SPED – August 2011 - SPED in the UK & Ireland

I hope some of you missed my comments in SPED Update whilst I holidayed in the Carolina’s of the USA.

August in Europe is a tradiationally quite month in the UK and also in Europe except in the holiday hotspots of Greece and Spain, where many north Europeans flock during the school holidays.

UK Process News

You will see from the selected comment below, from the UK’s Process Engineering & Engineer magazines that energy issues are never far from the headlines.

• I have long feared that “environmentalists will be the death of us”.  They do not state that our standard of life will decline to be green, but UK cchemical industry leaders are "dismayed" by the UK government's latest assessment of the scale of the energy-cost rises facing the sector.  In a new assessment, the DECC - the UK's department of energy and climate change - has suggested that government policies, including the recent Carbon Floor Price Support Mechanism, would push up electricity prices by 52% within a decade.  But, according to the trade body, the Chemical Industries Association, the actual rise due to government policies could be nearer 100% "when you take a commercially realistic view of cost pass-through".
• Drax a 700MW power station, the UK’s largest coal generating station has experimented with burning biomass.  They claim it is the cheaper way of producing electricity.  Far more cost effective that wind farms as the fuel is consistently available and needs no new infrastructure.
• •    And Air Product points in the same direction.  They have secured planning permission for its Tees Valley Renewable Energy Facility.  The facility is the first of a number of energy from waste plants that Air Products will be looking to develop in the UK over the next few years.  The gasification energy-from-waste (EfW) scheme, located at the New Energy and Technology Business Park, near Billingham, Teesside will convert pre-processed household and commercial waste currently going to landfill into base load, renewable power for up to 50,000 homes in the North East.  Producing 49MW of electricity from about 300,000 tonnes of waste, the facility is one of the largest advanced gasification projects planned for the UK.
• BASF is to consolidate the production of polyacrylamide (PAM) beads into its Bradford, UK facility, where it operates a backward integrated production plant with worldwide supply capability.  Significant investment will be made to increase and upgrade the bead capacity at the UK site to ensure a consistent supply of PAM beads to customers globally.  PAM products are used in solid-liquid separation processes.  They are available as powders and beads or in liquid form (inverse emulsions) and are extensively used in the global growth markets for water treatment, oilfield and mining as well as paper chemicals.  With the consolidation, BASF is to close its PAM bead production unit at its Suffolk, Virginia site, as of January 2012.  The US production unit, it said, is too small to support the strong growth in demand for water treatment and oilfield and mining chemicals in North America.
• Bayer has started up a 20ktpa demonstration plant for the production of chlorine at a German site.  The unit employs oxygen depolarised cathode technology, which has been incorporated into electrolysis technology from Uhde/UHDENORA.  Provided the two-year large-scale trial is successful, Bayer said it will gradually switch its chlorine production to the new process.  The project companies, it said, will also offer the new technology to the global market – with large German chlorine producers and companies in the Asia/Pacific among the interested parties.  “Improving energy efficiency in chemical production processes can considerably reduce electricity consumption in Germany and elsewhere in the world,” said Patrick Thomas, CEO of Bayer MaterialScience.  “In the present-day debate, the subject of energy efficiency is not being given enough air-time.  Politicians should focus their attention not only on generating electricity but also on how to significantly lower electricity consumption with comparatively little effort,” Thomas commented.  Using model calculations, Bayer estimates that, in Germany alone the technology could save electricity equivalent to that generated by a 700MW power plant.