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Technology is the lifeblood of industry, and nowhere more than in the process sector. Petrochemicals - by some distance the largest of the process sectors - has a reputation for being slow-moving with regards to new developments, especially when compared to its pharmaceutical and biotechnology cousins.

In the current `competitiveness is king' climate, petrochemical firms see technology as a tool to help them achieve an advantage over their competitors. This is generally by cutting costs - whether by allowing them to build larger plants for less, to use raw materials more efficiently, or to switch to cheaper catalysts or feedstocks.

This is a view wholeheartedly endorsed by BP Amoco Chemicals. Operating in some of the most competitive markets in the sector, notably polyethylene and acetic acid, the company has a history of using technology as a financial lever, to boost its businesses and squeeze out competitors.

Options and opportunities

According to BP Amoco, the relationship between technology and investment runs both ways. Process development both flows from and contributes to business strategy, and which takes the lead is largely a matter of chance. For example, the need to remove the bottlenecks in a process could be the trigger for a research programme to find a new catalyst. On the other hand, results from the company labs could set business units looking for opportunities to implement new reactor designs or refinements in separation processes. `The key,' says the company, `is in having a structure which does not create artificial barriers between "business" and "technology".' Thereafter, it's a matter of creating options and looking for opportunities.

One example of this is BP Amoco's new process for making vinyl acetate monomer (VAM). Known as Leap, this process represents the first time that a long-established technology, the fluidised bed reactor, has been used to make VAM. It also shows how investment decisions can affect process technology, and vice-versa.

For some time, explains acetyls division business advisor Rick Mingione, BP Chemicals (as was) had needed some way of increasing its European VAM capacity, represented by a 115,000tpa plant at Baglan Bay in Wales and a 55,000tpa unit, operated by Enichem, at Porto Marghera near Venice. `But it was far too expensive to close two medium-sized plants and build a larger one - the investment couldn't be justified,' says Mingione.

The problem lay in the technology itself. The VAM process used in the plants, originally developed by Bayer in the late 1960-early 1970s, relied on fixed-bed reactors where the raw materials passed through narrow tubes packed with the catalyst. This imposed a size limit on the reactor. The tube sheets - cylindrical sheets of metal which support the packed tubes inside the reactor - become more and more difficult to produce the larger they are, and when it comes to drilling 8000 holes in a six-inch thick, four metre diameter steel disc, the options become limited. Even with several generations of improved catalysts, the largest VAM reactor that could be made had a 150,000tpa capacity. Moreover, the size of the reactor made the reaction difficult to control, as it became trickier to maintain the same conditions everywhere within the tubes.

The break came with the technology department's idea for replacing the fixed-bed system with a fluidised bed reactor. `The acetyls business was very interested, so we funded the research for a couple of years, giving it some targets that they had to reach,' says Mingione. `They met all of them.'

The fluidised bed reactor has a simpler construction than the fixed bed, with neither tubes nor tube sheets and efficient mixing of the reactant gases and the powdered catalyst. BP Amoco estimates that a 300,000tpa fluidised bed reactor should cost the same to make as a 150,000tpa fixed-bed reactor. In total, a Leap plant built from scratch should be some 30 per cent cheaper than a fixed-bed VAM plant of the same capacity. And there's no limit on the size of the reactor in engineering terms.

But perhaps the most significant part of BP Amoco's vision for Leap is the way it makes smaller plants no longer a viable investment. Says Mingione: `over time we hope to raise the barrier to entry for the VAM field from the point of view of cost and scale.' Currently, he explains, a world-scale VAM plant has a capacity of maybe 150,000-170,000tpa; but thanks to Leap, BP Amoco could build a 400,000tpa unit for the same cost. `Anyone wanting to build a smaller plant would have to think again,' he says.

Living in the plastic age

Technology - and its judicious use - can also help companies carve out valuable niches in fields dominated by the giants. Borealis's Borstar process for polyethylene and polypropylene is dwarfed by the market leaders, BP Amoco's Innovene and Union Carbide's Unipol. But according to Borstar licensing manager Gunnar Thoressen, its use has helped the Nordic company boost its position as one of several players to a leadership position in the pipes and mouldings market, and helped support the company's leading position in the pipes, wires and cables market.

Borealis has a policy of always using new technology wherever it can, to the extent that it has delayed capital investments in its plants while Borstar was developed further.

Integration for innovation

BASF has a keen sense of how technology can act as a business lever. Its size and `Verbund' integration strategy means that by-products from processes, which in other companies would be produced in very small quantities, can be used as feedstocks.

For example, the company has invested heavily in developing products based on isobutene. Accounting for four percent of cracker output, this olefin is normally used in petrol additives. However, BASF has found ways of turning it into a much more diverse family of products.

For example, isobutene is used as a starting-point for vitamin A and E production. Other high-value products from this starting-point include a lily-of-the-valley fragrance, and a cereal fungicide. Other derivatives find uses in rubber, paper, peroxide, lubricants, roofing and even chewing gum.