Blog from October, 2015

Date: 2015-10-26

Comments: Versalis is a Butadiene/Styrene producer in Europe

Eni SpA is exploring the sale of its chemical division Versalis, three months after the unit returned to profit, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

The Italian oil company is working with Barclays Plc on a potential sale of Versalis, which may fetch as much as 1 billion euros ($1.1 billion), the people said, asking not to be identified as the process is private. Several private-equity firms may be interested in bidding for the unit, they said. No final decision has been made and the valuation may depend on the structure of any deal, they said.

Representatives for Barclays and Eni declined to comment.

A sale of Versalis would fit with Eni’s current focus on oil and gas exploration, alongside a restructuring program to cut costs and upgrade the portfolio in areas such as refining and chemicals. Eni said in July that its refining, marketing and chemical operations turned a profit for the first time in eight years. The chemical unit specifically reported an adjusted operating profit of 95 million euros in the first half of 2015, compared to a loss of 182 million euros in the same period the previous year.

Versalis is Italy’s largest chemical company by sales, according to Eni’s website, producing polymers used in industries from food packaging to car parts and toy manufacturing.

Source: ENI website from J Spiel Chemistry daily

DATE : 2015-10-23

China’s Jiangsu Sinopec Lianyungang’s new methyl methacrylate (MMA) plant is expected to begin commercial operations soon, market sources said on the sidelines of the 5th China International MMA Industry Chain Summit Forum in Wuxi.

The MMA plant located in Jiangsu province with a capacity of 100,000 tonnes/year was originally meant to start up in October, has now been postponed to November at the earliest, market sources said.

SOURCE Icis News

DATE : 2015-10-12

Daljeet Singh Kohli of India Nivesh Securities told CNBC-TV18, "Camlin Fine Sciences is actually a story for two to three years. The chemicals that they make, they hardly have any competition in India. There is only one major company which is called Rhodia that is major competitor to them. They are into food preservative products basically, hydroquinone. One and half years back, they bought a company called Boehringer in Europe which actually gave them this technology and that was the game changer for the company.""The trigger pint is also coming from there only because of that technology now being available, the company is going for an expansion in Dahej for which the project has started which will come up in second half of FY18 and then full ramp up will happen in FY19. They have to import everything from this European subsidy. As a result, 55 percent of the European subsidiaries business is internally consumed.

So, it is not showing up in the numbers," he said."Both these triggers will work in FY'18. Now from here till FY'18, the trigger will be the launch of new products. They have something like 30 odd products in the pipeline which will keep on coming like four or five products which are already in the trial stage. They have already started giving it out to the customers. They will try for the next three to six months. So, those numbers will start coming in. So, there are a few continuous triggers till three years and then in the next three years, there is a big trigger which will be from the new facility. Once that comes in, from FY'17 to FY'18, revenue growth projection for our model is 50 percent and from FY'19, it will be another 50 percent. So, that means, in FY18-FY19, from current level, we will be at least three to four times higher. So, that is the difference the new project will make.""In terms of valuation, there is actually no comparable, but if you still compare with other chemical companies, you will find that this actually has a return equity of almost 20-25 percent and return on capital of almost 30 percent but still trading at half the valuation. We believe that once those numbers will start coming in, there will be more visibility, this gap will narrow down. Therefore, the stock can actually appreciate to a much larger extent. As of now, for FY'17, we have given a target of Rs 136, but this can be definitely revised upwards," he added.

SOURCE Money Control

DATE : 2014-09-03

For years, battery technology startups and researchers have been striving to create a rechargeable, grid-scale energy storage system using zinc, one of the world’s cheapest and most plentiful metals. Zinc-based batteries tend to break down after just hundreds of charge-discharge cycles, however -- and coming up with new technology innovations to overcome this remains a challenge. 

Take the example of ViZn Energy Systems, a startup with a zinc-iron flow battery it’s now putting to the test in grid-scale applications. For the past four years, ViZn (pronounced “vision”) has been busy turning a fundamental weakness of its alkaline-based electrolyte chemistry into a key advantage.

Founded in 2009 as Zinc Air Inc., the Columbia Falls, Mont.-based startup changed its name in September and launched its first commercial-scaleproduct, an 80-kilowatt, 160-kilowatt-hour zinc redox flow battery housed in a 20-foot shipping container. It also announced its first deployment with BlueSky Energy for an Austrian microgrid project, aimed at storing and balancing on-site solar generation.

In March, ViZn announced that Kalispell, Mont.-based utility Flathead Electric Cooperative had installed a second system, meant to test a variety of grid support services. And this week, grid energy storage software and systems startup Greensmith named ViZn as one of the battery providers it’s working with at grid scale.

ViZn’s Z20 systems are targeting a price point of $800 per kilowatt-hour for microgrid systems, Kirk Plautz, vice president of sales, told me in a July interview. The company’s longer-term goal is to put together five of these containers in a 1-megawatt, 3 megawatt-hour system, the GS200, with a “clear path” to reducing those costs to about $450 per kilowatt-hour at scale, he said.

That’s on par with the costs being targeted by other flow battery competitors, whether they’re using vanadium (UniEnergy, Imergy andCellcube), iron-chromium (EnerVault) or zinc-bromine chemistries (Primus Power, ZBB, RedFlow). Flow batteries pump electrolyte through electrochemical cells, and thus can add more tanks of electrolyte to expand their energy capacity, something sealed batteries can’t do. They aren’t as efficient as the latest lithium-ion batteries, however, and can’t compete on how much power they're able to deliver at any one time.

One of ViZn’s key differentiators is its use of an alkaline, rather than acidic, electrolyte to get the job done, executive vice president Craig Wilkins told me. That alkaline chemistry, developed over the course of nearly a decade of research at Lockheed Martin, was aimed at avoiding the dendrite formation and subsequent failure common to acidic-based zinc battery chemistries, he said.

Instead of spiky dendrites, the alkaline electrolyte led to a  “clumping” of byproduct materials on the battery electrodes, he said. That in turn led to its own set of problems for cycle life in closed battery systems, ultimately prompting Lockheed to put the technology on hold.

But for flow batteries, this “clumping” had the unintended side effect of increasing the power density of the system, by increasing the surface area upon which electrochemical reactions could occur. That allows ViZn’s flow batteries to ramp up to higher power more quickly than many other flow batteries, while still retaining the multi-hour energy storage advantages the technology provides, he said.

“We leveraged this weakness in the chemistry,” through licensing of the core patents from Lockheed, Wilkins said. (The company’s board of advisors includes Roger Hollandsworth, who led much of Lockheed’s research into aqueous zinc redox batteries.) “Lockheed spent eight years and $10 million on the chemistry,” he said. “All we had to do is commercialize it.”

ViZn’s website notes that its “low-cost, non-acid” and low-temperature chemistry allows the use of inexpensive construction materials, and that it has built battery stacks with “proprietary elements to deal with the shunt issues historically afflicting flow batteries.” The company also claims the potential for 10,000 cycles and a 20-year lifespan, critical factors for investments that need to run for years in order to pay for themselves.

ViZn has raised about $20 million to date, mostly from private investors, which has allowed the company to deploy its first systems working with manufacturing partners like Semitool, the Kalispell, Mont.-based semiconductor chemical processing equipment maker bought by Applied Materials in 2009. ViZn’s new CEO Ron Van Dell told Bloomberg in July that the company is now seeking up to $25 million, with hopes of ramping up manufacturing capacity in late 2014 and early 2015.

To be sure, ViZn isn’t the only flow battery startup promising key improvements in chemistry, engineering and manufacturing processes. Nor is it the only contender promising a zinc-based grid storage alternative --startup Eos Energy is now testing its aqueous electrolyte zinc batteries, which it hopes to bring to market at a cost of $160 per kilowatt-hour.

California’s 1.3-gigawatt grid energy storage mandate is creating major new opportunities for batteries that can store energy for multiple hours at a time. Lithium-ion batteries are already providing power-centric grid services in projects around the world, and are starting to be deployed for multi-hour applications as well. But flow batteries are getting their own share of business for long-duration storage -- and adding some power density to the mix could allow them to provide both types of services, Wilkins noted. As with all grid-scale energy storage efforts, the proof will come in the real-world deployments.

SOURCE GreenTech Media

DATE : 2013-06-11

California has just taken a big step forward in making grid-scale energy storage on a truly massive scale a reality. On Monday, the California Public Utilities Commission released a proposal (PDF) that would call for the state’s big three investor-owned utilities to procure 1.3 gigawatts of energy storage by decade’s end, along with market mechanisms to start the procurement process as early as next year. 

The assigned commissioner ruling from CPUC Commissioner Carla J. Peterman is the result of a process that started in 2010 with the passage of California Assembly Bill 2514, the first state law calling for grid-scale energy storage. Last year, the CPUC took up the challenge of figuring out how much storage, in what forms, would meet the law’s goals, as well as how to incorporate it into the state’s existing energy and utility economic and regulatory structures.

Monday’s procurement targets go a long way toward defining those metrics, breaking down year-by-year targets for Pacific Gas & Electric, Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric across three categories -- transmission, distribution and customer-facing storage deployments -- meant to address a host of grid and energy management needs.

It also proposes a “reverse auction” market mechanism, similar to its Renewable Auction Mechanism (RAM) for wind, solar and other renewable power, to incorporate energy storage into the transmission and system-wide procurement and planning process, as well as new distribution system planning mechanisms and customer incentive programs. The first auction, to be held in June 2014, will ask the three IOUs to procure a collective 200 megawatts of storage, quite a bit more than what they’ve got today.

At the same time, it’s still a proposal, and the three utilities involved will be sure to be weighing in, as they have throughout the process. Let’s break down what’s at stake.

1) First, in terms of total megawatts, the CPUC’s proposal goes pretty far in establishing the state as a leader in energy storage for the grid -- and sets some pretty quick deadlines to meet as well. As the chart below indicates, the CPUC wants the state’s big three utilities to start procuring storage resources next year, and then keep increasing that amount by roughly one-third every two years, to meet its 2020 goals.

California Assembly Member Nancy Skinner (D-Berkeley), author of AB 2514, originally included a mandate that the state procure enough energy storage by 2020 to meet 5 percent of its average peak load. Measured against the state’s 2010 peak load of 47,350 megawatts (PDF), that would have added up to 2,367 megawatts of energy storage, or nearly twice the 2020 total of 1,325 megawatts that the CPUC’s proposal calls for.

Still, the state’s big three utilities have a lot of work to do to meet these goals. All three IOUs have but a fraction of the proposed amounts of energy storage they’ll need to procure in 2014, for example. Of course, because these mandates are for procurement of resources, that means that projects still on the drawing boards can count for biannual targets -- “Winning projects would be given a reasonable amount of time in which to be constructed and interconnected, but would not necessarily be complete before the next auction would take place,” Peterman wrote. 

2) There are plenty of energy storage projects of every description that will count toward the CPUC’s proposed targets. Commissioner Peterman lists a series of statewide storage projects that could be included under the “various mechanisms and proceedings” that the CPUC has “authorized or is considering authorizing…for commercialized energy storage projects.”

Those include many of the Department of Energy smart grid stimulus grant-backed projects underway in the state, such as Southern California Edison’s8-megawatt Tehachapi wind energy storage project and the Los Angeles Air Force Base’s electric vehicle-to-grid project; PG&E’s power purchase agreement with SolarReserve for a solar-thermal power projectincorporating molten salt energy storage;  and San Diego Gas & Electric’s Borrego Springs microgrid project’s community energy storage systems from S&C Electric (PDF) and parent company Sempra Energy’s general rate case proposal for 44.8 megawatts of energy storage for distribution system support.

It also includes various regulatory structures and mandates for energy storage in the state, including CPUC’s ruling earlier this year that asks SCE to procure 50 megawatts of storage-based capacity for the Los Angeles basin by 2020, or the up to 35 megawatts of energy storage projects under the existing self-generation incentive program (SGIP), which pays customers for on-site energy generation or storage.

Last week, the CPUC instituted a new program (PDF) that’s also included in Commissioner Peterman’s list. It’s called Permanent Load Shifting (PLS), and would provide $32 million in incentives of $875 per kilowatt, up to a maximum of $1.5 million per project, for storage systems that “permanently” move a building’s demand from hot afternoon peak times to other times. That could open up new revenue streams for thermal storage projects from the likes of CALMAC and Ice Energy, as well as other forms of storage. Under last week’s CPUC filing, the state’s big three utilities have 90 days to come up with plans to meet the new program requirements.

As for the host of other statewide grid energy storage projects funded by the California Energy Commission’s previous Public Interest Energy Research (PIER) program, as well as new projects under CEC’s EPIC program, “The primary purpose of both programs is technology development or demonstration, not commercial deployment,” Peterman write. “At this stage, I propose that any PIER- or EPIC-funded projects shall only count toward the procurement targets set in this proceeding if a load-serving entity subject to AB 2514 is a financial partner in the project, and the project reaches actual operations and can be shown to meet one of the three purposes set out here."

3) Market mechanisms will be a key part of what’s to come. “This ACR suggests procurement targets for energy storage with the goal of market transformation,” Commissioner Peterman wrote in Monday’s ruling. “The hoped-for result is that when the energy storage market becomes sustainable, procurement targets for storage will no longer be needed and it will compete to provide services alongside other types of resources.”

To get there, the CPUC is proposing different mechanisms across three broad categories of transmission-grid support, distribution system support, and customer-side storage deployments, as well as a list of 21 end uses for storage within different components of the grid, ranging from “black start” support and ancillary services for state grid operator Cal-ISO to outage mitigation and backup power for end users.

Each of those categories will also include different market mechanisms to incorporate energy storage’s capabilities into the state’s energy system. For transmission-scale storage, “I propose that the utilities hold a reverse auction, similar to the Commission’s Renewables Auction Mechanism (RAM),” Peterman writes. Under that plan, projects are able to bid their costs and be paid over the life of the contract, while future winning bid prices “adjust over time as the IOUs learn more about the projects, the storage market develops, and the Commission and the CAISO continue to assess the storage needs for the state.”

Monday’s proposal provides much less detail on mechanisms aimed specifically at distribution grid and customer energy storage, though it does mention “a requirement to include energy storage alternatives in distribution system planning” as part of its list of potential methods. California has set a 33 percent renewable energy target for 2020, and is looking to storage to help manage and mitigate the intermittent nature of that power, whether from massive wind farms or thousands of rooftop solar panels.

Praveen Kathpal, vice president of market and regulatory affairs for AES Energy Storage, the storage subsidiary of U.S. energy giant AES, said that Monday’s ruling leaves much yet to be worked out in how the program will run. “Whatever the right mechanism is will shake out in the stakeholder process,” he said in a Monday interview.

“At the end,” however, “one of those barriers that has inadvertently been erected over the years will be addressed,” he said. “There are established ways for utilities to procure power resources, and we’re just introducing storage into that equation.” AES serves California with both traditional (natural gas-fired) and renewable energy, and is watching developments on the energy storage front as well, Kathpal said.

Janice Lin, executive director of the California Energy Storage Alliance trade group, noted that Monday’s ruling also emphasizes that storage technologies must be cost-effective and commercially feasible. Of course, in the absence of rules and markets that can incorporate energy storage’s unique capabilities into the flow of energy and money across the state on a day-by-day, year-by-year basis, it’s been hard to prove whether or not that’s the case, she added. That’s something that the CPUC process is meant to help resolve, she said.

Meanwhile, there’s a whole universe of California energy storage projects that will want to be added to the mix. PG&E is building a DOE grant-backed, 300-megawatt, 10-hour compressed air energy storage (CAES) system in the Central Valley, and has several megawatt-scale storage projects using sodium-sulfur batteries from Japan’s NGK and power electronics and controls systems from Chicago-based S&C Electric Company. We’re also seeing distributed energy storage emerge in the state, with everything from backyard or garage batteries to backup solar installations (Tesla and SolarCity, Silent Power and Hanwha) to substation-scale grid balancing units in the 1-2 megawatt range (Greensmith and SDG&E), to name a few examples.

SOURCE GreenTech Media (Jeff St. John)

DATE : 2015-10-02

ALTIVIA Petrochemicals announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire all of Haverhill Chemicals' assets for their Phenol, Acetone, Alpha-Methylstyrene (AMS) and BisPhenol-A (BPA) businesses. The facilities are located on the banks of the Ohio River in Haverhill, Ohio, formerly operated by Sunoco. Haverhill Chemicals filed for relief under Chapter 11 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code on September 19. Closing of this transaction, which is subject to approval by the Bankruptcy Court, is expected in October.

The chemicals produced at the Haverhill facilities are intermediates utilized in the production of phenolic resins, epoxies, polycarbonates, paints and coatings, pharmaceuticals, acrylics, and heat resistant polymers.

According to ALTIVIA, entering this business will provide the company opportunities to participate in commodity products controlled by global players. The business' location provides a geographical advantage to the supply chain of its robust customer base.

SOURCE Chemicals & Chemistry

https://www.basf.com/en/company/news-and-media/news-releases/2015/10/p-15-353.ht ml