Business Roundup

Chemours has opened a battery innovation center in Newark, Delaware. The company’s Teflon fluoropolymers are used as binders for lithium-ion battery electrodes.

Petrobras held a ceremony with Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva to reopen a nitrogen fertilizer plant in Araucária, Brazil. The plant had been shuttered since 2020.

Shinkong Synthetic Fibers, a Taiwan-based polyester maker, is investing $10 million in Ambercycle’s first commercial-scale plant. Amercycle has been testing a process at a plant in Los Angeles to recover polyester from textiles and other sources.

Yara has agreed to buy 264,000 metric tons of low-emission nitrogen fertilizer per year from Atome. Atome’s planned Paraguyan production facility will run on renewable energy and is slated to start up in 2027.

E3 Lithium is working with Pure Lithium to build a pilot plant to convert lithium brines into lithium metal, skipping an intermediate step. Pure Lithium has already made test batteries with lithium-metal anodes using E3’s brine.

Bolt Threads has gone public by merging with a special purpose acquisition company. The California-based maker of polypeptides and other biomaterials has a market capitalization of about $160 million.

Svante Technologies has won a financing commitment of up to $100 million from the government-owned Canada Growth Fund. Svante plans to use the funds to develop carbon capture projects based on its metal-organic framework technology in Canada and the US.

American Vanguard has asked the US Environmental Protection Agency to cancel registrations for its Dacthal herbicide products. The EPA recently halted sales of the products because of potential risks to unborn babies.