Business Concentrates ECONOMY LITIGATION
▸ Dow settles big price-fixing suit Dow Chemical has agreed to an $835 million settlement in a decade-old dispute about alleged fixing of polyurethane raw material prices. Citing “recent events in the Supreme Court”—a reference to the death of Justice Antonin Scalia—the company says it is unlikely to receive a favorable ruling in a petition to set aside a lower court’s $1.1 billion judgment against it. Some 2,400 customers maintain that Dow as well as competitors tried to fix urethane chemical prices between 1999 and 2003. Dow’s rivals settled their cases for a total of $139 million in 2011. Dow decided to fight in the courts but lost several cases. In the firm’s petition, Dow’s lawyers argued that the lower court inappropriately certified the polyurethane customers as a class. Treating the customers as a class, Dow argued, goes against the precedent set by Scalia.—ALEX TULLO
POLYMERS
▸ DuPont plans lab at German school To develop lightweight polymers, DuPont will create a joint lab with the Aachen Center for Integrative Lightweight Production (AZL) on the campus of RWTH Aachen University. AZL is a partnership between
Cheap oil hits BASF The low cost of oil—currently about $37 per barrel—is dealing BASF, the world’s largest chemical company and an oil and gas producer, a series of financial challenges. The firm’s 2015 profits fell 22.7% to $4.5 billion on sales of $79.5 billion, down 5.2%, largely because of the low oil price and slowing growth in China’s economy, Kurt Bock, BASF’s chairman, said at the firm’s recent financial results briefing. If the oil price dips below $30 per barrel, BASF will experience a further decline in profits, Bock said. Oil’s collapse has also forced the firm to reconsider plans to build a major methanol-to-propylene plant in Freeport, Texas. “If the price of oil is low, then it is very competitive against this natural gas process,” Bock said of the proposed plant’s technology. The firm will decide whether to go ahead with the project by the end of June. BASF says it would be its largest-ever single-plant investment.—ALEX SCOTT
ENERGY STORAGE
INVESTMENT
▸ BASF wins round in patent case
▸ Evonik plans for continued growth
A U.S. International Trade Commission judge concluded in an initial patent dispute determination that Umicore infringed parts of U.S. patents held by BASF and Argonne National Laboratory relating to nickel-manganese-cobalt cathode materials used in lithium-ion batteries. BASF says the judge rejected Umicore’s argument that BASF’s patents are “invalid and unenforceable.” Umicore describes the judge’s determination as “mixed” and claims that it confirms the company did not directly infringe BASF’s patents. The commission is due to provide its final determination by the end of June.—ALEX
Expecting a bright 2016 following release of strong 2015 results, Evonik Industries has bought one business and is investing in two others. To bolster its nutrition business, it has acquired MedPalett, a Norwegian maker of food ingredients containing anthocyanin antioxidants extracted from bilberries and black currants. Evonik has started engineering on a world-scale plant in Singapore to make the animal feed additive methionine. And it plans to double capacity to make hollow-fiber gas separation membrane modules in Austria.—MARC
REISCH
SCOTT
INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY
▸ Axiall to sell two vinyl units
RWTH and 57 companies, including auto and aircraft producers seeking to lower fuel consumption. Already part of AZL, DuPont hopes that the lab will draw it closer to industrial partners and academics.—ALEX
As it reported a net loss of $816 million for 2015, Axiall revealed deals to sell two “noncore” vinyl-related businesses for a total of $41 million. The firm, which is fighting a $2.9 billion takeover bid from rival Westlake Chemical, says the sales are “part of an effort to reduce costs, improve productivity, and optimize our portfolio.” Axiall will sell its Solucor compound additives business to Galata Chemicals. About 60 employees are involved. Axiall is also selling its window and door profiles business to OpenGate Capital.—MARC
SCOTT
REISCH
DuPont aims to develop lightweight products like its Vizilon engineered polymer, shown here in orange.
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▸ Legal win for Chinese firm Sino Legend Chemical, a Chinese producer of tackifier resins used in tire manufacturing, says China’s Supreme People’s Court has ruled in its favor in a patent infringement dispute with SI Group, its main U.S. competitor. In its ruling, the court said SI raised procedural objections when appealing an earlier ruling that lacked factual and legal basis. Alleging intellectual property violations, SI has sued Sino Legend in China and tried to block its resins from entering the U.S. Although SI’s legal moves in China have repeatedly failed, the U.S. International Trade Commission ruled in the firm’s favor in 2014.—JEAN-FRANÇOIS TREMBLAY
DUPONT
POLYMERS
BIOBASED CHEMICALS
▸ Microbes help make ambergris scent
ucts; GABA is an ingredient in weight- and stress-management products.—MELODY
BOMGARDNER
PHARMACEUTICAL CHEMICALS Firmenich says it has scaled up a new route to Ambrox, a woody-scented fragrance molecule, with an assist from microbes. Ambrox , known generically as ambroxO ide, is a component of ambergris, an excretion from the digestive tract of sperm whales. Because ambergris is rare, Ambrox the fragrance industry has long relied on a semisynthetic process to make it from sclareol, which is isolated from the herb clary sage. Firmenich scientists engineered microbes to make sclareol from sugar.—MELODY BOMGARDNER
FOOD INGREDIENTS
▸ Firms partner on proteins from grass
ARKEMA
▸ Weil Group Resources is building a facility in Saskatchewan to annually refine 1.1 million m3 of helium from local gas wells. Linde is providing technology and will also buy and market the output of the plant, which is scheduled to open late this year. ▸ Air Liquide has inaugurated its second research facility in China. Built in Shanghai’s Minhang district, the lab can support 250 researchers working on energy transition, emissions reduction, waste-
Seeking to address the issue of reliability in the pharmaceutical building block marketplace, a group of laboratory chemical suppliers based in Russia and Ukraine—Enamine, ChemBridge, UORSY, and FCH Group— have pooled their catalogs to launch ChemSpace. Claiming its combined library consists of 15 million unique building blocks, the group is offering free access with no commission on sales. Customers purchase directly from suppliers via the website. Last May, a similar service called LabNetwork was launched by the Chinese services company WuXi PharmaTech.—RICK MULLIN
WATER
▸ Filtration membrane uses Arkema polymer Polymem, a French maker of water filtration products, is building a new production line to make hollow-fiber membranes using Arkema’s nanostructured polyvinylidene fluoride polymer. The two joined
ONCOLOGY
The German food ingredient maker Taiyo and Biofabrik, a German start-up, have formed a partnership to produce specialty proteins made from fast-growing grasses. Biofabrik has developed technology to ferment the grasses with lactic acid-producing bacteria to yield vegan protein powders. The powders contain a high proportion of branched-chain amino acids (BCAAs) and γ-aminobutyric acid (GABA). BCAAs are commonly added to sports nutrition prod-
Roundup
▸ Building block market debuts
Precision BioSciences’ genome-editing technology allows CARTs to be developed from healthy donors as treatments for multiple patients. The partners expect the first allogeneic CART therapy will enter the clinic late next year.—LISA JARVIS
▸ Baxalta pursues cellular therapy Baxalta will pay $105 million to genome-editing firm Precision BioSciences as part of a pact to develop off-the-shelf chimeric antigen receptor T-cell (CART) therapies for six cancer targets. The most advanced CART therapies have been highly personalized: Companies reengineer a patient’s own T cells to find and destroy cancer cells.
water treatment, food safety, health care, and other customer problems. ▸ Saudi Basic Industries Corp. has acquired a majority stake in Fibre Reinforced Thermoplastics of Lelystad, the Netherlands. The company makes engineering thermoplastic composite tapes used in transportation and construction. ▸ Mitsui Chemicals, Jayant Agro-Organics, and partners have inaugurated a facility in Gujarat, India, that can make 8,000 metric tons per year of biobased polyol, a poly-
Polyvinylidene fluoride-based hollow fibers will speed up water treatment, Arkema says. forces in 2014 to develop the new membrane, which they say is more durable and better at filtering out bacteria and viruses than conventional membranes.—MARC
REISCH
urethane raw material. Fed by locally sourced castor oil, the plant is “overwhelmingly cost-competitive,” Mitsui claims. ▸ ZeaChem, a biorefining firm, and Leaf Resources have joined to develop a project in the Southeast U.S. based on Leaf’s Glycell process, which breaks down biomass into separate cellulose, hemicellulose, and lignin components. Leaf has upped its ownership stake in ZeaChem to 13% with a $400,000 investment. ▸ GlaxoSmithKline has opened a technical devel-
opment lab and a kilo-scale manufacturing facility for specialized active ingredients at its site in Cork, Ireland. Together, the facilities cost $13 million. ▸ Exelixis and Ipsen are joining to develop Exelixis’s cabozantinib outside the U.S., Canada, and Japan. Sold as Cometriq, cabozantinib is currently approved in the U.S. and Europe for treatment of metastatic medullary thyroid cancer in adults. Exelixis will receive $200 million, plus milestone payments upon the drug’s approval for other oncology indications.
MARCH 7, 2016 | CEN.ACS.ORG | C&EN
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