The Blog took a few hazy photos of the conference speakers at World Base Oils on Thursday and Friday, none of them really up to publication standard, but luckily our own John Baker had hired a professional photographer to capture the event for the official conference digital review, which comes out on Wednesday. Here he has kindly let the Blog choose a few favourites prior to publication.
1 Co-chairs on first day: Geeta Agashe and Brian Crichton
2 Amy Claxton
3 Apu Gosalia
Corporate videos are getting very polished and we are quite used to seeing sponsors' videos at industry conferences. Bright colours, fast cutting between scenes, pulsing rock music - these are all pretty standard, but some businesses clearly have more video-friendly products to sell than others.
The world of lubes allows for shots of high-powered vehicles on sand and snow, and aspirational motor-launches on glamorous waterways (looks like the Bosphorous). The Blog was rather taken by this corporate video shown on the first day of the Base Oils conference by our lunch sponsor, General Petroleum.
The ICIS World Base Oils Conference (23-24 February 2012) broke all records again, with 607 delegates from 55 countries. The new venue, at London's Hilton Metropole, was enormous, with the conference hall the size of football pitch and the networking coffee area the same size again on the floor below.
The last time the Blog was in that hotel, then known as the Metropole (next to Edgware Road underground station), it seemed like a small low-key kind of place, but now it is huge, covering a whole city block and is apparently the largest conference hotel in London.
Everything about the conference was huge, with a list of sponsors as long as your arm. The keynote speakers were top-notch, of the type rarely seen at business events, with some stimulating ideas about sustainability, corporate social responsibility, debt, inflation and growth.
For coverage of the speakers' papers and other news from the event, see ICIS news.
Harry Potter star Daniel Radcliffe performs his party trick, which is singing "The Elements" by musical humorist Tom Lehrer, in this video clip spotted today by Helena.
Dick Cheney, 46th vice president of the United States, will be the speaker at the traditional Tuesday Luncheon at AFPM, it is announced on the conference website.
The International Petrochemical Luncheon will take place at 11.30-2.00 on Tuesday 3 April 2012, at the end of the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers (the new NPRA) 2012 International Petrochemical Conference in San Antonio, Texas, USA.
The Luncheon is open to registered attendees only. Reserved seating is available with the purchase of a table of 10 only. Tickets must be purchased by 21 March. No tickets or same-day seating will be available on-site.
As more snow is forecast for the coming week, sales of ultra-modern, super-fast sledges are going through the roof, according to an article in the Times.
"People don't just want to sit on sledges and go down the mountain any more, they want to go incredibly fast and do different things," says Keith Handy of Bobskis, manufacturers of hi-tech sledges.
The Porsche Bobsleigh (below) at £180 and the BMW Snow Racer (right) at £69.95, both made in sleek plastic, are giving the traditional wooden sledges a run for their money.
The cinema's fascination with oil continues with the imminent release of "Black Gold," a drama about the Middle Eastern oil boom, starring Antonio Banderas.
The film is in the vein of "Lawrence of Arabia," according to some reviews, which also point to the "horror of Antonio Banderas' miscasting as an Emir.
The plot is about two Arabian chieftains who have been at war about a piece of disputed land, the Yellow Belt. At a final truce, one chieftain, Nassib (Antonio Banderas) asks his foe, Amar (Mark Strong) to offer his two sons as hostages to Nassib to guarantee there will be no further hostilities between the two in claims over the Yellow Belt. Amar agrees and peace reigns. Fifteen years later, American prospectors for oil come to the region, and inform Nassib that there are millions of oil reserves beneath the disputed land. Nassib allows for oil exploration to take place in the Yellow Belt, igniting a war with Amar.
UK release is 24 February 2012.
ICIS is proud to announce the following ICIS Holiday Quiz 2011 winners.
Congratulations to the winners
A magnum of Champagne is on its way!
The ICIS Holiday Quiz 2011 has now closed.
Thank you for your participation.
This year's ICIS Base Oils & Lubricants event in London
on 23-24 February is set to be the biggest yet with over 600 delegates. For the
third year running ICIS has produced a special Base Oils publication for
delegates and circulation to all ICIS Chemical Business and base oil price report readers, with feature
articles from the ICIS base oils editors around the world.
APIC 2012 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia will be held on 17-18 May (Thursday to Friday), themed "Megatrends - Shaping the Future of the Petrochemical Industry," and bookings are now open, the organisers announced by email to delegates today.
The venue is the Kuala Lumpur Convention Centre, and there are six official conference hotels:
- Mandarin Oriental
- Traders Hotel
- Crowne Plaza Mutiara
- Intercontinental Hotel
- Renaissance Hotel
- Impiana KLCC Hotel
The registration fee for the conference is USD 600 per participant from APIC steering committee member countries.
(Photo: www.apic-online.org)
Merijn Van Dijk, formerly with InterChem, is now an aromatics trader at Trafigura, he announced on LinkedIn today.
"Last week I started at Trafigura in Geneva ... I will be trading benzene and other aromatics in Europe," he emailed the Blog.
Van Dijk had previously been in logistics, and later traded toluene, mixed xylenes and methanol in his 11 years at traders InterChem.
There
is nothing like an extreme snow warning to keep the motorways nice and clear.
The drive up the M1 to Derby
was a breeze with hardly any traffic and the fields on either side picturesque
in their snowy coverings.
The Blog does not spend much time on motorways, so on these rare occasions it is impressive how much service stations have changed for the better. At Leicester it's a Starbucks/Waitrose combo, where you can get some decent 99p pastries with coffee and a scenic view of the northbound carriageway.
In fact bargain prices seem to be a way of life in Derby, where the glitzy new Westfield shopping centre is side-by-side with the fantastic indoor Eagle Market, where fruit and veg, clothes, books and scooters are on display and cheap as chips.
The
Blog was reminded of a much earlier business trip to Courtaulds in Spondon, Derby in the 1980s, when
the scene was one of devastation. The destruction of the Midlands
manufacturing industry was written large in the post-apocalypse landscape
surrounding the surviving Courtaulds buildings. What a contrast to today, where
according to local websites Derby is England's fastest-growing city for wealth
creation by GVA (Gross Value Added).
(photo: thisisderbyshire.co.uk)
Yorkshire's
glorious green countryside is celebrated in the new Hockney exhibition at London's Royal
Academy. On huge canvases
pieced together, he depicts woodland scenes at different times of day, and in
different seasons.
Despite the heaving throngs in the galleries, and the constraints of a timed slot for the visit, the David Hockney RA: A Bigger Picture" exhibition is bright and uplifting, and on a colossal scale: real value for money with hundreds of painting on show.
In the oils and iPad paintings of the landscape, the colours are vibrant, the outlines crisp against clear blue skies. Nothing could be more different to the Chinese wastelands I've just been reading about in "Lost on Planet China." This is an exhibition to make all expats feel homesick for the lush green woodlands of England.
Pollution
and imaginative foods are the key impressions which writer Maarten Troost takes
away from his travels in China, in "Lost on Planet China."
I know him from his "The Sex Lives of Cannibals: Adrift in the Equatorial Pacific", so his exaggeration for comic effect is not unexpected, but his observations on the air quality in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou are more stomach-turning than his experiences eating live seafood and various novel animal parts.
Petchem travellers to China will recognise his descriptions of traffic chaos in the city streets and the comparative slickness of airports and metro stations. Unlike Troost's previous books, however, the overall tone is not one of benign even affectionate observation, but one of distaste. The over-riding message is that the cataclysmic level of pollution in China is bringing the rest of the world closer to environmental disaster.
Davie De Laet has taken up a new position as commercial manager benzene for US at Total Petrochemicals USA based in Houston, he announced today.
De Laet was formerly trade manager toluene, xylenes and cyclohexane for Europe at Total Petrochemicals in Brussels.
