(26b) Lessons Learned From SABIC New Processes Commercilization

During the Last 20 years, Sabic has experience within deferent affiliates many new or scaled-up processes where tremendous amount of resources have been devoted to operate and stabilize them.  Commercial plant start-up of new process is the real evaluation of how much successful the critical development milestones were accomplished. All lesson learns from the start-up can be linked to the failure of estimating the required activities for each development step. Moreover, As the plant mainly design for steady state with specified margin, initial plant start-up can be considered the most challenging step which most likely not reflected in the design due to the difficulties to set all possible unknown scenario’s which can be faced.

 In fact, Development of new technology is including many critical milestones which can strongly affect the final plant set-up. Starting from process kinetics and selecting of the important elements for scale-up model, Building the initial concept of the process, choosing the important plant sections which required to be piloting till plant start-up are involving some challenging areas. The final evaluation of the completion for each step can be considered as an important element which can highly affecting the final plant performance.

 Typically any new technology runs through an initial learning phases that could last upto many years depending on the complexity of the process. This paper will attempt to share with all sabic and provide the challenges faced in the journey of Many Process commercialization at Sadaf , Ibn Rushed , PK , United, ArRazi and ways to handle these challenges. This will be covered with a clear link between the important process commercialization milestones and start-up challenges faced which are very important for any team working on process development.