Transcript

Hello and welcome to Distilled News for July 2026. I'm Jonathan Katz, executive editor of Chemical Processing, bringing you this month’s top stories on ChemicalProcessing.com.

We start on the plant safety front. The U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board released an update this month on its investigation into the fatal hydrogen sulfide release at Woodland Pulp's mill in Baileyville, Maine. The January incident killed a 20-year-old chemical engineering co-op student and a 26-year-old chemical engineer and exposed 10 other employees to hydrogen sulfide.

Investigators say the mill had no fixed hydrogen sulfide detectors in the affected area and did not provide personal hydrogen sulfide monitors to the two employees who died.  There was also no system to track who was inside the building during the shutdown that was underway, which delayed the rescue by hours.

The preliminary investigation found the release occurred during a planned mill shutdown driven by increased natural gas costs.

According to CSB, the accident occurred in an area of the facility called the “bleach plant,” where wood chips are chemically processed into pulp. As operators drained plant equipment, alkaline process fluids containing sulfur compounds entered the facility's acid sewer system. Automatic controls responded by adding sulfuric acid to reduce pH. Because liquids accumulated in an elevated section of piping, sulfuric acid continued to be injected longer than intended, reacting with sulfur compounds to generate hydrogen sulfide gas.

When operators shut down the bleach plant scrubber fan as part of the shutdown process, the toxic gas was no longer removed from the sewer system. Instead, it migrated through connected process equipment before escaping into the building through multiple openings.

The two engineers were believed to be working nearby on an equipment drawing project unrelated to the shutdown when they were overcome by the gas. Other employees reported symptoms including burning eyes, throat irritation and headaches.

Woodland Pulp knew hydrogen sulfide could form in that system but didn't have adequate safeguards in place, according to the CSB report. A final report with recommendations is still to come.

Also from CSB this month, the board released its final report on last September's fire and toxic release at KIK Consumer Products' Bio-Lab warehouse in Conyers, Georgia. The incident sent a chemical plume over the Atlanta area, forcing roughly 17,000 evacuations and a shelter-in-place advisory for about 90,000 people.

CSB determined the fire started after water from a corroded sprinkler component reacted with chlorinated isocyanurates stored in the warehouse. CSB found the facility was holding nearly 14 million pounds of these reactive chemicals, more than double what was originally disclosed to local officials before the plant was even built in 2019. The storage bags weren't waterproof, and the building's ventilation couldn't keep humidity in check, which corroded the sprinkler system from the inside out.

The board identified five primary safety issues that contributed to the severity of the event. They include operating equipment until failure, inadequate identification of storage hazards, deficiencies in risk management and oversight, insufficient industry guidance for pool-treatment chemicals and limited regulatory coverage of reactive chemical hazards.

Moving on to trade and tariffs. The Trump administration’s 25% tariff on certain Brazilian imports could put U.S. chemical industry reshoring initiatives at risk, according to an American Chemistry Council statement released after the July 15 executive order.  

“ACC is concerned that broad tariffs on imports from trusted trading partners like Brazil could make it more difficult to reshore and friend-shore supply chains closer to home, especially when faced with more significant unfair trading practices from other countries,” the trade group said.  

The tariffs impact a wide range of chemicals, particularly ethanol and many materials used outside the pharmaceutical sector.   

These broad, untargeted tariffs could raise costs across downstream sectors, such as energy, plastics and manufacturing, and put recent U.S. reshoring efforts that relied on Brazilian raw materials at risk, according to a July 1 letter from Jason Bernstein, ACC's director of international trade and supply chain, submitted to the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) on its proposed action. 

Instead of strengthening U.S. supply chains, the tariffs could make it cheaper for chemical manufacturers to abandon domestic production and import finished chemicals from other countries using China-sourced raw materials, the letter stated.  

“This would weaken U.S supply chain resilience and increase U.S. dependence on less balanced and strategically aligned partners,” the letter stated. “We therefore would express caution in implementing these proposed tariffs and request USTR to establish a review procedure to identify and address these and similar unintended consequences before such tariffs are implemented.” 

ACC stated it was pleased to see an expanded list of exemptions from the tariffs from the initial proposal. The list includes a broad range of chemical and petrochemical raw materials that are unavailable domestically or in insufficient quantities, such as aluminum hydroxide (see the full Federal Register list). 

The Trump administration contends that for decades Brazil’s trade policies and practices have unfairly harmed U.S. farmers, workers, innovators and businesses, while restricting access to Brazil’s consumers.  

The administration specifically cited Brazil’s lower tariffs on imports from Mexico and India, weak anti-corruption regulations, lax intellectual property protections and a failure to reciprocate the U.S. favorable treatment of Brazilian ethanol as key reasons for the 25% fee.  

In other legislative news, the American Chemistry Council and a coalition of 75 other organizations sent a letter dated July 20 to the EPA, OSHA and the White House budget office, asking the agencies to build one unified federal framework for workplace chemical safety.

According to the coalition, EPA's Workplace Chemical Protection Program, established through recent TSCA risk management rules, has created duplicate regulatory obligations alongside OSHA's existing worker safety standards. The organizations said the overlapping requirements can complicate compliance for employers without improving worker protections.

The coalition recommended that EPA and OSHA establish a single federal framework for occupational chemical safety, strengthen coordination between the agencies, align regulatory responsibilities with each agency's expertise and eliminate duplicative or conflicting workplace requirement.

And we wrap up this month’s edition of Distilled News with a look back at a feature article we ran this month digging into artificial intelligence in plant operations. Specifically, we looked at AI’s growing role in advanced process control. I covered this from the floor of the AspenTech Optimize conference in Houston in May.

The pitch from vendors is that these tools bring engineer-level judgment to operators who don't have decades of experience. But the engineers and experts I talked to say the reality is more incremental, and one issue keeps coming up again and again: When an AI system recommends an action, it often can't fully explain why. And in a chemical plant, that's a problem operators can't just shrug off.

I sat down with Brian Ashcraft, a central engineering specialist at Dow, who's been testing Dow’s AI agent AVA in a couple advanced process control applications to assess its value. Here’s Ashcraft:

Dow's early read has been mixed — Ashcraft says their subject matter experts didn't find AVA offering much more insight than the tools they already had, and the cost hasn't justified rolling it out more broadly yet. Where he does see value is for newer engineers and operators, who can use it to understand why a unit is behaving a certain way — something veterans can often already do faster on their own.

Others, like specialty chemicals manufacturer Albemarle, have reported more measurable success using AI. Albemarle achieved more than $150 million in annual savings from AI and analytics work across its plants, according to Jonathan Alexander, manufacturing AI and advanced analytics manager within Albemarle’s global manufacturing excellence team.

Albemarle is seeing 5%-20% improvements on overall equipment effectiveness and production driven by better predictive maintenance insights, according to Alexander.

Hear more from Alexander, Ashcraft and others by visiting the ChemicalProcessing.com home page or searching for the article, “AI Comes to Advanced Process Control.”

I’m Jonathan Katz, and this has been Distilled News.