf/d from 1.28 bcf/d by 2023 and supports ADNOC’s objective of enabling gas self-sufficiency for the UAE. The Shah gas plant currently meets 12% of the UAE’s total supply of natural gas, as well as producing 5% of the world’s elemental sulphur. The expansion will cumulatively represent a 45% increase on the plant’s original capacity of 1.0 bcf/d when it came on-stream in 2015.

CF Industries has signed an agreement with thyssenkrupp to develop a commercial-scale green ammonia project at its Donaldsonville production complex in Louisiana.

The Chemical & Process Technologies business unit of thyssenkrupp Industrial Solutions is celebrating a milestone in 2021. It is one hundred years since engineer and entrepreneur Friedrich Uhde founded his own plant engineering company in a barn at his parents-in-law’s farm in Dortmund-Bövinghausen on April 6th, 1921. Now, in this centenary year, the origins of the firm are to become visible in its name again: thyssenkrupp is changing the business unit’s name to thyssenkrupp Uhde.

A recent report from BloombergNEF (New Energy Foundation) looking ahead to 2050 argues that green hydrogen can be cheaper than natural gas. It finds that ‘green’ hydrogen from renewables should become cheaper than natural gas (on an energy-equivalent basis) by 2050 in 15 of the 28 markets modelled, assuming scale-up continues. These countries accounted for one-third of global GDP in 2019. In all of the markets BNEF modelled, ‘green’ hydrogen should also become cheaper than both ‘blue’ hydrogen (from fossil fuels with carbon capture and storage – CCS) and even ‘grey’ hydrogen from fossil fuels without CCS. The cost of producing ‘green’ hydrogen from renewable electricity should fall by up to 85% from today to 2050, the report predicts, leading to costs below $1/kg ($7.4/MMBtu) by 2050 in most markets. These costs are 13% lower than BNEF’s previous 2030 forecast and 17% lower than their previous 2050 forecast. Falling costs of solar photovoltaic (PV) electricity are the key driver behind the reduction; BNEF now believes that PV electricity will be 40% cheaper in 2050 than they had thought just two years ago, driven by more automatic manufacturing, less silicon and silver consumption, higher photovoltaic efficiency of solar cells, and greater yields using bifacial panels.

Tecnimont has been awarded a $1.5 billion contract by Nigeria’s Federal Executive Council to carry out rehabilitation works at the Port Harcourt refinery in Rivers State, run by the state-owned Nigerian National Petroleum Company (NNPC). The contract covers engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) activities for a full rehabilitation of the Port Harcourt refinery complex, aimed at restoring the complex to a minimum of 90% of its 210,000 bbl/d nameplate capacity. Tecnimont says that the project will be delivered in phases from 24 and 32 months and the final stage will be completed in 44 months from the award date.