GreenCentre`s scale-up capacity drawing US chemists CSChE

Canada's top stories in the chemical sciences and engineering | Chemical News
CATALYST DISTRIBUTION
GreenCentre’s scale-up capacity drawing US chemists
Paul Chirak, a Princeton University researcher specializing in
catalysts for new methods of chemical synthesis, has turned to
GreenCentre Canada for help in commercializing products he
has been developing. GreenCentre, an organization based in
Kingston, Ont., was established to assist Canadian academics with
this kind of work, but Princeton’s interest in this same kind of
service reveals that it meets a need that is not being addressed in
the United States. “You’d think with all the resources and all the
people in the US that this would be something that exists,” says
Andrew Pasternak, GreenCentre’s Director of Commercialization
and Business Development. “But it’s pretty clear that it doesn’t —
GreenCentre is unique in this respect.”
Through an agreement with the Princeton University Office
of Technology Licensing, GreenCentre Canada will apply its
commercial and technical expertise, access to industrial networks
and laboratory facilities to accelerate the progress of Chirak’s
catalysts to make them ready for market.
“GreenCentre is very pleased to have the opportunity to work
with the high level of researchers at Princeton University and
assist them in getting their catalysts to be used by industry,”
GreenCentre executive director Pete Pigott said in a formal
announcement on the deal. “These technologies being developed
at Princeton have the potential to offer real sustainable solutions
to the fine chemical industry.”
GreenCentre was recently renewed as part of the federal
government’s Centres of Excellence for Commercialization and
Research program to continue this work with members of the
academic community as well as build similar bridges with entrepreneurs and larger enterprises in the chemical sector. Among
other activities, the organization’s Kingston facilities offer
researchers the ability to scale up the output of their laboratory
efforts from a matter of milligrams or millilitres to the kilogram
or kilolitre amounts necessary for potential industrial partners to
take stock of its commercial potential.
According to Pasternak, an even more important role for
GreenCentre is putting researchers in touch with their counterparts in the private sector. “The hard part is finding the correct
technical people in industry who make the decisions for catalysts,
who can use it and try it,” he says.
In this respect, establishing such a network for Chirak also
represents a much larger opportunity for GreenCentre, which
will now be conducting this process in a much wider setting.
“When we’re promoting these catalysts that come from the US,
we get to know who the players are in the US and globally,” says
Pasternak. “That knowledge is invaluable. The more catalysts we
bring in, the more people get exposed to GreenCentre. That can
help GreenCentre in all its catalyst distribution efforts, no matter
where it comes from.
REGULATIONS
CSChE backs new process safety management standard
The Canadian Society for Chemical Engineering (CSChE) has
successfully turned the Process Safety Management Standard
(PSM) it developed three years ago into the Canadian Standards
Association’s first national standard. The achievement addresses
a need in Canada, which is one of the few Western countries
without prescriptive legislation and regulations.
“Process Safety Management is the application of management principles and systems to the identification, understanding
and control of process hazards to prevent process-related injuries
and accidents — that’s the starting definition,” says University
of Toronto chemical engineer Graeme Norval, who chaired
the project group that undertook the initiative earlier this
year. Norval says that the group was made up of a diversity of
people who brought the perspectives of their various industries
and government departments to these deliberations, so that
the language and meaning of the resulting standard would be as
universally applicable as possible. For example, the condition
“loss of containment” could mean a pipeline leak to the operator
of a chemical plant or a rock collapse in the shaft of a mining site.
“You have to understand all the process hazards and the process
risks,” Norval says. “It’s a performance-based standard so it’s
smaller than the CSChE standard in terms of length. But it’s very
precise in what the elements are that you need to have.”
The financial cost to CSChE for developing the CSA standard was $140,000, an amount that was successfully supported by
companies, industry trade associations and government departments. The final product was sent out for a public review that
wrapped up in October and the resulting feedback will be incorporated over the new few months. Norval estimates that the new
standard should be in place by this March or April of 2016.
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