While I was at AIChE 2016 in Houston this year, I sat through a presentation that focused on the "Role of the Chemical Engineer in Enabling Reliable Operations" It was presented by David Rosenthal, Reliability Strategy and Implementation Consultancy LLC. A lot of topics were covered in exploring the roles that a Chemical Engineer can play in today's world, some of them very different from the traditional role of a Chem E. Being a Chem E myself and focused on Brownfield Modernization Projects for some time, I found the discussion on Building Reliability into Capital Projects to be interesting. His premise is that building in reliability establishes over 80% of what an asset can deliver over its life. And that sustaining capital projects and continuous improvement of equipment/asset strategies after the fact can only improve reliability about 10-15%. If that's true, why don't we see more process engineers involved in the early planning of capital projects?
So the question is: What is the makeup of your Capital Project Team? Are you as a Process Engineer a member of that team? Do you actively participate in the planning? Are you a bridge for good operating practices that should be incorporated in the project, so that reliability can be designed in vs trying to fix reliability issues after the project is done, commissioned, and turned over to Operations? If not should you be? The answer I think is YES. Best practices are emerging that has process and/or reliability engineers involved earlier in capital projects and I think they are better for it.