NEWS OF THE WEEK
EASTMAN SELLING POLYMER PLANTS PLASTICS: Competitors want company's non-U.S. PET business
T Eastman's plant in Zarate, Argentina, will go to Mexico's Grupo Alfa.
WO PROPOSED transactions could significantly reduce Eastman ChemicaPs presence in the polyethylene terephthalate (PET) business. In one deal, Eastman is selling its PET plants in Latin America to the Mexican conglomerate Grupo Alfa for an undisclosed sum. Separately, a Spanish firm, La Seda de Barcelona, has made an offer for Eastman's two remaining European PET plants. Included in the Alfa transaction is a 150,000-metric-ton-per-year PET plant in Cosoleacaque, Veracruz,
MARS IS DRIER THAN EXPECTED PLANETARY SCIENCE: New images
show lava, landslides instead of watery residues
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UTTING A DAMPER on some of the recent effusiveness about possible evidence for past and present water on Mars, new images of the red planet show that many features once attributed to gushing floods and rivers may instead be landslides or lava flows.
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Mexico, and a 185,000-metric-ton unit in Zârate, Argentina. The deal marks Alfa's second acquisition of a U.S.-owned PET business. In 2001, Alfa purchased DuPont's business in PET and purified terephthalic acid, a raw material for making PET. La Seda, which bought Eastman's PET plant in San Roque, Spain, earlier this year, disclosed in a Spanish regulatory filing last week that it is offering Eastman $250 million for its PET plants in Workington, England, and Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Eastman is not commenting on the offer. If the company does sell the two European units, its only remaining PET plants will be in Kingsport, Tenn., and Columbia, S.C. Taken together, the announcements are raising questions about Eastman's intentions regarding the PET business. "It's pretty clear that they are exiting the business," says one industry observer. To Eastman, the Latin American sale is about streamlining a business, not exiting it. "Eastman is taking a number of actions to improve the financial performance of its overall PET polymers business," says Gregory O. Nelson, head of its polymers business group. The company has said it is focusing on plants based on its IntegRex technology, which eliminates a production step, known as solid stating, that increases PET's viscosity to facilitate molding into containers. In late 2006, the company opened a 350,000-metric-ton IntegRex plant in Columbia.—ALEX TULLO
NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) spacecraft, which sent back to Earth the striking new images, like the gullies shown here (right image), has a suite of instruments with much greater resolving power than those in previous craft. With its ability to pick out i-meter-sized boulders and narrow crevasses, it was expected to answer a lot of questions about Mars's geologic history. Just last year, NASA's Mars Global Surveyor spotted a new bright patch in a gully, which was believed to be evidence of a recent gush of water on Mars (C&EN Online, Latest News, Dec. 11,2006). But international teams of planetary scientists now report in a series of papers (Science 2007,317,1706, 1709,1711, and 1715) that signs of water flow have been harder to find than expected in the new images. Some gullies do resemble those formed by water flow on Earth, but the new bright patches appear likely to be the result of dry landslides. MRO also reveals that a large field of channels once thought to be formed by water is covered by lava. Other regions of the planet are littered with boulders, rather than the snow or ancient ocean sediments once postulated. But that doesn't mean that Mars is and always has been dry as a bone. Some geologic features, such as the fan-shaped swath of channels shown (left image) in an impact crater, appear to have been created byfluidflow. MRO will continue mapping the planet for another year, after which it will serve as a communications relay for future Mars missions.—ELIZABETH WILSON
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