Mark Quiner, formerly with Houston-based PetrochemWire (PCW), has joined brokerage Ion Energy Group, he told ICIS.
Quiner, who was olefins editor at ICIS Houston prior to PCW, will be brokering olefins, he said in an email today.
Ion Energy Group is an NGLs and energy brokerage, according to another market source.
Nigel Davis, Insight editor ICIS, spent an exciting evening with Bayer at London's Science Museum. The Blog was intrigued to hear about the bars and silent disco, so necessary to inform and educate about science. Nigel writes:
Award-winning design guru Professor Rob Holdway's enthusiasm for the power of innovation was infectious at the Science Museum last Wednesday. At a Bayer-sponsored reception, Holdway talked about how more environmentally-friendly closed loop manufacturing systems, lean production and dematerialisation as well as lease instead of buy concepts can be driven by clever design. He is a director of Giraffe Innovations which advises on how new production systems and product concepts can be optimised to please the consumer and bring real environmental benefit.
Bayer, no slouch itself when it comes to materials and product innovation timed the event to coincide with one of the London Science Museum's successful adults only 'Lates' evenings.
Who could resist the allure of the Lotto Lab where the generosity and attractiveness of the sexes were being investigated - with cocktails, the two bars, the Mars Rover driving challenge, speed dating or the silent disco, in the Computing and Maths gallery? A good time was had by all. The free Lates evenings are held on the last Wednesday of each month. The next is on 29 February, 18:45 to 22:00, on the theme of 'The Science of Surgery' with "live demonstrations"!
Aldi, the low-priced supermarket range, has inspired an "I love Aldi" exhibition including puppets made out of recycled plastic packaging at a German art museum, according to an article in the Times today.
The exhibition, at the Wilhelm Hack Museum in BASF's home town of Ludwigshafen-am-Rhein, features art made out of food and plastics packaging, including the puppets made out of plastic shopping bags.
Petchem folk are familiar with the "Walmart Effect," whereby consumers are attracted by bargain prices which demand cost efficiencies throughout the supply chain, but now the Blog has discovered the German version: "Aldisierung."
LinkedIn has just sent out this pleasant photo collage of all the Blog's friends who moved jobs in 2011.
Apparently 80 of you moved jobs, some voluntarily, some not so voluntarily.
The Blog's next quiz will be to spot who jumped and who was pushed ...
On a wintry January morning, standing outside in formal dress for hours making conversation is a chilly business, but the Blog can now recommend the sustaining properties of 94% polyamide, 5% elastane, 1% cotton tights, which proved equal to the challenge of Hertfordshire's most biting winds.
Seafood
hot and sour soup (two bowls), aromatic duck rolls, lobster with ginger on
noodles, wasabi king prawns, fish and asparagus, beef and mango ... Dish followed
calorie-laden dish, the wine flowed and the Blog welcomed in the Year of the
Dragon in a manner which would be a major health risk if continued for more
than one night.
It was a pleasure to be invited to the IOD Chinese New Year dinner at the Phoenix Palace. The highlight of the evening was the crazed Lion Dance around the restaurant where the dancing lion shook himself aggressively around all the tables to very loud accompanying percussion.
The only disappointment was the Blog's failure to win anything in the raffle, which included three sets of business class tickets from London to Hong Kong on the new all-business class Hongkong Airlines route which launches in March.
Dress code for the evening was national dress or business suit, and a lot of Chinese ladies and a few men were in traditional Chinese dress. A number of English ladies were wearing the same, and the Blog has to say that it suits the slimmer Chinese frame rather better than the curvier English figure.
Subbuteo
will relaunch in March 2012, bringing the classic table football game to a new
generation of children, according to an article in the Grocer.
One of the great improvements in the new game, which features Premiership team tie-ups with Manchester United, Chelsea and Liverpool, is that the little figures are now made of flexible plastic so that they will not get crunched underfoot. They will still be agony to tread on barefoot
Subbuteo now goes on the Blog's list of Top Petrochemical Toys along with Lego, Plasticine, Barbie ...
Sitting in the office all day is bad for you, and leads to muscle wastage, heart disease and reduced life span, but it is easy enough to counteract, according to this article in Lifehacker.com today.
First, get up.
Second, move around.
Maybe take a brisk walk.
The Blog has been in the office all day today, but has fortunately walked around to talk to people, gone downstairs for coffee, trekked down the high street, been in a sit-down-stand-up kind of project meeting, and finally run downstairs to see a colleague's new puppy. Unwittingly, this was heeding the advice of a highly paid professor at a US university who recommends in the article that you "make sure you get out of the office chair throughout the day."
Petrofina
has restructured its European aromatics trading team from 1 January 2012, the
general manager of the team announced by email to all business contacts on 25
January.
ICIS has launched its new China Crude Report (CCR), which will be produced in English and Chinese by the ICIS China team in Guangzhou. Data will also be available on the C1 terminal. Sold through ICIS China, the daily report will enable Chinese buyers of imported crude oil and other market participants to measure the relative delivered cost of international crude grades to the Chinese market.
The CCR
uses FOB/CIF price assessments from the ICIS World Crude Report and freight
rates from Simpson Spence and Young (a leading ship broker) to create forward
CIF China assessments. This is done by pricing each crude grade at a
differential to the forward curve for the nearest main marker grade (BFOE,
My old friend Adrian Brown, former ICIS senior editor on shipping and base oils, will be speaking at the ICIS World Base Oils & Lubricants conference in London in February.
Brown, now senior research analyst at shipbrokers Simpson, Spence & Young (SSY), will be giving a joint presentation with chemical shipbroker Jordi Maymi on the latest developments and challenges in the base oils shipping market on Thursday 23 February at the Hilton London Metropole.
He has come full circle after launching the ICIS Base Oils reports back in 1990 and launching the first ICIS Base Oils conference in 1999.
The conference, organised by Heather Robson who has been running it since 2001, is the biggest of all the ICIS events, with around 600 delegates from 47 countries expected this year.
One thing you can say about plastic bags is that they are good for advertising a message. In a campaign to encourage volunteering, the UK's business secretary Vince Cable was photographed modelling this charity plastic bag while volunteering on Friday the 13th January in a hospice charity shop in west London, according to the Shooting Star Chase website today.
When even the GPCA is calling for the re-use of plastic bags, and replacing thin single-use bags with thicker and stronger bags, there are not many voices raised in favour of lightweight plastic bags.
One plastic bag manufacturer and recycler has posted a catchingly titled video "What's Your Plastic Bag IQ" to get across its points about the value of the bags.
As the debate about banning single-use plastic bags rages on, these photos celebrate the inner beauty of plastic bags, comparing them to the view from a cavern in Antarctica, on ManMadeDIY.com, a blog about "creativity and the handmade life for the postmodern male."
There are more suggestions for beautiful artefacts made from recycled plastic cups, or melted plastic soldiers.
Elizabeth (Liz) Bains, formerly with ICIS, has been promoted to editor
of the Middle East Economic Digest (MEED) magazine, she announced last
week.
Bains has been based in
What is the obvious link between the hit Danish TV series "Borgen" and petrochemicals? Luckily this was not a question in the ICIS Christmas Quiz, which closed yesterday and is still shrouded in mystery.
Yes it
was the year of the EPL in Copenhagen. In a year when everyone has gone crazy
for all things Danish - Borgen, The Killing, woolly jumpers - the EPL was just
embracing the Zeitgeist.
In last week's episode, the blonde TV reporter was seen running down the exact same stretch of waterfront between the Marriott and the Copenhagen Island hotel where EPL delegates strolled to meetings.
I am waiting to see the characters eating in the Krebse Gaarden, where we enjoyed a spectacular dinner, or even the much celebrated Noma.
Was the Blog the only one to spot the periodic table on Sherlock Holmes's bedroom wall, in the brilliant new 21st-century Sherlock on BBC TV?
The dashing Sherlock, played by Benedict Cumberbatch, shows he is not only a man of science, but a man of chemistry, in the first two episodes of the second series, which started just two weeks ago and is the talk of the Blog household.
For fans of chemicals and Sherlock, and surely there are many, there is already a cult T-shirt combining the two: another perfect chemical gift.
We need to remember to stop saying NPRA at the end of January and call it by its new name AFPM.
Since NPRA announced its name change on 4 October 2011 (see ICIS news article: US NPRA to become American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers), word has been slowly filtering into the industry consciousness.
But old dogs are slow to learn new tricks, and emails are now going round setting meetings for the 2012 International Petrochemical Conference (1-3 April in San Antonio, Texas), all titled "NPRA meetings."
Yesterday the Blog heard that members have received in the post a small package of logoed goodies from AFPM, including a mug, to get us using the new name before the conference.
No doubt the ICIS Houston staff are sharing these around the office in the spirit of the Editorial Guidelines on sharing gifts from the industry.
The 7th
ICIS Olefins Conference, set for 29 February 2012, has announced some speaker
additions to the programme:
The conference will take place at the Radisson Royal Blu hotel, Brussels - near to the Grand Place - the day before the EPL in Brussels on 1 March.
Plasticine, the multi-coloured putty-like modelling clay beloved of children and animators. Why has it never occurred to the Blog that this is another perfect petrochemical toy?
What is it made from? Calcium salts, petroleum jelly and aliphatic acids, according to Online Schools, and the trademark is owned by Flair Leisure Products, based in Cheam, UK - just down the road from the ICIS office in Sutton.
The Flair website has a sweet video of a plasticine iPad. And for those of a sturdier disposition, a rather nastier video (or claymation) of "Pingu's The Thing" is being tweeted around. It is not for the faint-hearted, or those with sweet childhood memories of Pingu.
Our visitors to
Until now, the Blog had always recommended the Sea Shell in Marylebone, but since a visit this weekend to the Nautilus in
A wide variety of fish, fried or grilled, all very fresh and moist, with the matzo meal batter crispy to perfection, comes in huge portions, with friendly service too.
Here's 45 seconds of video from the mini-flood in Houston on the morning of Monday 9 January, taken by our own Stephen Burns.
"It's now mostly drained away but (it was) fun while it lasted," he added.
While on the subject of horse-racing, the Blog is struck once again by the ridiculous names of these beautiful creatures.
The conventions of naming thoroughbred horses are a mystery to the Blog, but it is painful to see gorgeous sleek expensive horses with undignified names.
What were they thinking of, the owners of the hideously named "Havingotascoobydo" (Sire: Witness Box. Dam: In Blue), which came in second on Saturday?
It puts one in mind of some of the new offspring of the chemical industry, where the spin-off company name is quite unrelated to the parent companies. With all the consolidation which has been going on in the industry, particularly in the styrene space, the columns of ICIS news are bursting with articles on name changes.
The Blog is torn between the merits of traditional merger naming - ExxonMobil, Chevron Phillips - and brand new name invention - Innovene, INEOS, etc
Watching horse-racing with my mother on Saturday, I heard a great quote which I was sure our trainers at ICIS training would love.
"Two weeks ago I felt I couldn't train ivy up a wall," said racehorse trainer Venetia Williams, who was the trainer of the winning horse Ciceron in the 3.45 at
Wietse
Noorlander, formerly with Excalibur Oil Brokerage, has joined brokers
Starsupply Petroleum Europe BV, he informed the Blog today.
Based in Capelle a/d IJssel in the Netherlands, Noorlander will be setting up a chemical desk for Starsupply, starting with aromatics, he said.
Chemical folk often think they would make good reporters, but now the CEO of ferts and chems giant Agrofert is launching his own current events magazine.
Andrej Babiš, Agrofert's founder and CEO, who has also set up a civic movement, is now about to launch a magazine as part of his entry into politics, according to an article on ceskapozice.cz on Thursday spotted by Will Conroy.
Babiš plans to launch a 32-page regional free weekly magazine called 5+2 in March. He feels that the media often ignore important events and do not give him enough space when he wants to defend himself.
