Investing in new chemical technologies
Investing in a new chemical technology is different than, for example, investing in a new mobile app. It’s not like you can lock a bunch of twenty-three year old chemical engineers in a closet for the weekend and expect them to emerge with a minimum viable product.
Capital and operating costs are high and depend strongly on the results of R&D and scale-up. Further, lengthy timelines increase chances that market conditions will change.
The impact of these factors can be difficult and time-consuming to estimate. So, they are often visited once at the beginning of a project and then largely ignored in favor of the tasks at hand.
This doesn’t have to be the case. I put this set of slides together to illustrate how techno-economic analysis can be used as a tool to select winning technologies and to maximize their chances of success.
