(290a) A Case Study for the Use of Conventional and Modular Construction Methods in Building an Intensified Chemical Plant

Early efforts in offsite construction grew out of project needs such as building chemical plants in remote locations lacking the infrastructure for supporting plant construction. More recently, mainstream chemical companies are using offsite construction to reduce capital costs and project timelines, putting capital to work faster and lowering the risk of entering new markets. Engineering and construction firms have realized shorter construction timelines, lower construction costs and improved work safety using offsite construction to overcome labor shortages, enhance labor productivity and improve quality of work. However, most chemical manufacturers have not realized numbering-up strategies for managing capacity and most engineering and construction firms have stopped short of economies of mass production during off-site construction. Process intensification strategies to process development lend themselves to modular construction as intensified processes are more capable of fitting within modular form factors. Within the RAPID institute, the modular construction of intensified plants is finding its way forward within many distributed chemical processing markets where capacity is scaled up by numbering up, leading to offsite construction efficiencies associated with building the same module multiple times. This talk will provide insights from a case study showing the key drivers associated with the use of modular offsite construction for a distributed chemical processing application. The differences in capital equipment costs for the intensified chemical plant built using conventional “stick-built” construction methods versus modular offsite construction methods will be contrasted. The methodology described within this talk will be used to collect lessons learned from other modular chemical process intensification efforts, ongoing within the RAPID institute, for advancing specialty chemical production.