Dateline: February 6, 2007

News
Technically Speaking

North America

World

Protest
Five trade unions in France representing Shell workers are protesting the company’s strategic review of its refining and petrochemical feedstock assets in France.  The company’s management has not officially said anything about selling any of the company assets under review, but the unions are raising concerns that divestments will take place.

Refinancing
Merck KGaA is raising approximately €2 billion ($2.6 billion) by issuing rights shares to refinance its purchase of Swiss biopharmaceuticals company Serono.  Merck has decided to issue 13.3 million shares at €78 each.  Shareholders will be able to subscribe for 7.1 million of the new shares at a rate of four new shares for every 29 held.

Startup Delayed
Jam Petrochemical, a subsidiary of Iran’s National Petrochemical Co. (NPC) has delayed commercial production at is cracker due to limited funds and shortage of skilled manpower.  This is the fifth time Jam has delayed the startup of its 1.32 million tons/year cracker project at Assaluyeh, which can produce 350,000 tons/year of propylene.  The unit was originally expected to be completed by the end of 2005.  The startup date was later postponed to July 2006, then to late 2006 and then to the third quarter of 2007.  The polyethylene (PE) facilities downstream of the mixed-feed cracker have already achieved mechanical completion and will startup in August, using ethylene from the adjoining 1 million ton/year Arva Sasol cracker, which should go on stream in July.  The project includes a high-density polyethylene (HDPE) unit, an HDPE/linear low-density PE unit and a polypropylene (PP) unit, each with a capacity of 300,000 tons/year.  The PP project and the 440,000 ton/year ethylene glycol unit downstream of the cracker are expected to start up at the beginning of 2008.  A 115,000 ton/year butadiene unit was expected to go on stream in 2008, but money for the project is short with only 70% of the procurement completed.

R&D Center
DuPont plans to invest more than $22.5 million to construct its first research and development center in India.  The DuPont Knowledge Center will be in Hyderabad and will be home to more than 300 scientists and other employees.  A Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) has been signed with ICICI Knowledge Park for a long-term lease that will allow DuPont to construct its own facility on 15 acres of land in the park.  The center is expected to be fully operational in early 2008.  The center will focus on discovery research as well as applications development in a variety of areas.  Research will focus on “integrated science” – the addition of biology to traditional strengths in chemistry and materials science – to develop the company’s application pipeline in India and other emerging markets.  Initially, the focus will be on molecular biology, bio-informatics and polymer synthesis.

Technically Speaking

Is there a rule of thumb to estimate the footprint of a cooling tower during design phase?

Over the years, this one has seemed to stand the test of time:

Every million Btu/h of tower capacity will require approximately 1000 ft² of cooling tower basin area.

Reference:
Cooling Tower Fundamentals, SPX Cooling Technologies