The Chemical Industry (CI) is perhaps unique in the very high degree of automation it has incorporated, particularly in industries with high complexity like refineries and petrochemicals. A lot of this automation with powerful software driven controls mimic near intelligent operations. And more are on the way with the advent of robotics and Industrial Internet of Things  (IIoT).

A very potent intelligent force is in the making, bandied about as AI or simply Artificial Intelligence. AI systems, the author warns should not be confused with ‘mere’ automation. As much as it could have manifold benefits, it has dreadful dangers too as it borders on ‘thinking like humans’ – and therein, ironically enough, lies the danger. Read this well articulated opinion on AI and above all lets debate. Please send us your views on AI to the email provided at the end of this.

AI + CI→???!!!

Space Odyssey 2001, a cult sci-fi film of 1968 by Stanley Kubrick, describes a journey to Jupiter. HAL, a computer onboard the spaceship has intelligence to take decisions. In a spine-chilling finale, HAL decides that humans are a threat to its mission and plans a clever stratagem to do away with the crew. This is the kind of “artificial intelligence” that the noted sci-fi writer Arthur C Clarke envisioned more than 5 decades ago. Today “Artificial Intelligence” has been reduced to AI and bandied about in many unintelligible ways. AI has become a buzzword and interchangeably intermixed with Robotics and Internet of Things (IoT). Robotics and IoT are tools of convenience; AI is far more. Robots and machines on IoT perform as per the way we humans program

them. AI systems think for themselves and may perform actions that we don’t expect them to. We don’t program AI systems; we teach them to think for themselves, just as we do. Intrinsic in this is our acceptance of the limitations of human brain; both its size and speed of information processing.

Learning

How does the human child learn? It starts by observing others and learns to recognise patterns. This is further reinforced by a set of instructions, both formal and informal, respectively from schools and family. These instructions attempt to weed out undesirable patterns. AI systems are taught in the same way. They are exposed to a vast amount of data from which they seek out patterns on their own without human influence. Armed with this “intelligence” AI systems are expected to take decisions in a new situation. Are we ready to accept such decisions? Are we ready to accept the outcomes of these decisions, even without knowing what the decisions are? Probably not! This is the scenario that Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates and Elon Musk, three most intelligent inhabitants of the digital universe are warning us against.

Automation

What inroads will AI make into the chemical industry? The degree of automation in the chemical process industry is already very high. Control algorithms are getting sophisticated and the response times are becoming shorter. Advanced and predictive control systems are allowing plants to be operated very close to the theoretical efficiency. Feed-Forward control systems allow process parameters to be adjusted in anticipation of changes in the quality of raw material. Equipment fitted with smart sensors monitor and announce their health in real-time, thereby improving the plant reliability immensely. All these have become possible because of human intervention aided by computer technology and are not to be confused with AI.

Safety

Despite the high degree of automation, the chemical industry has been plagued by horrific accidents. The safety Guru, Trevor Kletz, in his seminal work – An Engineer’s View of Human Error – says that statistics support the view that as many as 90% of industrial accidents are due to human failing. Kletz then proceeds to catalogue various types of human error – error due to momentary lapse of attention, error due to improper training or instruction, error because the task is beyond a person’s ability, error due to noncompliance. All these four types of errors can be eliminated by a robust artificial mind that is intelligent and free of fatigue and emotions. “Zero Accident” can thus be a lofty goal for adopting AI in chemical industry.

Quality

Another area where AI can contribute immensely is quality. Many quality parameters are not possible to be measured online and need the intervention of a laboratory. The granulometry of a prilled product, for example. Or the Iodine Value of oil; or the opacity of a pigment. Any measurement in a laboratory is riddled with three problems: sampling error, contamination during sampling and timelag. Oftentimes, if the results are not as per expectation, there is no alternative but to recycle the product or label it as off-spec. Now compare this with the scenario in a kitchen, a veritable chemical plant, where quality requirements are equally stringent and complex, if not greater. Corrections to perceived shortfall in quality are instantaneous and intuitive in the kitchen. If AI systems be taught to replicate such actions in a chemical plant, laboratories will be rendered redundant.

Anticipation

E-commerce juggernaut Amazon patented “anticipatory shipping”, a system which helps them to predict what customers are going to buy before they actually order. Let us imagine a similar scenario in chemical industry. A fertiliser company manufactures 3 crop-specific product grades. The company’s product slate mirrors

the likely cropping pattern, which in turn is largely influenced by the rainfall prediction. Each year the company management plans to make the 3 grades in a proportion that is primarily determined by the long-term rainfall forecast issued by the meteorological department. Because the experts of the recommendation committee invariably fail to arrive at a consensus, the final decision is always a compromise of their subjective opinions. Farmers in turn do not rely completely on the forecasts put out, but supplement the information with their own gut feeling before deciding what to sow. An AI based system using historical inputs can be trusted to provide a more objective recommendation in this case. AI based system will help the company management to stay abreast with the farmer’s mind and improve its bottom-line. Such AI based production planning can be profitably adopted for most agrochemicals, whose consumption depends on nature’s vagaries.

Materials

It might take a decade or more for the AI scenarios described above to be turned into reality. The most immediate impact of AI is likely to be in the area of materials, more specifically on how materials are discovered and synthesised. Historically, scientists have stumbled upon new materials by accident. It has taken several years before their properties were fully understood and the material was put to commercial use. Graphene, touted as a wonder material, is still floundering 13 years after its discovery (Chemingineering, June 2017). AI is poised to turn around this process, putting application first and synthesis second. Material databases containing hundreds of thousands of compounds are now available. Properties of these “yet to be made” compounds are in the process of being predicted. AI based systems will zero in on a specific candidate in these databases to meet the required application. Such tailormade materials will rule our future in energy, healthcare, transportation and many other areas.

Readers’ responses may be sent to: k.sahasranaman@gmail.com or chemindigest@gmail.com

Driven by pressures for a cleaner environment and for mitigating the effects of global warming, the pace has picked up for the deployment of renewables based energy. Cost of renewable power has come down drastically. Some challenges still need to be overcome like on the storage battery front and alternatives to lithium. Technological developments are continuing and need to be speeded up.

Notwithstanding the personal views of the man holding the most important office on planet earth, the rest of humanity is more or less convinced that climate change is indeed real. And the urgency to arrest global warming has never been more than today. Each day brings fresh evidence of global warming, the latest being the breakaway of a titanic iceberg in Antarctica. Fortunately, the renewed commitments to adopt renewable energy have been on an equally epic scale. In 2016 a record 161 GW of renewable power capacity was installed. Solar contributed 47% to this capacity addition, followed by wind and hydro at 34% and 16% respectively. The total global renewable power capacity is now a little more than 2000 GW.

Despite a 3% growth in global economy and the resultant increase in demand for energy, energy-related CO2 emission has remained flat for a third year in a row. While this can be partly attributed to improvements in energy efficiency, it also clearly demonstrates the growing share of renewable energy resources in the new global economy. The share of renewable sources in global energy consumption was 18.3% in 2014. The target is to double this share by 2030; a goal that is acknowledged as extremely stiff.
Renewables

However, it is electricity production that has witnessed the most dramatic growth of renewables. Renewables are now the second largest source of global electricity production, second only to coal and ahead of gas, oil and nuclear. In fact, electricity produced from renewable resources has been growing faster than total electricity production since 1990! The cost of electric power produced from renewable sources has been plummeting and is currently below the cost of fossil fuel generated power in many countries including India. Investment analysts are now betting that renewables will be the cheapest source of power in every country by 2020.

Electricity production accounts for only 20% of primary energy consumption globally. A larger slice of the primary energy pie, as much as one-third, is consumed by the transport sector. Use of electrical energy in transportation is miniscule, despite its dominant share in rail transport. This is likely to change as transport technology is poised on the cusp of a major transformation. Norway and Netherlands plan to phase out petrol and diesel- powered cars by 2025. India and France plan to do the same by 2030 and 2040 respectively. Volvo, the Scandinavian automobile giant, says that from 2019 all its cars will be completely or partially powered by electricity, and calls it a “historic end” to cars that have only the internal combustion engine. More auto majors are likely to follow suit in the coming years.

Energy demand in transport sector is intermittent in nature. Energy locked up in hydrocarbon molecules of petrol and diesel is extremely convenient for meeting this fluctuating demand. We need to replicate this ease in batteries at an affordable cost. Battery contributes 40% to the cost of an electric car. Tesla, the battery pioneer, is facing serious competition in both Europe and China. Daimler, which owns Mercedes-Benz is investing 500 million euro to set up a plant to build energy storage units. China is reportedly constructing as many as 9 battery building factories. Battery costs have dropped from $542/kwh in 2012 to its present level of $139/kwh. With the completion of the aforesaid factories, global battery production is expected to more than double by 2021. The cost of batteries is likely to drop by 40% from its current level. Batteries will be an important enabler of the penetration of renewables into transportation sector.
Energy Storage

Both solar and wind, the two dominant forms of renewables, are cyclical in nature. Hence energy storage is important for the largescale adoption of renewables, irrespective of the end use. Early this year, the largest lithium-ion battery project in the world went on stream in California. Built by Tesla, it can store 80 MWH of power, adequate for feeding 2500 households for an entire day. We need many such storage units if we have to smoothen out the variable power supply from renewables and seamlessly integrate it into the distribution grid fed by conventional sources. Germany, Denmark and Portugal are among the few countries that have demonstrated the possibility of meeting their total electricity demand entirely from renewable sources, by installing such battery backups in the grid.

The technology behind solar and wind power have reached the plateau of maturity in the Hype Cycle. This explains why both capital and operating costs have dropped to the present lows. But the same cannot be said for battery technology. The longevity of batteries is a prime concern, as they get pummeled by repeated charge-discharge cycles. Though numbers are not readily forthcoming, state-of-the art batteries today are believed to possess a useful life of 5000 cycles. This is inadequate for a large distribution grid. Fears are already being raised about the supply of lithium, the mainstay of today’s batteries. Price of lithium carbonate has more than doubled since 2015. Supplies are controlled by a handful of companies who operate mines in South America and Australia. Lithium production has to increase 15 times in next 2 decades to meet the growing demand. sources, by installing such battery backups in the grid. The technology behind solar and wind power have reached the plateau of maturity in the Hype Cycle. This explains why both capital and operating costs have dropped to the present lows. But the same cannot be said for battery technology. The longevity of batteries is a prime concern, as they get pummeled by repeated charge-discharge cycles. Though numbers are not readily forthcoming, state-of-the art batteries today are believed to possess a useful life of 5000 cycles. This is inadequate for a large distribution grid.

Fears are already being raised about the supply of lithium, the mainstay of today’s batteries. Price of lithium carbonate has more than doubled since 2015. Supplies are controlled by a handful of companies who operate mines in South America and Australia. Lithium production has to increase 15 times in next 2 decades to meet the growing demand.

Lithium ion batteries are not the only means of storing electricity. Many experts are now conceding that using rare elements in batteries is not the best long-term option. But no clear alternative has emerged on the horizon, despite being no rocket science. Funding of research remains woefully inadequate and has been largely limited to incremental improvements. Building cheap and large batteries is the Holy Grail for renewable revolution to get underway.

Postscript: No story on energy can be told without recourse to statistics Aaron Levenstein’s famous quote – “statistics are like bikinis, what they reveal is suggestive but what they conceal is vital” – cannot be truer for energy and emissions. While researching for this story, I was overwhelmed with data, that often contradicted each other. I realised that energy and emissions are too enormous and complex to be cloaked under numbers Hence, I have consciously tried to keep statistics to the minimum.

Readers’ responses may be sent to k.sahasranaman@gmail.com or chemindigest@gmail.com

Almost everyone uses the first 2D material graphene extensively, without knowing the wonders of the material. This material is admired by the scientific community because of its properties. However other, commercial application of graphene are moving slow. In this column, Sahasranaman discusses the history, applications, recent developments and the prob¬lems faced in commercialising this wonder material.

Many of us play with the touchscreen of our smartphones without realising that it is made from the first 2D material of the world. Though hypothesised many years ago, Graphene was accidentally discovered in 2004 by Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov at the University of Manchester. Following its discovery, the scien¬tific community went into hyperbolic diarrhoea singing paeans of the properties of the wonder material – strength, electrical and thermal conductivity, magnetism, etc. A Utopian world with its myriad applications was conceived. But 13 years later, the commercialisation of graphene is still painfully slow. Much of its potential remains unrealised.

The most exciting prospect for graphene, following its discovery, was touted to be in the semiconductor industry, where the famous Moore’s Law was beginning to run out of steam. It was only in 2014 that IBM could succeed in knocking silicon off the chip throne and replace it with Graphene. Because Graphene is only one atom thick, it is order of magnitudes faster than silicon. But there are still technical hurdles, difficult according to some, to be overcome before it displaces silicon forever from the chip. And there is the powerful silicon lobby to contend with.

According to The Graphene Council, the largest global community of those interested in this wonder material, there are 142 graphene producers around the world as of January this year. China has the most number (33), followed closely by USA (30), with UK (12) a distant third. Together these 3 countries account for slightly more than half of global production of graphene. India’s share is a little less than 5%. China also has the most installed capacity in the world, as much as 67%.

The jury is still out on whether graphene was patentable, as it is derived from carbon, a naturally occurring material. Many experts believe that University of Manchester missed out on patenting the process by which the invention was made. The commercialisation arm of the university felt that “it was too early to know what to do with it and too much of a rudimentary approach to be a useful manufacturing technique”. The interest in graphene exploded only when the inventors were recognised in 2010 with the Nobel Prize for Physics; but even before that a significant number of patents had been filed by many countries for the application of graphene. As of September last year, more than 50000 graphene patents have been filed. China accounts for more than half of them, followed by USA, South Korea and Japan. But everybody is unanimous that commercialisation of Graphene is very slow. A seminal essay in Nature (October 2014) benchmarks graphene against carbon fibre and Carbon Nanotubes and points out the significantly slower growth in demand and production of graphene. The estimated production of graphene in 2019 is 1200 tpa.

The major reason for graphene’s slow uptake is that nobody was looking for it; it arrived accidentally as a serendipitous discovery. We need to figure out what we want to use it for. The only significant graphene-based commercial products so far are tennis rackets, smartphone touchscreens and conductive ink for printed electronics. Among future applications, one that holds out most promise is energy storage. A Spanish company claims it is close to offering graphene batteries with 5 times more energy density than Lithium-ion batteries. Others say that graphene can double the output of photovoltaic cells. Medical imaging is another promising area. But these are in future and depend on volumes, purity and cost.

A major challenge of nano-manu¬facturing is to produce graphene in industrial volumes in a cost-effective way. At Manchester, Geim and Novoselov used adhesive tape to peel off graphene layers from a block of graphite. Though this exfoliation technique still produces graphene of the highest purity, it is unviable on an industrial scale. Among numerous other methods, the most proven for large scale production of graphene is Chemical Vapour Deposition (CVD), a technique in which methane gas is brought in contact with a heated copper substrate. The problem is to peel off the graphene film deposited on the substrate without contaminating it. The traditional method is to dissolve the copper and redeposit the graphene layer on another medium, an intricate process full of contaminating possibilities. Purity is extremely important for graphene, as contaminants will significantly take away its phenomenal physical properties. Recently researchers at Kansas University claim to have serendipitously discovered a new technique for mass production of graphene. This involves controlled detonation of ethylene or acetylene in a chamber. This patented process holds out a promise of easy scale-up to industrial scale production.

With incredible physical properties graphene is indeed a dream material. It is super flexible and yet tougher than diamond. It conducts electricity faster than any other known substance and conducts heat 10 times faster than copper. It also exhibits high degree of bio-compatibility. And it is incredibly durable.

Readers’ responses may be sent to k.sahasranaman@gmail.com or chemindigest@gmail.com

Many new concepts and techniques have been emerging in recent times whose deployment in the chemical industry could make its processes and products sustainable and benign to the environment. One such concept is the Circular Economy or Cradle to Cradle. According to this concept manufactured products should have the prospect of its constituents being brought back as raw materials. This is the underlying principle of ‘Circular Economy’. In this column, Sahasranaman explains the importance of Circular Economy. He elaborates on the evolution of these concepts, its applications in industry and the challenges involved in its implementation.

Epicerol, Solvay’s branded Epichlorohydrin, is a unique product. It is manufactured using glycerol, a renewable feedstock, instead of the fossil-based propylene. However, what makes Epicerol unique is that it is the first product to be “CE-tagged”, for want of a better word. Ernst and Young have developed an ecertification program, by which downstream processors of Epicerol would be able to ascertain that their raw material originates from a renewable feedstock. Epichlorohydrin is as an important petrochemical, as it is a building block for epoxy resins, which find myriad applications, primarily in production of paints and coatings.

Glycerol is produced as a relatively worthless byproduct in large quantities during transesterification in the manufacture of biodiesel. “CEtagging” of Epicerol is thus a very good advertisement for Chemical Industry’s environmental responsibility, as it loudly and proudly proclaims how the wasteful byproduct of one process is reused as a raw material in another. This is not the first such instance of a recycle in the chemical industry. However, championed by Akzo Nobel, a leading manufacturer of paints and coatings, this message can be understood easily by the lay customers. It marks an important milestone of Chemical Industry in the world of Circular Economy (CE).

Circular Economy

Though the term Circular Economy was first coined by two British environmental economists, David Pearce and Kerry Turner in 1990, it is more meaningfully associated with the “Cradle to Cradle” concept enunciated in 2002, by Dr Michael Braungart, a German chemist and William McDonough, an American architect. Underlying this concept is the utopian dream, that every manufactured product can be broken down to recover its constituents, which can then be reused to make new products. The R’s of Reduce, Reuse, Repair, Replace and Recycle are at the heart of CE. In 2010 Ellen MacArthur Foundation, named after the famous English long-distance yachtswoman, was established and has quickly emerged as the global thought leader on CE. Under the Foundation’s vision, Circular Economy is a complex umbrella concept, which is threatening to become a buzzword. Underlying this concept are some rather simple tenets that sound bombastic. One of these tenets is preserving the value of natural capital. The Epicerol story is a glorious illustration of this principle. The challenge before chemical industry is to invent more such processes that will use bio-based feedstocks. “Using renewable feedstocks” is inwp972entally the Seventh Principle of “Green Chemistry”.

Chemical Leasing

Much before Ellen MacArthur Foundation created a framework of ground rules for CE, chemical industry found itself pitchforked into the centre of Circular Economy through Chemical Leasing Model (CLM), a bold and brilliant joint initiative by United Nations Industrial Development Organisation (UNIDO) and the Austrian Ministry of Environment. In this model postulated in 2004, the supplier of chemical continues to retain its ownership. It is a disruptive business model, in which chemicals are sold on the basis of performance and not on weight or volume basis. Paints and coatings are paid for, not by litres or kgs, but by the area covered. Echoing Schumacher’s “Small is Beautiful”, profits don’t depend on higher volumes, but less. Since environmental safeguards can be written into the performance criteria, the onus lies on the supplier and not user. CLM has successfully accomplished two important goals of CE – resource optimisation and waste minimisation. The story often told to illustrate the success of CLM is that of a factory manufacturing metal components for the automobile industry. The metal parts had to be cleaned, for which the company used large quantities of perchloroethylene, a hazardous solvent, which eventually found itself in the waste streams. The company then switched to CLM, in which the goalpost was shifted to pay not for the quantity of chemicals bought, but as per the operating hours of the cleaning machine. This forced the chemical supplier and the cleaning machine manufacturer to revisit the cleaning process and optimise the chemical consumption. They also installed a distillation unit to recover the solvent from the waste stream.

Dow and BASF are among the leading chemical producers who have adopted the CLM. Automobile majors like Volkswagen, Volvo, Toyota, Ford and General Motors are some of the CLM customers, who have outsourced the management of their paintshops to chemical companies.

Recycling Chemicals

Unlike the construction industry, where steel and glass or brick and mortar can be separated from each other with relative ease, products made out of chemicals cannot be easily broken down into its constituents. Further steel is very easy to be reused. The steel salvaged in Alang ship-breaking yard is reused for construction and even by capital goods industry. Steel is in fact the ambassador of Circular Economy; it is classified as “permanent material” in CE jargon. Plastics are a different kettle of fish. What would be the impact of additives when a plastic is de-polymerised? How will they influence properties and performance when the constituents are re-polymerised? We need answers to such difficult questions. For chemical industry to be 100% CE-ready, great advances are required in material science and engineering. We need to develop new materials that can be easily broken down into its constituents at the end of the product life. We need to develop new technologies to breakdown existing materials into their building blocks. This will take decades. Experts estimate Circular Economy will take 50-70 years to mature.

Epicerol

Let us revisit Epicerol, the first chemical product with the capability of being tracked throughout the supply chain. Here is why I think it will be an important trendsetter. Our cities have stores, where welloff people pay more to buy organically grown foodstuffs. They do it not so much for taste as wanting to be seen to do their bit for the environment, either of their own volition or due to peer pressure. Their heightened awareness about environment helps them make this choice. I foresee similar stores for consumer products, where people will pay a premium to buy a toothbrush made out of plastic from renewable feedstock. The “CEtagging” of chemicals would have paved the way for such a scenario.

Readers’ responses may be sent to k.sahasranaman@gmail.com or chemindigest@gmail.com