On February 25, at a board session of the Tatinvestneftekhim Holding held by Tatarstan President Rustam Minnikhanov at Tatarstan Government House, some reports on promising scientific developments were made.

In particular, Chairman of the Board of the Advanced Research and Technologies Research and Development Enterprise Sergey Zhdanok made a report on production of carbon nanomaterials and their application in Tatarstan. Nanostructured carbon has been already used at Belarus's five cement plants to make concrete, which greatly increases its strength. Using nanostructured carbon provides, for example, the increased strength of polyamide, polyester, rayon and acrylic fibers up 30-40 per cent.

Minnikhanov proposed to examine in detail the feasibility of application of nanostructured carbon in Tatarstan, in particular, by the KAMAZ Automakr, in aircraft and helicopter industry, manufacturing of polymers. At the same time, he noted that the production cost of the final product is important.

Ravel Sharafutdinov from Kutateladze Institute of Thermal Physics (Novosibirsk) has told the Board about the chemical reaction method of electric plasma. According to him, this breakthrough method is uniform and enables to apply various technologies, from vacuum to atmosphere to turn out chemical items.

As for fodder protein for livestock, the director of Russian Chemical Technologies University’s chemical pharmacy and biomedicine department, Yevgeny Ofitserov, made a report. He insists that the real animal husbandry is there where consistent fodder protein is. He also argues that imported and soaring in price soy prevails in the Russian market now. At the meantime, protein, which is more quality than soy, can be extracted from natural gas by microorganisms. Yevgeny Ofitserov suggested setting up such production in Tatarstan, at first from 10,000 tonne of protein. The Board resolved to review the business-plan of this pilot project.