NEWS OF THE WEEK
LANXESS READIES STYRENICS SALE CONSOLIDATION: Joint venture will become wholly owned by Ineos after two years
Lustran Polymers7 site in Tarragona, Spain, will be Ineos' in a couple of years.
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ET ANOTHER styrenic resins producer is finding a way out of the business. Lanxess has agreed to sell its Lustran Polymers acrylonitrile-butadiene-styrene (ABS) resins business to the privately held chemical company Ineos. The transaction isn't a straightforward sale. By the end of September, the firms will form a joint ven ture, with 51% held by Ineos and 49% by Lanxess. Ineos will pay Lanxess about $48 million for this stake, and the joint venture will also assume about $41 million in Lanxess pension obligations. Then, after a two-year period, Ineos will purchase Lanxess' minority stake for a second payment that will depend on the financial per formance of the joint venture. The Lustran business has been performing * poorly for Lanxess, earning a mere $22 million 3 before taxes in 2006 on about $1.2 billion in
NEW DATA ON OLD CLIMATES CLIMATE SCIENCE: Antarctic ice core provides temperature record dating back 800,000 years
A section of ice more than γοο,οοο years old is providing new data on Earth's past climate cycles.
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NALYSIS of ice retrieved from more than 3,000 meters below the frigid surface of Antarctica is providing a clearer picture of vacillating temperature cycles at the South Pole during the past 800,000 years, according to a report in the journal Sci ence (DOI: io.H26/science.ii4i038). Data from the Dome C ice core reveal that average temperatures during eight glacial ice ages and the peri ods between them ranged from 10 °C cooler than the present, reached about 20,000 years ago, to 4.5 °C warmer than the present, reached about 130,000 years ago. The results are helping confirm the "tight link age between climate and the green house gas effect," notes Jean Jouzel of France's Laboratory of Climate 8c Environmental Sciences, who led the research team. WWW.CEN-0NLINE.ORG
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sales. Lanxess Chairman Axel C. Heitmann says the joint venture establishes a solution for the business and allows Lanxess to benefit from restructuring over the past two years. Steps have included moving some production from Dormagen, Germany, to Tarragona, Spain, and the pursuit of specialty ABS resins instead of less-profitable commodity grades. The Lanxess deal isn't the only recent consolidation in styrenic polymers, which are experiencing sluggish growth and poor profitability due to high costs for ben zene and other raw materials. "ABS has been a difficult business over the past 10 to 12 years," says Austin Peppin, managing director of consulting firm BRG Peppin. In a move that mirrors Lanxess', Nova Chemicals is pooling its polystyrene and styrene assets in North America into a joint venture with Ineos. General Elec tric is selling GE Plastics, which has an ABS unit, to Saudi Basic Industries. And Dow Chemical and Chev ron Phillips are forming a styrene and polystyrene joint venture in the Americas. Lustran will give Ineos 600,000 metric tons per year of ABS capacity. "The agreed joint venture provides Ineos with strong market positions in a new portfolio of products that complement our styrenic, polyethyl ene, polypropylene, and polyvinyl chloride plastics ac tivities," says Jim Ratcliffe, Ineos' chairman. Ineos also makes the ABS raw materials acrylonitrile, butadiene, and styrene.—ALEX TULLO
The Dome C ice core was drilled and is being analyzed by the European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica (EPICA). Researchers finished drilling the 3,260-meter core in 2004 just before hitting rock, and they have been reporting their findings in a series ofjournal papers. The latest results provide the first look at data from the final 120 meters of the core, the deepest and oldest section. Estimates of global temperatures come from analy sis of the ice for the isotopic ratio of deuterium to hydrogen. The ratio is higher during warmer periods because more heavy water evaporates from Earth's sur face, thereby enriching the deuterium content of snow that subsequently is compressed into ice. The data are corroborated by data from other ice cores and from ocean sediment cores. "The correlation between temperature in Antarc tica and variations in sea level as recorded in marine sediments is remarkable over the entire 800,000-year record," Jouzel notes. Younger sections of the EPICA Dome C core previ ously were analyzed for the deuterium-hydrogen ratio and for the content of the greenhouse gases methane, carbon dioxide, and nitrous oxide trapped in air bub bles in the ice. The earlier data reveal that C 0 2 and CH4 concentrations are higher now than for any period cov ered by the ice core, suggesting the impact of human activities. Elemental analyses of dust particles in the ice core and greenhouse gas analysis of the oldest core section are underway.—STEVE RITTER
JULY 9, 2007
