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 Strategies & Market Trends : The New Economy and its Winners

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From: Julius Wong4/25/2012 8:38:58 AM
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Honeywell Breakthrough Seen Transforming Plastics Industry: Tech
By Thomas Black - Apr 25, 2012

Honeywell International Inc. (HON) has discovered a one-step process to convert household natural gas into a plastics raw material. The implications are far-reaching.

The technology in time could ease a glut of natural gas from U.S. shale drilling; lower the cost of products ranging from soda bottles to paint; and give Honeywell a steady profit stream from licensing the technique in the $150 billion plastics raw-material industry.

The process would allow companies to make ethylene -- the substance from which plastic and other materials are created --from methane, commonly known as natural gas. Ethylene is now produced from ethane, which is found alongside natural gas and costs three times as much. Ethylene can also come from naphthas in oil refining, which are more expensive than ethane.

Commercially viable gas-to-ethylene conversion is the industry’s “holy grail,” making methane more versatile at a time when natural gas is abundant and cheap because of shale drilling, said Gotz Veser, a chemical engineering professor at the University of Pittsburgh. Burned mostly as a fuel, natural gas closed yesterday at $1.98 per million British thermal units, compared with $13.58 at a July 2008 pre-recession peak.

“The industry has been looking for efficient ways to turn methane into higher hydrocarbons directly for decades,” said Veser, who has written more than three dozen papers on the subject. “Nobody has been able to come up with an economical process.”

bloomberg.com 
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