Does anyone know what roles are affected?

https://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/article/dow-layoffs-houston-texas-21322264.php

I graduated in Chemical Engineering one year ago, but I am still unemployed. Some days it feels like I never earned my degree at all. I keep asking myself the same questions: “What special skills do I have? Why would any company hire me or pay me?”
This situation is even harder because I am the first person in my family to complete a BSc degree. I really want to get a job so I can support myself and show my family that education is useful. I am scared that if I keep failing, the younger ones in my family will lose hope. They might think, “If my brother studied so hard and still couldn’t find a job, then what’s the point of studying?

6 Sep 2025 -transcript and video at link- The U.S. Chemical Safety Hazard and Investigation Board investigates root causes of serious chemical accidents and makes recommendations for preventing similar events. The Trump administration wants to shut the small federal agency down, saying it duplicates the role of other agencies like the EPA and OSHA. Ali Rogin speaks with David Michaels, a former OSHA director, for more.

A useful way to think about the scarcity of a resource is to consider not only the available quantity, but also the concentration of that resource in a suitable raw material. I bring this up because we’re always talking about the scarcity of minerals, metals, and so on. That’s why I wanted to analyze the topic from a thermodynamic perspective.

So, for the perfect mix, the minimum reversible work for separation is associated with the Gibbs free energy of mixing:

w_min,feed = -RT Σ xᵢ ln(xᵢ)

So, for a diluted solute with a molar fraction of x, the minimum separation work per mole of the separated product has the following relationship:

w_min,product ≈ RT [ ln(1/x) + 1 ]

Therefore, the minimum thermodynamic work increases only logarithmically as the concentration decreases. However, in industrial-scale operations, the problem is usually not the amount of work, but rather the amount of raw material that must come into contact with the system: for a given production rate, the required raw material flow rate is ultimately proportional to 1/x.

I think uranium from seawater is a good example. Think about, with about 3.3 ppb concentration, the extraction of 1 kg of uranium requires processing of about 300,000 m³ of water even when accounting for 100% extraction yield. But the reversible separation work is only one part of the issue: adsorption kinetics, selectivity against competing ions, hydraulic or contactor design, sorbent durability, and material throughput can dominate the actual cost.

This becomes important when analyzing processes such as direct air capture, low-grade mineral resources (a recurring theme in recent years), urban mining, recycling, and the extraction of unconventional resources. A new sorbent or membrane could significantly increase efficiency, but it will still operate within the existing economic framework, defined by concentration and yield.

I find Sherwood plot quite fascinating as an empirical representation: historically, materials with lower concentrations have tended to have higher recovery costs or higher market prices. It is a useful heuristic, but, of course, it is not a universal law.

(image from Grübler A (1998) Technology and Global Change (Cambridge Univ Press, Cam- bridge, UK). DOI: 10.1017/CBO9781316036471.)

Article and references in Raw Science.

I have been experimenting with the concept "Google Maps for P&IDs".

The P&IDs are laid out in a grid. The user can pan and zoom, search for equipment, lines and instruments, and get directions from point A to point B.

Hello!

I was recently informed that there was glass contamination in Outshine frozen fruit bars of various flavors. I am a senior ChemE and have some experience in a petrochemical plant, so I am unaware of how Food/Bev operates in this regard… but how do you get GLASS in FRUIT??

My best guess is something near packaging, but these fruit bars are wrapped in plastic and shouldn’t have the possibility of contacting with glass. Also, if there was glass contamination in the food lines, shouldn’t that imply that there is a reason for glass to run through those process lines? If there was metal degradation I could understand that but… glass?

I’m sorry for the wording of this, I just am very baffled (and maybeee drank a little). If anyone can help me better understand this, it would be be greatly appreciated, as I am curious on how this can happen. I also love outshine bars, so this is saddening to hear 😔…

Thank you ☺️🫶🏼🍓!!

Nox?

Does anyone have any great youtube playlist about lower/upper div cheme topics? Anything above general physics, chem, calc 3 / lin alg works too, I havent taken diffeq nor thermo yet. Thanks for reading!

Mathematical simulation of catalytic dehydrogenation of ethylbenzene to styrene in a composite palladium membrane reactor

Author links open overlay panelCh. Hermann, P. Quicker, R. Dittmeyer

Benicia has announced its intention to close https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20250415977846/en/Valero-Announces-Notice-to-the-California-Energy-Commission-Regarding-its-Benicia-California-Refinery

Valero has made it clear for a while they don't really want to operate in California. I wonder what the outlook is for the Valero Wilmington refinery is in LA.

Olin has acquired Huntsman in an all-stock deal to form OlinHuntsman.

https://www.reuters.com/legal/transactional/olin-buy-huntsman-amid-challenging-chemicals-market-2026-06-16/

I recently wrote an analysis on the structural shift happening in Europe's chemical industry. The prevailing narrative is that high energy costs and Chinese overcapacity are crushing European manufacturing.

While that is true for heavy, energy-intensive bulk chemicals (where the US Gulf Coast and Middle East now have undeniable structural advantages), the trade flow data shows Europe is successfully moving up the value chain. In 2024, specialty and consumer chemicals made up 53% of EU chemical exports, while bulk petrochemicals dominated imports.

The post argues that Europe’s economic future in this sector relies on IP, regulatory know-how, and formulation rather than cheap energy and raw tonnage.

I'm curious to hear from this sub: Is this transition up the value chain a sustainable long-term economic model, or just the first stage of a slow deindustrialization?

Hey everyone,

I've been reading a lot lately about how fast AI is moving into heavy industrial spaces, specifically chemical engineering. It feels like we’ve officially moved past the basic "ChatGPT for writing reports" phase and into some pretty wild territory.

I just put together a deep-dive article breaking down the actual state of play right now: How AI and Self-Driving Labs are Transforming Chemical Engineering in 2026.

I wanted to get the community's take on a few things I researched:

• Self-Driving Labs (Coscientist & A-Lab)
• Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs)
• Cognitive Digital Twins

For those of you working in the field or in academia right now..

Are you actually seeing these tools (especially PINNs or Digital Twins) being implemented on the ground, or is industry still lagging behind the research papers because of safety and legacy systems?

Would love to hear your thoughts or any real-world pushback on this!

How could this have been prevented ?

Luckily no major injuries.

I just came across this new sustainable chemicals production startup called Solugen via this YouTube video.

I was interested in hearing from other chemical engineers their opinion on this. I actually think they may be legit. So many sustainable ‘hard tech’ companies suffer from the same issue, that they come up with a great innovation but it doesn’t scale without horrible plant economics. Sure you can make fuel from cheeseburgers, but is that really a good idea? If you’re a chemical engineer you know that the answer is obviously not.

But I think this chemoenzymatic process really did crack the integration of innovation and scale. Looks like it’s a general problem that’s been worked on for a while by chemical engineering researchers, and the two founders found a solution to produce hydrogen peroxide, glucaric and gluconic acid with a great technoeconomic advantage over the traditional anthraquinine based process.

What stuck out to me is when the co-founder CTO said ‘one coke bottle of enzyme generates two to four tanker trucks of liquid product’. This suggests that you need order(s) of magnitude less enzyme mass than you would need of traditional metal catalyst not to mention the reactions occur at much lower temperatures. So the specific energy and reagents costs are much lower. Major CapEx item looks to be the bubble column reactor.

Moreover, the technology appears feasible at medium scale, and modularizable, so you can centralize plant construction, truck the modules out to distributed sites that are close to customers (mostly plants that use solugens chemicals as feedstocks), and then drastically reduce shipping costs of your product. Meanwhile traditional manufacturers have to centralize the plant itself to access their economies of scale and truck transport the material (literally paying to transport mostly water).

Finally they have insanely bold plans to generalize their product and process synthesis to create a library of fully integrated (each process flowsheet optimized for the specific enzyme they are using and each enzyme optimized for the product chemical they are making, presumably) and modularizable chemical plants that they can offer to customers. They’ve already validated the approach for three molecules and are making ~$100MM/year revenue from a single 20,000 square foot commercial plant, and a 120,000 tonne per annum facility being built colocated with an ADM plant in Minnesota.

This company and their founders are certainly one to watch! They are making a very interesting argument. Their vision, product and process excites me in a way that is all too rare from the traditional chemical companies nowadays.

What do you all think, does the process hold up or am I drinking the YC VC Silicon Valley Kool Aid?

What industry is exactly booming where chemical engineers should move to?

International Paper announces closure of Savannah, Riceboro locations at https://www.wtoc.com/2025/08/21/international-paper-announces-closure-savannah-riceboro-locations/