Supplying the Chemical Industry

1) Increase agricultural production to a level sufficient to meet the requirements of the chemical industry without compromising food production. 

2) Reduce the demand for chemical products and maximize recycling so that raw material demands can be met by agriculture with a smaller impact on food 

3) Find alternative sources of renewable raw materials, such as the production of hydrocarbons from abundant inorganic compounds using renewable sources of energy. 

1 DECC (2009) Digest of United Kingdom Energy Statistics 2009. 

2 Christensen, C.H., Rass-Hansen, J., Marsden, C.C., Taarning, E., and Egeblad, K. (2008) The renewable chemicals industry. ChemSusChem, 1, 283-289. 

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The petrochemical refineries that supply the chemical industry process these cuts in various chemical, mostly catalytic, processes to produce petrochemical primary products (basic chemicals such as olefins, diolefins, aromatics, paraffins, acetylene). These raffination (i.e., shifting the C/H ratio of the products) processes can be divided into ... 

The Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 limit the amount of benzene in gasoline in the United States to 1% (7). Initially there was some concern that this would dismpt the benzene supply and demand balance in the chemical industry because at that time gasoline contained benzene above 1%. If refiners had to extract all of the benzene above 1%, substantial additional benzene would be produced. However, only modest increases in the quantity of benzene produced from reformer sources is expected as most refiners can adjust the composition of reformer feed and reformer severity to produce less benzene. 

Uses. Hiere are several different grades of barium carbonate manufactured to fit the specific needs of a wide variety of applications very fine, highly reactive grades are made for the chemical industry coarser and more readily haridleable grades are mainly supplied to the glass industry ... 

At present batteries worth more than 30 billion USD are produced every year and the demand is still increasing rapidly as more and more mobile electronic end electric devices ranging from mobile phones to electric vehicles are entering into our life. The various materials required to manufacture these batteries are mostly supplied by the chemical industry. Ten thousands of chemists, physicists and material scientists are focusing on the development of new materials for energy storage and conversion. As the performance of the battery system is in many cases a key issue deciding the market success of a cordless product there is in fact a kind of worldwide race for advanced batteries. 

Uses. Since 1947, 70 to 85% of the annual USA production of nitric acid has gone into the production of NH4 nitrate fertilizer, initially in the form of solid prills currently, increasing amounts have been supplied mixed with excess ammonia and/or urea as aqueous nitrogen solution for direct application to the soil. Some 15% is used in explsj (nitrates nitro compds), and about 10% is consumed by the chemical industry. As the red fuming acid or as nitrogen tetroxide, nitric acid is used extensively as the oxidizer in proplnts for rocketry. It is estimated that current USA capacity for nitric acid is in excess of 10 million tons (Refs 30, 34, 36 37)... 

A weekly publication of McGraw-Hill. This excellent pubheation concentrates on the news and business aspects of the chemical industry. It periodically has excellent marketing and sales studies for various products. It also publishes annually a plant-site-selection issue and a Buyers Guide. The Buyers Guide lists the major producers and the source of supply for over 6,000 chemical products, and has a list of chemical trade names. It publishes, quarterly, the current financial condition of 300 companies involved in chemical processing. 

The use of domino reactions has two main advantages. The first advantage applies to the chemical industry, as the costs not only for waste management but also for energy supplies and materials are reduced. The second advantage is the beneficial effect on the environment, as domino reactions help to save natural resources. It is, therefore, not surprising that this new concept has been adopted very rapidly by the scientific community. 

Supply-Chain Management Increases Profitability of the Chemical Industry Through Computer Tools... 

This is especially true for the pharmaceutical and the chemical industry where a great range of details have to be taken into account. To here successfully plan and optimize large supply chain scenarios it needs a specifically sophisticated combination of algorithms and heuristics [15,16, 29, 30]. 

This article is only an overview. Therefore the references contain Briill and Metz [8] and Metz [10] for an overview about supply chains and related planning systems in the chemical industry. 

The underlying supply chain consists of several production sites that are closely connected. This is a typical situation in the chemical industry as many companies own several sites representing the different production facilities each focusing on special products or product groups. The different sites may be closely coupled, e.g., by pipelines, ensuring that production across several sites are possible. Figure... 

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