(52b) Pilot Plant Politics: Scaling up from Small Pilot Plants to Commercial Production Plants

The laboratory and commercial scales are reasonably well defined. The laboratory scale uses glassware equipment and involves producing gram quantities of product. The commercial scale produces several thousand pounds of product per year of specialty chemicals and many million pounds of product per year of commodity chemicals. Pilot plants exist between these two scales. Thus, pilot plants can be small or sizably large. In today's commercial environment, the push is to build and operate small pilot plants. Such pilot plants consume little capital and have low operating costs. Thus, the ratio of commercial plant size to pilot plant size will be large. For such a paradigm to work

·the chemically active phase must be know; ·the scale ratio of the chemically active phase must be known; ·the production plant staff must have direct input with regard to the experiments done in the pilot plant.

This paper describes work done by Shell Global Solutions to implement a chain transfer agent in the Shell Higher Olefin Process using a small pilot plant. This project involved close cooperation between pilot plant personnel and production personnel. The interaction of these two groups is a major reason for the success of this project. This paper will, therefore, discuss how to forge such relationships.