Business Roundup

Evonik Industries will spend “in the mid-double-digit million euro range” to build a specialty surfactants plant in the Brazilian state of São Paulo. Subject to board approval, the 25,000-metric-ton-per-year plant will open in early 2014, Evonik says.

Hitachi Chemical will spend about $25 million to build a chemical mechanical planarization slurry plant in Tainan, Taiwan, to complement its existing Japanese facility. Since the Great East Japan Earthquake, Hitachi says, electronics industry customers have been pressuring it to build a plant outside Japan.

Asahi Kasei plans to construct a second solution-polymerized styrene butadiene rubber plant in Singapore. In June, the company began construction of a 50,000-metric-ton-per-year S-SBR plant, which is expected to start up in 2013. The second line will have the same capacity and open in 2015.

Qurain Petrochemical Industries is planning a $1 billion complex in Al Jubail, Saudi Arabia, with an annual capacity of 800,000 metric tons of polyethylene terephthalate and 1 million metric tons of purified terephthalic acid. Qurain is a minority shareholder in two joint ventures between Dow Chemical and Kuwait’s Petrochemical Industries Co.

Total is buying out ExxonMobil’s 35% interest in Fina Antwerp Olefins, one of Europe’s largest ethylene cracker complexes, giving it full control of the facility. Both oil companies run refineries as well as petrochemical and polymer facilities near Antwerp, Belgium.

DSM has invested an undisclosed sum in Connecticut-based NanoHoldings, an early-stage company that specializes in nanotechnology material discoveries in the energy field. Promising innovations may be cofinanced by DSM’s venture capital arm or possibly acquired by DSM, the Dutch company says.

Pall Corp. has agreed to acquire ForteBio, a maker of protein analysis instruments. Pall says the acquisition, expected to close in February, will extend its capabilities in the biopharmaceuticals process monitoring and protein research markets, which it values at more than $1 billion in total.