Julian Vance Daniel, director at Vessco Engineering, examines how the processes and procedures that govern engineering and manufacturing in the stringent civil nuclear sector could equally apply to the chemical sector

As digitisation, AI and information exchange speed up, so too do the learnings from one industry to another. Fabrication plays a crucial role in the chemical manufacturing industry and encompasses various processes involved in transforming raw materials into final products with specific characteristics.

Italian CDMO Olon has announced the start of a construction on a €22 million facility for the production of ultra-potent compounds. These are aimed for use mainly as payloads and payload-linkers for antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs) at its site at Rodano, near Milan. The facility will reach containment OEB Level 6, with a target occupational exposure level (OEL) of 10 ng/m³.

BASF has started up a new supercomputer at its Ludwigshafen verbund site in Germany. Like its predecessor, the new machine will be called Quriosity but will have three petaflops of computing power compared to 1.75. It will also be the largest supercomputer used in industrial chemical research.

Japan’s Nippon Shokubai has officially opened a 100,000 tonnes/year acrylic acid (AA) plant that was built at a cost of about $200 million at Cilegon, Banten, Indonesia. This takes its global capacity to 980,000 tonnes, of which 540,000 are in Japan itself.

AA is a key raw material in superabsorbent polymers (SAPs) for disposable diapers, the application that is mainly driving continuing demand growth. SAPs are also used in paints and adhesives. Nippon Shokubai claims to be the world’s largest SAP producer and has integrated AA and SAP facilities across the globe.

Oxo chemicals firm OQ Chemicals has announced a two-year cost-saving programme that includes realignment and workforce reductions in Germany. This was attributed to high raw material and energy prices, plus inflation rates, particularly in Europe. Last year alone, rising energy costs amounted to “a high three-digit million Euro figure”.

Global Healthcare Opportunities (GHO), a European specialist investor in healthcare, and Partners Group, a global private markets firm, have both invested in Sterling Pharma Solutions, a CDMO owned by GHO. The exact amounts have not been disclosed.

Solvay has officially opened its application development lab in Shanghai. Housing some 30 scientists, engineers and technicians, it will seek to “advance custom-tailored application developments” using Solvay technologies, notably for the automotive, new energy, life sciences, smart devices and semiconductors.