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The US chemical industry has had a couple of down years, but its leading trade group, the American Chemistry Council (ACC), predicts that 2025 will be the year when it turns the corner.
“Coming into the end of the year, the US economy is reasonably healthy,” said Martha Moore, the ACC’s chief economist, in a briefing for reporters on Dec. 12. Inflation is easing, consumer spending is buoyant, and investment in equipment is robust. In its year-end economic forecast, the ACC expects the US gross domestic product to finish 2024 with 2.7% growth before easing to 2.0% growth in 2025.
US chemical production, excluding pharmaceuticals, will finish the year down 0.4%. In 2023, production volumes fell 0.2%. The ACC attributes the 2024 decline to repressed end-use markets. But with declining interest rates supporting investment and consumption, the ACC expects US chemical output to increase 1.9% in 2025.
“The industrial sector, which of course is where chemicals play, that remains pretty, pretty stagnant,” Moore said. She singled out semiconductors and electrical equipment as bright spots. Demand for chemicals used in these markets increased 8% in 2024. “The data center build-out has really created a lot of demand,” she noted.
Moore expects further interest rate cuts from the Federal Reserve to stimulate sales of homes and durable goods. Construction, a major source of chemical demand in the US, has had a terrible year. Housing starts are on track to fall to 1.35 million in 2024 from 1.42 million in 2023. They should climb back to 1.40 million in 2025, the ACC predicts.
Similarly, the trade association expects that US sales of motor vehicles—another big consumer of chemicals—will increase sharply to 16.2 million in 2025 from 15.7 million in 2024.
Trade is another bright spot for the US chemical sector, which has production cost advantages over other global regions. But potentially upsetting trade flows, the incoming Trump administration has threatened to increase tariffs by, for example, tacking another 10% on imports from China and erecting 25% tariffs on two major trade partners, Canada and Mexico.
“There’s a lot of uncertainty about what trade policy is really going to look like—you know, how much of it is talk and how much of it is going to translate into actionable policies,” Moore said. “But certainly if tariffs are raised to the levels that have been talked about, that would be very troubling to the US economy.”
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Oregon State University researchers have synthesized new molecules able to quickly capture significant amounts of carbon dioxide from the air, an important tactic in climate change mitigation.
The study, which focused on titanium peroxides, builds on their earlier research into vanadium peroxides. The research is part of large-scale federal effort to innovate new methods and materials for direct air capture, or DAC, of carbon dioxide, produced by the burning of fossil fuels.
Findings of the research, led by May Nyman and Karlie Bach of the OSU College of Science, were published today in Chemistry of Materials.
Nyman’s team is exploring how some transition metal complexes can react with air to remove carbon dioxide and convert it to a metal carbonate, similar to what is found in many naturally occurring minerals.
Transition metals are located near the center of the periodic table and their name arises from the transition of electrons from low energy to high energy states and back again, giving rise to distinctive colors.
Facilities that filter carbon dioxide from the air are still in their infancy. Technologies for mitigating carbon dioxide at the point of entry into the atmosphere, such as at power plants, are more mature. Both types of carbon capture will likely be needed if the Earth is to avoid the worst outcomes of climate change, the scientists say.
At present there are a combined 18 active direct air capture plants operating in the United States, Canada and Europe, with plans for an additional 130 around the globe. Challenges to direct air capture include big costs and high energy requirements compared to working with industrial exhausts. Additionally, the atmosphere’s concentration of carbon dioxide, four parts per million, is low, challenging the performance of carbon capture materials.
“We opted to look into titanium as it’s 100 times cheaper than vanadium, more abundant, more environmentally friendly and already well established in industrial uses,” said Bach, a graduate student in Nyman’s lab. “It also is right next to vanadium on the periodic table, so we hypothesized that the carbon capture behavior could be similar enough to vanadium to be effective.”
Bach, Nyman and the rest of the research team made several new tetraperoxo titanate structures—a titanium atom coordinated with four peroxide groups—that showed varying abilities to scrub carbon dioxide from the air. Tetraperoxo structures tend to be highly reactive because of the peroxide groups, which are potent oxidizing agents.
Related peroxotitanates have been studied for their potential uses in catalysis, environmental chemistry and materials science. However, the tetraperoxotitanates in this study had never been definitively synthesized; Bach was able to use inexpensive materials for high-yield chemical reactions.
“Our favorite carbon capture structure we discovered is potassium tetraperoxo titanate, which is extra unique because it turns out it is also a peroxosolvate,” Bach said. “That means that in addition to having the peroxide bonds to titanium, it also has hydrogen peroxide in the structure, which is what we believe makes it so reactive.”
The measured carbon capture capacity was about 8.5 millimoles carbon dioxide per gram of potassium tetraperoxo titanate—roughly double that of vanadium peroxide.
“Titanium is a cheaper, safer material with a significantly higher capacity,” Bach said.
Named for the titans of Greek mythology, titanium is as strong as steel but much lighter. It’s non-toxic, does not easily corrode and is the ninth most abundant element in the Earth’s crust—found in rocks, soil, plants and even the human body in trace amounts.
Other Oregon State authors on the paper included assistant professors Tim Zuehlsdorff and Konstantinos Goulas, postdoctoral researcher Eduard Garrido Ribó, graduate students Jacob Hirschi, Zhiwei Mao and Makenzie Nord and crystallographer Lev Zakharov, interim manager of OSU’s X-Ray Diffraction Facility.
More information:
Karlie Bach et al, Tetraperoxotitanates for High-Capacity Direct Air Capture of Carbon Dioxide, Chemistry of Materials (2024). DOI: 10.1021/acs.chemmater.4c01795
Citation:
New chemical structures show vastly improved carbon capture ability (2024, December 12)
retrieved 12 December 2024
from https://phys.org/news/2024-12-chemical-vastly-carbon-capture-ability.html
This document is subject to copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study or research, no
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The US Navy’s Los Angeles-class fast attack submarine USS Hampton
MC2 Chase Stephens/U.S. Navy/Alamy
The US Navy has a long wish list of applications for quantum computers, ranging from basic science – understanding corrosion, a fleet’s constant enemy – to more intriguing uses like war game simulations. Although quantum computers have rapidly improved in recent years, they are not yet capable of all these tasks, but that hasn’t stopped the military from dreaming up ways to use them.
“We are committed to the axiom that whatever legacy model is now successful will lead to [our] demise if it does not…
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Illustration of modern humans who lived in Europe about 45,000 years ago
Tom Björklund
Modern humans and Neanderthals interbred over a sustained period of around 7000 years, probably in the eastern Mediterranean. That is according to two studies that trace how these two hominins hybridised in unprecedented detail.
“The vast majority of the Neanderthal gene flow… occurred in a single, shared, extended period,” says Priya Moorjani at the University of California, Berkeley.
The studies confirm that modern humans acquired important gene variants by mixing with Neanderthals,…
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This relatively small solar flare from October – the bright flash in the centre spotted by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory – would be dwarfed by a superflare
NASA/SDO
The sun may produce extremely powerful bursts of radiation more frequently than we thought. Such “superflares” seem to happen as often as once a century, according to a survey of sun-like stars, and might be accompanied by particle storms that could have devastating consequences for electronics on Earth. As the last big solar storm to hit Earth was 165 years ago, we might be in line for another soon, but it is uncertain how similar the sun is to these other stars.
Direct measurements of the sun’s activity only started towards the middle of the 20th century. In 1859, our star produced an extremely powerful solar flare, a burst of light radiation. These are often associated with a subsequent coronal mass ejection (CME), a bubble of magnetised plasma particles that shoots out into space.
That flare was indeed followed by a CME that struck Earth and caused an intense geomagnetic storm, which was recorded by astronomers at the time, and is now known as the Carrington event. If this happened today, it could knock out communication systems and power grids.
There is also evidence on Earth of much more powerful storms long before the Carrington event. Assessments of radioactive forms of carbon in tree rings and ice cores suggest that Earth has occasionally been showered with very high-energy particles over periods of several days, but it is unclear whether these came from one-off, massive solar outbursts, or from several smaller ones. It is also uncertain if the sun can produce flares and particle storms so large in a single outburst.
The frequency of these signs on Earth, as well as superflares that astronomers have recorded on other stars, suggested that these giant bursts tend to occur many hundreds to thousands of years apart.
Now, Ilya Usoskin at the University of Oulu in Finland and his colleagues have surveyed 56,450 stars and found that sun-like stars appear to produce superflares much more often than this.
“Superflares on sun-like stars are much more frequent than we thought before, roughly once per one or two centuries,” says Usoskin. “If we believe that this projection to the sun is correct, then we expect a superflare on the sun roughly every 100 to 200 years, and extreme solar storms, as we know them, occur roughly once per 1500 or 2000 years. There is a mismatch.”
Usoskin and his colleagues measured the brightness of the stars using the Kepler space telescope and detected a total of 2889 superflares on 2527 of the stars. The energies for these flares were between 100 and 10,000 times the size of the largest measured from the sun – the Carrington event.
We still don’t know whether such large flares also produce large particle events of the sort we have evidence for on Earth, says Usoskin, but our current theories of the sun can’t explain such large flares. “This opens a question of what we are actually seeing,” he says.
“As a stellar flare survey, it looks really impressive,” says Mathew Owens at the University of Reading, UK. “They’ve clearly got new methods for detecting flares with increased sensitivity.”
How much this tells us about the sun’s flaring activity is harder to discern, says Owens, partly because it is difficult to accurately measure the rotation rate of other stars. “The devil is in the detail here,” he says.
“The rotation rate is important because it’s linked to how a star generates a magnetic field, and the magnetic field is linked to flaring activity,” says Owens.
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Unidentified drones have been flying over US military sites
U.S. Navy/Ensign Drew Verbis
Mysterious drones have been swarming the night skies above New Jersey and other nearby states for a month. They have been spotted over several US military sites. They have been videoed over houses and apartment buildings. A swarm was seen following a US Coast Guard rescue boat at the same time that New Jersey police reported 50 drones arriving on land from the ocean. But no one seems to know who is piloting them, or whether it is a coordinated effort.
The incidents have drawn the attention of state governors and legislators, as well as members of the US Congress, and the FBI has launched an investigation, asking for the public to report sightings.
Witnesses describe the drones as being as loud as lawnmowers, with some approaching the size of a small car – significantly larger than a typical quadcopter or multirotor drone that anyone can purchase. “These are not necessarily just small, hobbyist unmanned aerial systems that you can buy for $2000,” says Daniel Gerstein at the RAND Corporation, a think tank in California. “These feel like they have longer range and are more sophisticated than what you can get at a hobby shop.”
Blurry nighttime videos have popped up all over social media sharing drone sightings in states such as New Jersey, Pennsylvania and New York, including one video showing drones over the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge in New York City. The Federal Aviation Administration issued drone flight restrictions over the Trump National Golf Club and the Picatinny Arsenal Military Base in New Jersey after reports of drone activity over both. The sightings coincide with other drone swarms recently appearing near UK military bases where US Air Force squadrons operate.
On 10 December, the House Committee on Homeland Security held a hearing on drone threats with officials from the FBI, US Customs and Border Protection and US Department of Justice. The officials described the recent sightings as involving a possible mix of both rotor drones and fixed-wing drones but had little information to offer about what the drones are doing and who may be operating them. However, they said the drones do not yet represent a serious threat. In a separate briefing from the US Department of Homeland Security, the agency told lawmakers that some of the sightings may have mistaken aircraft for drones.
Ryan Herd, a town mayor from New Jersey, told ABC News Live that officials confirmed that these are not US military drones and that they are not operated by a US tech company.
Meanwhile in the UK, Vernon Coaker, a defence minister, told Parliament last month that authorities are investigating multiple drone incursions that occurred near several UK military bases starting on 20 November. Those bases support US Air Force squadrons that fly fighter jets, bombers and support aircraft.
“The common theme across all of these cases is that nobody has fully cracked the code on how to find, track and, if need be, take down small drones,” says Arthur Holland Michel, a journalist and author who writes about drones. “The second common theme is that if the person flying the drone is actively trying to avoid being identified, the challenges of countering that drone go through the roof.”
Radar and other sensors can track drones, but it is “still not practical to cover every inch of the country with detection and tracking systems”, which often leaves authorities “totally blind to drones in most of our airspace”, says Michel. “As a general rule, once a citizen has spotted a drone and reports it or films it with their phone, it’s too late [to take early action],” he says.
Gerstein says there is some uncertainty about who has the main authority and responsibility among local law enforcement and state and federal agencies to take action against such drones. And even if that is cleared up, it isn’t simple to figure out the best way to address them.
Many counter-drone measures exist for either shooting down drones directly – using missiles, lasers, bullets and even other drones – or taking over control of suspicious drones and forcing them to land by using electronic warfare signals, says Gerstein. Such technologies have been commonly used during the drone-heavy war in Ukraine, while US Navy warships and other navy vessels have shot down dozens of drones threatening shipping in the Red Sea region.
“When it comes to shooting drones down, the most effective measures are often the most dangerous,” says Michel. “We simply can’t have law enforcement departments firing high-powered projectiles into the air, or activating military-grade signal jammers, every time a drone is spotted flying over [New Jersey].”
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Chemists from Ed Tate’s laboratory at Imperial College London have launched a company, Siftr Bio, that aims to improve the chemistry used to link antibodies to cancer-killing molecules in therapies known as antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs).
Siftr is led by CEO Daniel Lucy and chief scientific officer Archie Wall, who cofounded the firm along with Tate. Siftr’s origins can be traced to 2019, when Lucy joined Tate’s lab to work on enzyme-responsive chemistry. When Walllater joined the lab with experience developing ADCs, Lucy got excited about the opportunities to use his chemistry in that context, he says. The idea for Siftr grew from there.
ADCs have become increasingly popular with pharmaceutical firms in recent years. The drugs “are exciting because they work,” Lucy says, but there “has not been much innovation” in linker chemistry. Lucy says Siftr could make a real impact by improving spatial and temporal control of ADCs. These qualities could be especially useful as the drug class moves beyond oncology, Siftr’s current focus, and into other disease areas.
In July, another firm that Tate cofounded, Myricx Bio, netted a substantial series A fundraising round after pivoting from small-molecule medicines to ADCs. Siftr is at a much earlier stage, having raised $1.3 million in preseed funding.
As a founder-CEO, Lucy has participated in multiple accelerators and programs to help him develop Siftr, which is based in Imperial’s White City incubator. With cash in hand and a platform for developing new linkers, Lucy says he is now scanning the landscape to see where first to focus within the oncology space.
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But this pace of innovation is not guaranteed, and the next frontier of technological advances—from the future of AI to new computing paradigms—will only happen if we think differently.
The modern microchip stretches both the limits of physics and credulity. Such is the atomic precision, that a few atoms can decide the function of an entire chip. This marvel of engineering is the result of over 50 years of exponential scaling creating faster, smaller transistors.
But we are reaching the physical limits of how small we can go, costs are increasing exponentially with complexity, and efficient power consumption is becoming increasingly difficult. In parallel, AI is demanding ever-more computing power. Data from Epoch AI indicates the amount of computing needed to develop AI is quickly outstripping Moore’s Law, doubling every six months in the “deep learning era” since 2010.
These interlinked trends present challenges not just for the industry, but society as a whole. Without new semiconductor innovation, today’s AI models and research will be starved of computational resources and struggle to scale and evolve. Key sectors like AI, autonomous vehicles, and advanced robotics will hit bottlenecks, and energy use from high-performance computing and AI will continue to soar.
At this inflection point, a complex, global ecosystem—from foundries and designers to highly specialized equipment manufacturers and materials solutions providers like Merck—is working together more closely than ever before to find the answers. All have a role to play, and the role of materials extends far, far beyond the silicon that makes up the wafer.
Instead, materials intelligence is present in almost every stage of the chip production process—whether in chemical reactions to carve circuits at molecular scale (etching) or adding incredibly thin layers to a wafer (deposition) with atomic precision: a human hair is 25,000 times thicker than layers in leading edge nodes.
Yes, materials provide a chip’s physical foundation and the substance of more powerful and compact components. But they are also integral to the advanced fabrication methods and novel chip designs that underpin the industry’s rapid progress in recent decades.
For this reason, materials science is taking on a heightened importance as we grapple with the limits of miniaturization. Advanced materials are needed more than ever for the industry to unlock the new designs and technologies capable of increasing chip efficiency, speed, and power. We are seeing novel chip architectures that embrace the third dimension and stack layers to optimize surface area usage while lowering energy consumption. The industry is harnessing advanced packaging techniques, where separate “chiplets” are fused with varying functions into a more efficient, powerful single chip. This is called heterogeneous integration.
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A team of engineers is reimagining one of the essential processes in modern manufacturing. Their goal? To transform how a chemical called acrylonitrile (ACN) is made—not by building world-scale manufacturing sites, but by using smaller-scale, modular reactors that can work if they let the catalyst, in a sense, “breathe.”
Their article, titled “Propene Ammoxidation over an Industrial Bismuth Molybdate-Based Catalyst Using Forced Dynamic Operation,” is published in Applied Catalysis A: General.
ACN is everywhere, from carbon fibers in sports equipment to acrylics in car parts and textiles. Traditionally, producing it requires a continuous, energy-intensive process. But now, researchers at the University of Virginia and the University of Houston have shown that by pausing to “inhale” fresh oxygen, a chemical catalyst can produce ACN more efficiently. This discovery could open the door to smaller, versatile production facilities that adapt to fluctuating needs.
William Epling, a professor and chair of the Department of Chemical Engineering at UVA, calls the technique “forced dynamic operation,” or FDO. Picture a machine cycling through work and rest periods, using short breaks to recharge and perform at its best.
This is what Epling’s team has done with an industrial bismuth molybdate-based catalyst, alternating between two phases: one containing the full mixture of ingredients needed to make ACN, and another containing only oxygen. This rhythmic approach allows the catalyst to regenerate its lattice oxygen—the source of the key reactant in driving the transformation into ACN.
“FDO is essentially like giving the catalyst a breather, letting it work harder and more effectively in each cycle,” said Zhuoran Gan, a Ph.D. candidate in Epling’s lab. When the catalyst “rests” with just oxygen, it regains strength to tackle the next cycle of production. The results were surprising: ACN production was exceeded by as much as 30% over traditional, continuous methods.
The impact could be transformative. Smaller production facilities that use this method could meet the demand for ACN growth without the need for world-scale, capital-intensive plants. Such facilities could also operate closer to end-users, like manufacturers of high-performance carbon fibers, reducing transportation costs and making production more adaptable.
Epling envisions a future where chemical manufacturing can be more flexible and efficient, with small, scalable production units that meet demand exactly where and when it arises.
The UVA team’s work underscores how sometimes, a catalyst just needs a breath of fresh air to become a powerful tool for innovation.
More information:
Zhuoran Gan et al, Propene ammoxidation over an industrial bismuth molybdate-based catalyst using forced dynamic operation, (2024). DOI: 10.1016/j.apcata.2024.119585
Citation:
Catalyst ‘breathes’ new life into acrylonitrile production (2024, December 12)
retrieved 12 December 2024
from https://phys.org/news/2024-12-catalyst-life-acrylonitrile-production.html
This document is subject to copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study or research, no
part may be reproduced without the written permission. The content is provided for information purposes only.
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