Techno-economic estimation of innovative technologies in chemical engineering

The evaluation of innovations in the field of process engineering requires the estimation of economic indicators. This estimation is one of the key elements for orienting process development strategies, positioning an innovative technology in relation to a mature process, feeding a business model, or contributing to the improvement of a technology.

However, as the innovative technology is not introduced on the market or deployed in a production process, the technical elements are neither precisely known nor completely mastered, since they involve singular equipment (composite, outside its field of use, or non-existent on an industrial scale). Insofar as knowledge increases with the level of technological maturity of the process, assessments based on feedback are not directly applicable in preliminary studies, when the process is not industrially mature. What's more, these assessments are generally carried out in the early phases of an industrial project, for example during feasibility or design studies, when few human and financial resources are yet allocated to this preliminary work. In such cases, the assessment is subject to greater uncertainty, due to the assumptions made, than during the subsequent stages of detailed engineering and contracting, when more substantial resources are generally allocated to the project.

The difficulty is to evaluate a process that does not yet exist industrially, and to do so with little technical information available. This article proposes an approach to the technico-economic estimation of an innovative process. The aim is to provide process engineers and/or researchers with the knowledge and methods they need to evaluate an innovative component or process, then position it among a range of mature and innovative techniques. The article includes: a reminder of general industrial economics concepts; notions on the main factors influencing the cost of equipment; an approach for evaluating singular pieces of equipment and a method for quantifying uncertainties linked to the project's level of progress and the process' level of technological maturity.

At the end of the article, a glossary lists the most important terms and expressions used in the article.