Industrial gases industry innovation continuing

The large scale continuous processes that lie at the core of the modern chemical and petrochemical industries have their roots in scientific innovations that started nearly one hundred years ago. As Chapter 1 has described, the prime driving force for process innovation was the availability of new feedstocks and the need for new conversion processes and products. This force will remain an important one in industry. Today, for example, improved catalytic processes will be necessary to exploit natural gas resources or to produce hydrogen as an energy carrier. 

Growth of the industrial gas industry has actually exceeded the unprecedented growth in primary petrochemicals over the past 40 years. This is due to the higher intensity of industrial gas use in petrochemical manufacturing processes, as well as a significant reduction in the cost of industrial gas production from introduction of technology innovations. This trend is likely to continue for the foreseeable future. Gas usage will increase to meet environmental requirements and facilitate process efficiency improvements. 

As with gas purifications, very few process innovations are likely to occur with liquid purifications. Fixed-bed processes artd processes in which powdered adsorbent is irs will continue to pre minate. If process technology is not likely to advance much, uses for the techrrology are. Perhaps the largest area for expanded use is in municipal arid industrial waste treatrrrent. Activated carbon adsorbs a wide spectrum of organics from water and can be useful in improving taste and lowering the concentrations of toxic or other objectionable materials. Also as chemical process effluents are reduced and more streams are recycled, additional adsorption processes will be required to remove traces of contaminants from these recycles. 

The surfactant industry of the future will continue to face many challenges. Commodity snrfac-tants will continue to be driven by cost and environmental safety. The market will demand reliable low-cost supply and environmental acceptance. New surfactant technology will be a portion of the future revolution in surfactants. This innovation will likely come from gas to liqnids (GTL ) technology and catalyst/process breakthrough such as those already demonstrated by Sasol. GTL is the general process name for conversion of natural gas, coal, biomass, or other carbon-containing raw materials to higher liquid hydrocarbons, and more specifically to naphtha, jet/diesel, and diesel fuel. 

The offshore oil and gas sector, be the plants used by the industry necessary to extract and process the fluids located on ships, platforms, down pipes or under the sea bed, was one of the first to embrace process intensification with compact heat exchangers such as the PCHE. The sector has pioneered other PI uses in separations and more recently in reactions, and the potential for growth and further innovation is considerable. More extensive replication onshore, as the demand for these resources continues to grow, is likely. 

The second way to effect these separations is staged distillation. In staged distillation, the column internals are completely different than those normally used for gas absorption. Now these internals consist of a series of compartments or trays, where liquid and vapor are contacted intimately, in the hope that they will approach equilibrium. Now, the liquid and vapor concentrations in the column do not vary continuously, but discretely, jumping to new values on each tray. Staged distillation was an innovation for commodity chemicals a century ago, and was the standard during the rapid growth of the chemical industry. While it is still the standard in universities, it has been eclipsed by differential distillation in many areas of industrial practice. 

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