Engineering: issues, challenges and opportunities for development ...

ENGINEERING: ISSUES CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES FOR DEVELOPMENTFigure 3: A plant of the futureThe chemical and process industries – the heart ofthe challengesToday, the chemical and related industries – including oil andgas, oil shale, petrochemicals, pharmaceuticals and health,agriculture and food, environment, pulp and paper, textile andleather, iron and steel, bitumen, building materials, glass, surfactants,cosmetics and perfume, and electronics, and so on– are evolving rapidly. This is due to unprecedented demandsand constraints, stemming not least from public concern overenvironmental and safety issues. Only 25 per cent by weight ofextracted resources is used for the production of goods andservices; the other 75 per cent is lost to pollution, waste andenvironment disturbances.Chemical knowledge is also growing rapidly and the rate ofdiscovery increases every day. More than fourteen million differentmolecular compounds could be synthesized in 2005.About 100,000 can regularly be found on the market, but onlya small fraction of them can be found in nature. Most of themare deliberately conceived, designed, synthesized and manufacturedto meet a human need, to test an idea or to satisfy ourquest for knowledge. The development of combined chemicalsynthesis with nanotechnology is a current example.There are two major demands associated with the challengeto assure development, competitiveness, sustainability andemployment in chemical industries. The first is how to competein the global economy where the key factors are globalization,partnership and innovation (which mainly involves theacceleration of innovation as a process of discovery and development).For example, in the fast-moving consumer goodsbusiness, time to market has decreased from about ten yearsin 1970 to an estimated 2–3 years in the year 2000. Now, evenone year is often considered long. The second major demandis to respond to market demands. This actually presents adouble challenge. In industrializing countries, labour costs arelow and there are fewer regulations. In industrialized countries,there is rapid growth in consumer demand for specificend-use properties and significant concern for the environmentand safety.The chemical engineering profession is already responding tothese demands and the necessity for more sustainable productsand processes. It will increasingly research innovativeprocesses for production to transition, from the now traditionalhigh-bulk chemistry, into new industries of specializedand active material chemistry.For example, in the production of commodity and intermediateproducts (ammonia, calcium carbonate, sulphuric acid,ethylene, methanol, ethanol and so on representing 40 percent of the market), patents usually do not apply to the productbut rather to the process, and the process can no longer bedetermined by economic considerations alone. The need is toproduce large quantities at the lowest possible price, but theeconomic constraints will no longer be defined as ‘sale price,minus capital, plus operating, plus raw material, plus energycost’. Increased selectivity and the savings linked to the processitself must be considered, which needs further research.Furthermore, it has to be added that the trend towards globalscalefacilities may soon require a change of technology, withthe current technology no longer capable of being built ‘just abit bigger’. This may involve an integrated multi-scale chemicalprocess design. It may mean that large-scale production unitsare created by the integration and interconnection of diverse,smaller-scale elements.For high-margin products that involve customer-designed orperceived formulations, chemical engineers need to designnew plants that are no longer optimized to produce one productat high quality and low cost. The need is for multi-purposesystems and generic equipment that can be easily switchedover to other recipes; systems like flexible production, smallbatches, modular set-ups, and so on.Chemical and process engineering in the futureBriefly, the years to come seem to be characterized by fourmain parallel and simultaneous changes:1.Total multi-scale control: process to increase selectivityand productivity.© Charpentier2.Process intensification: including the design of novelequipment, new operating modes and new methods ofproduction (Figure 3).130