After more than half a century under Occidental Petroleum’s umbrella, OxyChem (the business built around its 1968 acquisition of chlor-alkali pioneer Hooker Chemical) will soon stand on its own—Buffet’s Berkshire is aquiring OxyChem for $9.7 billion in an all-cash transaction. The split is mostly administrative: the production of chlorine and caustic soda (sodium hydroxide) has little overlap with Occidental’s upstream operations—the largest tangible overlap is probably the use of these chemicals to treat produced water from fracking, but the benefits of that cost advantage are far outweighed by the balance sheet benefit that Occidental will reap from paying down a third of its long term debt, even if they need to write down some of those direct air capture (DAC) projects. [LINK]

My model for electricity generation is crude: natural gas is burned to make steam, the steam rotates turbine blades on a shaft, the shaft spins magnets around coils of wire, and the changing field pushes electrons back and forth, producing an alternating current. The reverse is also true: a battery can push electrons through coil wire near a magnet, and the interaction between the coil’s field and the magnet’s field creates torque. The point I’m trying to make here is that magnets are important in an electrified world, and I’m making that point because there’s a startup called Niron Magnetics trying to make permanent magnets from iron nitride (instead of relying on rare-earths, which present various supply chain issues), and they just broke ground in Minnesota. [LINK]

A quick primer: steam crackers break down relatively stable hydrocarbons (like naphtha or ethane) into reactive components (ethylene, propylene, etc.) that are later combined to make most of the world's chemicals and materials. It’s a very-valuable operation, but also a very-energy-intensive one, and right now we provide that energy via heat, and we make that heat by combusting hydrocarbons like natural gas (which produces a lot of CO2). That heat production is responsible for about half of all petrochemical emissions, which makes “electric cracking” something like the holy grail of the petrochemical industry. Scaling such a transformational technology is the sort of thing that happens over the course of decades, and Coolbrook keeps chugging along: they just demonstrated that its pilot-scale electric cracker can handle plastic waste pyrolysis oil. [LINK]