During these challenging times the oil and gas production, gas processing, petroleum refining and chemical industries need to be able to identify economically viable projects as early in the design process as possible. Every man-hour spent on non-profitable process designs results in opportunity costs that could have made more value for the organization when assigned to efficient and profitable process designs. In order to remain competitive and maximize business performance, optimum designs must therefore be identified quickly with minimum risk of rework, as design changes further in the project development cycle come at the expense of higher cost and more effort (figure 1). To accomplish this, process and cost engineers should work hand-in-hand during the economic analysis of the different solutions.
