China Steel Corp (CSC, 中鋼) said yesterday it has teamed up with LCY Chemical Corp (李長榮化學) and New Zealand’s LanzaTech Ltd in a joint collaboration to produce fuel ethanol from steel mill off-gases.
The off-gases are waste gases emitted as a by-product of the refining process of steel products. The carbon dioxide in the waste gases can be captured using LanzaTech’s fermentation technology and is then converted into low-carbon biofuels and other chemicals.
CSC and LCY Chemical yesterday signed a joint investment agreement, aiming to establish a 50-50 venture that will adopt LanzaTech’s technology by using microbes to produce fuel ethanol from off-gases, according to a statement issued by CSC.
“By using LanzaTech’s gas fermentation technology, the fuel ethanol from off-gases has been proven to generate far less carbon dioxide than that from corn-based ethanol,” CSC said in the statement.
In the initial stage of their collaboration, the two companies are planning to invest NT$150 million (US$5.14 million) in the new venture, White Biotech Corp (新能生技), and are planning to construct a demonstration plant, the statement said.
CSC said the projected plant could go into commercial operation after they become more familiar with LanzaTech’s gas fermentation technology and when the plant has obtained relevant certification.
However, the company did not set a timeframe for commercial operation of the plant. It also did not specify the production capacity of the plant, nor offer any revenue targets for the plant once it starts mass production.
Prior to its collaboration with CSC, LanzaTech has already been cooperating with two Chinese state-owned steel makers, Baosteel Group Corp (寶鋼) and Shougang Group Corp (首鋼), and has built demonstration plants in Shanghai and Beijing.
The fast economic development in emerging markets such as China and India in recent years has boosted energy demand by nearly 40 percent from a decade ago, prompting major economies to seek alternative “green” energy sources, including fuel ethanol, as the sustainability of exploiting fossil-fuel energy increasingly becomes a concern.
Separately, CSC chairman Tsou Juo-chi (鄒若齊) said on the sidelines of the signing ceremony that he expected the global steel industry would hit bottom in this quarter.
The company is also expected to see its quarterly shipments increase by 3 percent to 5 percent from last quarter, as its downstream customers have seen longer order visibility, local cable TV network UBN yesterday quoted Tsou as saying.
Elon Musk’s lieutenants have reached out to chip industry suppliers, including Applied Materials Inc, Tokyo Electron Ltd and Lam Research Corp, for his envisioned Terafab, early steps in an audacious and likely arduous attempt to break into the production of cutting-edge chips. Staff working for the joint venture between Tesla Inc and Space Exploration Technologies Corp (SpaceX) have sought price quotes and delivery times for an array of chipmaking gear, people familiar with the matter said. In past weeks, they’ve contacted makers of photomasks, substrates, etchers, depositors, cleaning devices, testers and other tools, according to the people, who asked not to
NO SHORTCUTS: Asked about Elon Musk’s Terafab initiative, TSMC CEO C.C. Wei said it takes two to three years to build a fab and another one to two to ramp it up Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday raised its revenue growth forecast for this year to above 30 percent, up from the 25 percent it estimated three months earlier, citing extremely robust artificial intelligence (AI)-related chip demand. “Our customers and customers’ customers, who are mainly cloud service providers, continue to send us very positive signals and outlook,” TSMC chairman and CEO C.C. Wei (魏哲家) said at an earnings conference. The company also hiked its capital expenditure for this year toward the higher end of its forecast, or US$56 billion, as it aims to step up advanced chip capacity expansions, such as
The founder of Chinese property giant Evergrande Group (恆大集團) has pleaded guilty to charges of fraud and bribery, a court said yesterday, the latest blow for what was once the country’s leading developer. Evergrande’s rise was propelled by decades of rapid urbanization and rising living standards, but in 2020, its access to credit dramatically narrowed when the government introduced curbs on excessive borrowing and speculation. The company defaulted in 2021 after struggling to repay creditors. Founder Xu Jiayin (許家印), 67, known as Hui Ka Yan in Cantonese, was reportedly held by police in 2023, with Evergrande saying he had been subjected to
Taiwan is attracting a growing number of foreign jobseekers as companies increasingly recruit overseas talent to ease labor shortages and expand global reach, recruitment platform 104 Job Bank (104人力銀行) said yesterday. More than 40,000 foreign nationals searched for jobs in Taiwan through the platform last year, a 28 percent increase from a year earlier, the company said. Malaysians accounted for the largest share of overseas jobseekers at 12.2 percent, followed by Indonesians at 11.9 percent and Vietnamese at 10.8 percent. Indonesian applicants surged more than 50 percent year-on-year, while Vietnamese jobseekers rose by more than 30 percent. Applicants from the
RSS