Lessons learned in commercial scale-up of new chemical processes (6)
Continuous engineering
Engineering
should be part of the commercialization effort; this is the essence of the
scale-up/scale-down approach. The engineer(s) leading this effort must have the
necessary experience and skills to conceptualize the entire plant with a
high level of realism, starting from
day one, with occasional reassessments to follow. Good engineers can identify
gaps in research knowledge early on and ask R&D to obtain the solutions
before the gaps become a critical path to pilot or commercial design efforts.
If early efforts show viable economics, then it is highly unlikely that the
final results at the commercialization stage will be different. The converse is
also true. An early negative result from engineering may not be insurmountable
if viewed as a challenge for improvement. For example, a negative result can be
turned positive with a small increase in reactor yield, which can then guide
further research.
In
another example, a major producer invented a process to produce a certain
compound in high global demand. The front and back ends of this
new process were fairly standard and easy to estimate. The initial concept for
the “reactor” made the process economically unattractive. The consultant
started with the published market price of the product, deducted
required margins and variable costs, and came up with a contribution
to the selling pricedue to depreciation of capital. The maximum permissible total
plant cost was estimated from these calculations.
Deducting
the known cost of the balance of the plant yielded the required “imputed” cost
for the reactor. The client’s team then worked with alternate concepts to see
if the imputed cost was achievable. The
technology is now in the advanced stages of demonstration on a large scale,
with a reactor concept quite different from the initial one.
CONTINUES
Jazayeri, B., Reacxion http://www.hydrocarbonprocessing.com/magazine/2016/october-2016/process-control-and-instrumentation/lessons-learned-in-commercial-scale-up-of-new-chemical-processes
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