Business Roundup

LyondellBasell Industries is consulting with unions at its Brindisi, Italy, site to close one of two polypropylene production lines there. The company says the line is the oldest of its kind in the world.

Ineos has signed a deal with Sinopec to form a joint venture to build an acrylonitrile-butadiene-styrene plant in Tianjin, China. The plant, which will have a capacity for 300,000 metric tons per year of the polymer, will come on line in 2025.

Teijin has agreed to sell a Japan-based composites business, GH Craft, to TIP Composite. Teijin aims to focus on its composites business in North America.

Advancion is the new name for Angus Chemical as of Sept. 1. The firm is the only US producer of nitroalkanes and one of the world’s largest makers of buffers for life sciences.

Pyran says it has raised $1.5 million in new funding and expanded the availability of 1,5-pentanediol made from renewable resources, such as corn cobs. The firm is based on technology developed at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Ginkgo Bioworks will help the agricultural biologicals company Exacta Bioscience scale up a fermentation production process for a ­microbial biostimulant. Exacta says the product helps crops absorb water and nutrients.

E3 Lithium has started up a pilot plant that will extract lithium from subterranean brines in Alberta, Canada. It will use ion-exchange technology to separate lithium from brine, a technique that hasn’t yet been used for commercial-scale lithium production.

Monarch Energy is exploring a $426 million green hydrogen plant in Louisiana’s Ascension Parish. The state has agreed to provide workforce development, forgivable loans, and tax breaks to support the project, which would produce 120 metric tons of hydrogen per day starting in 2027.