Business Roundup

DIC will withdraw from the liquid crystal business and transfer intellectual property to the Chinese firm Shijiazhuang Chengzhi Yonghua Display Materials. The Japanese company has been making the display materials since 1973 but says it faces mounting overseas competition.

BASF has begun installing renewable-energy-powered water electrolyzers at its site in Ludwigshafen, Germany. The firm plans enough electrolyzers to produce 8,000 metric tons (t) per year of low-carbon hydrogen, reducing its greenhouse gas emissions by up to 72,000 t per year.

Kureha has discontinued an expansion of polyvinylidene fluoride capacity at a plant in China. The Japanese firm says the US Inflation Reduction Act has changed the business environment around lithium-ion batteries, a major market for the polymer.

Jera, a Japanese energy company, is exploring buying into an ExxonMobil project in Baytown, Texas, to produce low-carbon ammonia. Jera would ship ammonia to Japan for use in power generation.

Novoloop has picked Worley Consulting to conduct an engineering study for a 20,000-metric-ton-per-year plant on the US Gulf coast that would turn postconsumer polyethylene into dicarboxylic acids. The monomers can be used to produce polyols and polyurethanes, Novoloop says.

Koch Modular Process Systems is more than tripling the size of its chemical process scale-up lab in Houston, to about 1,700 m². The finished facility will have bench- and pilot-scale equipment for several reactions and separations used in both synthetic and biobased chemical production.

AbbVie has agreed to acquire Landos Biopharma for $137.5 million. Landos’s lead compound, NX-13, is a small-molecule agonist intended to treat ulcerative colitis. It’s in Phase 2 clinical trials.

Verge Genomics and Ferrer are collaborating on a small molecule to treat amyotrophic lateral sclerosis that’s currently in early clinical trials. Ferrer will pay Verge up to $122 million to codevelop the drug.