Industrial examples Monsanto

Chemical companies have taken a number of different routes. Hiils and Hoechst, for example, before their respective mergers with Degussa and Rhone-Poulenc, integrated a great many corporate service functions into their divisions and spun off all infrastructure functions into a separate site management company ( industrial park ). Monsanto has moved its central services into a central business division called Monsanto Business Systems, while Bayer favors a strong corporate center with five corporate divisions and seven central service divisions. 

The insertion of CO into M—Caikyi bonds is well exemplified in organometallic chemistry, and one industrial example (equation 23.36) is a step in the Monsanto process for the production of acetic acid (see Section 26.4). 

Distillation and related vapor-liquid processes are by far the most widely used molecular separation processes in the petroleum, natural gas, petrochemical, and chemical industries, as mentioned earlier. It is highly unlikely that adsorption will ever rival distillation in frequency of use, but adsorption will continue to m e inroads into its domain. Adsorption s serious competition for the separations for which it is now used would seem to come chiefly from membrane-based processes, and especially fixed-membrane processes. For example, Monsanto s Prism hollow-fiber-based process has been commercialized in a number of hydrogen-upgrading applications, and a growing number of other applications are being pursued. 

Whatever the source of synthesis gas, it is the starting point for many industrial chemicals. Some examples to be discussed are the hydroformylation process for converting alkenes to aldehydes and alcohols, the Monsanto process for the production of acetic acid from methanol, the synthesis of methanol from methane, and the preparation of gasoline by the Mobil and Fischer-Tropsch methods. 

Organometallic compounds are used widely as homogeneous catalysts in the chemical industry. For example, if the alkene insertion reaction continues with further alkene inserting into the M C bond, it can form the basis for catalytic alkene polymerisation. Other catalytic cycles may include oxidative addition and reductive elimination steps. Figure above shows the steps involved in the Monsanto acetic acid process, which performs the conversion... 

Transition-metal-catalyzed carbonylation reactions are useful one-carbon homologation techniques in organic synthesis, involving industrially important processes, for example, Fisher-Tropsch reaction, Monsanto acetic acid process, and hydroformylation (oxo reaction) [25]. 

One widely used solution was the creation of new chemical entities through various spinoffs. Thus, between 1993 and 1999, Kodak gave birth to Eastman Chemical Company, American Cyanamid to Cytec Industries, Ciba-Geigy to Ciba Specialty Chemicals, Sandoz to Clariant, Monsanto to Solutia, and Rhone-Poulenc to Rhodia. Some more complex cases had to be solved differently. Hoechst, for example, proceeded in successive steps in 1994 it set up a fiftyfifty joint venture with Bayer, called Dystar, for the purpose of managing their respective dyestuffs businesses. In 1997 it transferred its specialty chemicals operations to Clariant in return for a 45 percent stake in the enlarged company finally, in 1999, it passed its industrial chemicals assets on to Celanese—the U.S. corporation it had acquired twelve years earlier—and passed Herberts, its coatings company, on to Du Pont. 

Catalyst performance has of course been a permanent theme in industry. For example, the catalytic activity of oxo catalysts (in hydroformylation) has improved in the past 50 years by a factor of 10 000 change from diadic and triadic process technology to continuous plant operation, replacement of cobalt by rhodium, tailoring of the ligand sphere (phosphines), change of phase application (from mono- to two-phase processes). At the same time, an improvement of selectivity has been achieved, apart from the ease of product/catalyst separation [132]. A similar development seems to occur in the Monsanto acetic acid process [49]. 

Another example where metabolic pathway engineering has made a dramatic impact is in the biodegradable polymer field. The polymer of this family most widely studied is poly-P-hydroxybutyrate (PHB) (46). Another member of the PHA family commercialized by Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI), which later became Zeneca under the trade name Biopol, is a copolymer consisting of p-hydroxybutyric acid and P-hydroxyvaleric acid. This biodegradable polymer was first used in plastic shampoo bottles by the Wella Corporation [198]. In the early part of 1996, the Biopol product line, was purchased from Zeneca by the Monsanto Company. 

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