As some of my readers have surmised, I developed a lifelong interest in the chemical industry. I started collecting chemical and petroleum/energy related stamps many years ago, joining a large contingent of collectors with a similar interest. At some point I bought the book illustrated above, which is absolutely magnificent. It illustrates many hundreds of topical stamps from countries all over the world with annotations. A wonderful way to reflect on chemical history in color. Unfortunately, the book has become very expensive as it costs around $ 400 in hardcover from Amazon. However, m ..read more

    Last week the manuscript for my book Primed for Success: The Story of Scientific Design Company subtitled How Chemical Engineers created the Petrochemical Industry, was sent to Springer, a well-known publisher of technical books headquartered in Switzerland. The e-book version of the book should be out in April and the hardcover version in May or June. While the market for the book is uncertain, it is likely to receive good reviews, given nice back cover endorsements by such luminaries as Andrew Liveris and Tom Connelly, CEO of the American Chemical Socie ..read more

Over the past year, I have been busy writing about the petrochemical industry again. It is a book almost finished called: Primed For Success: Scientific Design Company sbhd.  How Chemical Engineers created the Petrochemical Industry   The book will be published early next year.   Thought you would be interested.   ..read more

As you know, I have not posted anything for quite a while. The main reason is that I really stopped finding interesting  new developments I could get excited about in either the chemical or the energy arena. Fracking has not changed much, except for continuous improvement. New chemical process technology important enough to be considered “breakthroughs” has not caught my eye. (Pharmaceuticals are an exception, but I am not an expert in that area). And while I had planned to monitor the Trump administration’s agenda related to global warming and pollution in general, all I can say is that ..read more

With little new in the chemical industry world [believe me, I have been trying to find some interesting (to me) developments]I have been reflecting on how the landscape of U.S. chemical companies has changed since, let’s say, the end of the last century. Several forces have been at work here, including consolidations, mergers and private equity. The above graphic, taken from Chemical & Engineering News lists the ten largest U.S. chemical companies in 2016. [Note that it does not include the chemical divisions of oil companies(e.g. Exxon Chemical) or foreign chemical firms(e.g. BASF, S ..read more

President Trump has promised to restart  shuttered coal mines and bring coal back as an important fuel for power plants, a move that has been met with skepticism and disbelief by energy experts who point to the favorable economics of natural gas, now at prices close to the lowest in recent history. Even those utility CEO’s who are pleased that the EPA’s edict to shut down highly polluting coal-burning power plants will probably now be rescinded will choose to burn natural gas for economic reasons. And readers of this blog know that only massive government subsidies can convert existing pl ..read more

A decade or so ago, Bjorn Lomborg, the famous “Skeptical Environmentalist”(title of his book) opined that it would be hopeless and a wrong allocation of trillions of dollars to get the world to transform its energy generation means and transportation equipment by switching away from coal and oil fast enough to avoid a global warming catastrophe.. He correctly assumed that politics, inertia, and lack of feasibility would not allow such a disruption of the world and its lifestyles. Therefore,  a better use of at least some of this money would be (a) to spend it to eradicate major ..read more

It now becomes important to find out what Donald Trump and his cabinet plan to do to reverse the previous administration’s effort to slow down the pace of global warming. Also, we must monitor the choices the new administration are making in enacting its energy policy. Therefore, I plan to write and comment frequently on specific actions that the new administration is taking in these two areas. Trump’s  well known pronouncements denying the effects of CO2 on atmospheric warming and his disdain for science in general are a good indication of where we are heading. Under Obama, a number ..read more

 This blog has covered the long history of technologies and approaches that would allow coal-fired power plants to keep operating while the carbon dioxide in flue gases can be captured and either used or stored in some manner. The most promising of these approaches applies only to new plants that gasify the coal (rather than burn it), allowing the CO2 to be captured in an efficient manner. When such plants are built close to oil fields that can beneficially use CO2 injection as a tertiary recovery method the economics of the operation are substantially improved. The only problem is that s ..read more

    Readers of my blog have probably recognized that I write more about energy than about chemical developments. This is not by choice, but because I have over the last year found little to write about in the chemical world. Scouring, for example, Chemical and Engineering News’ annual issue of noteworthy chemical developments, I was somewhat underwhelmed, to coin a phrase, except perhaps in the pharma field, which I don’t write about. So, it was a really interesting to read about recent advances in the nanotechnology field that didn’t just announce, as is oft ..read more