Queen's Awards span crackers to crop protection
15 Jan 2000
Process companies were well represented among the winners of the Queen's Awards for Industry. Winners encompassed basic chemicals and complex agrochemicals.
Organic chemicals don't come much more basic than ethylene, and one award- for exports - went to a company involved right at the heart of the process. Paralloy, based in Birmingham, makes the nickel/chromium alloy tubes that carry ethane or naphtha through the furnace of the ethylene cracker. The alloy has to withstand temperatures above 1000oC.
Paralloy's revenues last year topped £28million. Some 85 per cent came from exports, with about a third each from the Far East and US. Sales have more than doubled over the past three years. With a client list including BP Chemicals, ICI and Exxon, and a spate of new crackers on the verge of being built in China, the company's fortunes seem rosy.
Other export award winners include Electra Polymers and Chemicals, which makes materials for printed circuit boards; and the Durham Chemicals Division of Harcross Chemicals, for catalysts, coatings and zinc-based chemicals.
Meanwhile, Zeneca has received a technology award for a new process to make chirally-pure S-2-chloropropanoic acid, an agrochemical intermediate. The process involves fermentation with recombinant bacteria to produce a tailor-made enzyme; this catalyses a biotransformation which produces pure SCPA. The herbicides themselves can then be made in a chirally pure form, which is effective at far lower application rates than a racemic mixture.
