Business briefing for April 7

Ingevity makes peace with activist investor The pine chemical maker Ingevity has reached an agreement with the activist investor Vision One Fund that will avoid a cantankerous proxy fight. Vision One owns nearly 1% of Ingevity’s stock, worth about $13 million. In February, the Miami-based investor nominated four directors to Ingevity’s board. In a presentation at the time, it called out what it sees as Ingevity’s “bad acquisitions and bad corporate strategy.” For example, Ingevity’s purchase of Georgia-Pacific’s pine chemical business, Perstorp’s caprolactone business, and Ozark Materials cost a total of $1.3 billion but generated losses for the firm, Vision One says. Ingevity has been trying to right the ship. In January, the firm announced that it was exploring strategic alternatives for its industrial specialties business, and in March it tapped former CMC Materials CEO David H. Li to be its new CEO. Ingevity has now agreed to put one of Vision One’s nominees, the former International Paper executive F. David Segal, on its board.—ALEX TULLO BASF sells back North Sea wind farms BASF says it will sell its 49% stake in the Nordlicht 1 and 2 wind farms in the German North Sea back to the Swedish state-owned energy company Vattenfall. BASF had agreed to purchase the stake in April 2024. The farms are intended to produce 1.6 GW of electricity when they open in 2028. BASF says it has instead signed a long-term deal to source renewable energy from Vattenfall. The move reduces BASF’s capital investment but means the company will post a related loss of about $325 million.—ALEX SCOTT Röhm completes US acrylic plant Röhm has started up a methyl methacrylate plant in Bay City, Texas, that uses its new technology to make the acrylic resin raw material. The plant has an annual capacity of 250,000 metric tons per year. The technology, based on ethylene, methanol, and natural gas, requires less energy than other routes, the German firm says. In January, Mitsubishi Chemical shelved plans to build a methyl methacrylate plant in Louisiana that was to be based on similar technology.—ALEX TULLO Cornerstone exits another business Cornerstone Chemical has agreed to sell its sulfuric acid operations in Waggaman, Louisiana, to Ecovyst, which produces and recycles the acid for refining and other industries. Ecovyst says the facility will fit into its Gulf Coast network of sulfuric acid plants. Cornerstone recently announced that it would shut its acrylonitrile plant in Waggaman, citing an oversupplied market. The company still produces urea and melamine and hosts other firms on the site.—MICHAEL MCCOY Summit gets cash for lithium extraction Summit Nanotech has raised $26 million to scale up a process that chemically extracts lithium from brine. Summit recently commissioned a demonstration plant in Chile and has three joint ventures in the country. The firm claims that its system conserves water used in the process by recycling it. Other direct lithium extraction projects are also progressing. Last month, Standard Lithium and Anson Resources both reported positive results from pilot tests of a Koch Technology Solutions system at sites in the US.—MATT BLOIS Green methanol companies advance C1 Green Chemicals, a spinout from Humboldt University, has secured $16 million in funding from investors and about $5 million in research grants. The German firm says it will use the money to commercialize its homogeneous catalysis technology for making green methanol from biomass. C1 plans to build a demonstration plant later this year that will operate at low pressure and temperature. Separately, the green methanol firm C2X has secured $100 million from existing shareholders and the Japanese energy firm Eneos. C2X says it will use the money to build a 500,000-metric-ton-per-year biomass-to-methanol plant in Louisiana.—ALEX SCOTT IFF, Kemira to make biobased materials International Flavors & Fragrances (IFF) and Kemira have pooled $141 million to form a joint venture called Alpha Bio that will make biobased materials. The venture plans to build a facility at IFF’s biorefinery in Finland that will enzymatically convert 44,000 metric tons of sugar per year into polysaccharides for use in adhesives, detergents, hair conditioners, and other products. The two firms have been collaborating for about 5 years. They anticipate creating about 30 jobs once the plant starts up in late 2027.—CRAIG BETTENHAUSEN Dow, X-energy move on nuclear plans Nuclear-powered chemical production took an important step forward recently when Dow and X-energy jointly submitted a construction permit application to the US Nuclear Regulatory Agency for their project in Seadrift, Texas. Dow operates a large petrochemical plant in Sea- drift that is powered by natural gas–fired boilers. Those boilers are nearing the end of their service life, and the chemical maker plans to replace them with a quartet of 200 MW modular nuclear reactors provided by X-energy. The firms are targeting a start date in the early 2030s.—CRAIG BETTENHAUSEN Merck licenses heart disease molecule Merck & Co. has agreed to license from the Chinese drug developer Hengrui Pharma a small molecule that targets lipoprotein(a). Merck will pay $200 million up front plus up to $1.77 billion in milestones for the molecule, called HRS-5346, which is in Phase 2 clinical trials. Produced in the liver, lipoprotein(a) carries cholesterol, fats, and proteins in the blood. It can accumulate in blood vessel walls, forming plaques that can cause heart attacks or strokes.—MICHAEL MCCOY Vestaron raises cash for bioinsecticides The start-up Vestaron has raised $20 million to commercialize peptide-based insecticides. Its first product, which kills caterpillars, moths, and worms, has been sprayed on 400,000 hectares of crops. Vestaron expects to soon receive full regulatory approval for a second product targeting aphids, mites, fruit flies, and whiteflies. In October, the Michigan-based firm partnered with ADM to scale up production of the peptides. Vestaron says it will use the funding to expand its presence in the US and Europe and develop additional biopesticides.—MATT BLOIS AstraZeneca invests $2.5 billion in China AstraZeneca says it will spend $2.5 billion over the next 5 years on investments in China, including an R&D center in Beijing and research and manufacturing agreements. The agreements are with Beijing Cancer Hospital to conduct research and clinical trials, Harbour BioMed to discover multispecific antibodies, Syneron Bio to develop macrocyclic peptides, and BioKangtai to develop and produce vaccines. The UK-based pharma giant says it expects its workforce in Beijing to grow to 1,700.—SARAH BRANER Novo adds to its weight-loss pipeline Novo Nordisk has raised large amounts of capital from sales of its glucagon-like peptide 1 (GLP-1) receptor agonist semaglutide, marketed under the names Wegovy for weight loss and Ozempic for diabetes. The Danish drugmaker is now on the hunt for a follow-up. Novo Nordisk will pay $75 million in up-front and near-term payments for Lexicon Pharmaceuticals’ LX9851, a small molecule the firm says it is developing for obesity and associated metabolic disorders. It will also pay $200 million for United Biotechnology’s UBT251, a triple agonist for GLP-1, glucose-dependent insulinotropic polypeptide, and glucagon receptors.—LAURA HOWES Business Roundup Circular Aromatics, a Dutch consortium of companies, universities, and other knowledge institutions, has launched with the goal of scaling the production of aromatic compounds from olefin-rich waste streams such as mixed plastics. The consortium has secured $25 million in funding from the Dutch government. Shin-Etsu Chemical plans to spend about $67 million on its pharmaceutical cellulose business. The Japanese firm will build a new plant for the excipient hydroxypropyl cellulose in Wiesbaden, Germany, and boost cellulose warehousing capacity in Joetsu, Japan. BASF has named Heather Remley president and CEO of its North American subsidiary, BASF Corp. Remley joined the German company in 2016 and most recently headed its global engineering services division. Gulbrandsen plans to expand its polyethylene wax plant in Dahej, India, and add a functional polymer facility at the site. The US firm says it is the leading manufacturer of specialty polyethylene waxes, which are used in cosmetics, adhesives, inks, and other products. Mitsubishi Chemical Group plans to close two plants in Iwaki City, Japan, by March 2027. The firm makes ammonia and derivatives at one plant and produces fine chemicals and other products at the other. Forestal de Atlántico, a Spanish chemical maker, will use BASF’s OASE technology to capture carbon dioxide from the exhaust gas of electricity-generating turbines at its site in northern Spain. Forestal plans to turn the CO 2 into methanol by reacting it with renewable hydrogen. Eion plans to remove 78,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere over 4 years for a consortium of software companies. Eion will spread crushed olivine rock on farmland, where the material will react with water and CO 2 to form solid carbonates.