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Plant Design Blog: from daratechPLANT quinceañera, a fli in the
P&ID porridge ... Love, Janis
Ok, so daratechPLANT2008, in its 15th year [and its 12th in Houston], witnessed the changing of the guard from Cambridge, MA-based industry admiral, Charles Foundyller to H-town's own TradeFair Group captain, Sean Guerre. Both the daratechPLANT series & the TradeFair Group were purchased last year by Access Intelligence, the domain-accretion engine funded by Veronis Suhler Stevenson. Among Access Intelligence's armada are Chemical Week, Chemical Engineering, and Energy Daily banners, to which is now added the TradeFair Group's fleet including POWER Magazine and the
Clean
Gulf, Clean Atlantic & Clean Pacific conferences. The daratechPLANT acquisition definitely provides AI with a flagship for rallying many of its capabilities, most interestingly, those of SRI Consulting. As for this observer, I will mostly miss sagacious Foundyller's information-packed “Industry Outlook” presentations and his hosting [and on occasion, stoking] daratechPLANT's CEO Roundtable, which in the past has proven akin to refereeing kick-boxing kangaroos. Charles, we'll miss you! - but hopefully not too much, as Mr. Foundyller will be continuing with TradeGroup's stewardship of the show in a consulting capacity [kinda like a proud padre giving over his 15-year old princesa to dance with her novio, but still under Daddy's watchful eye].
Speaking of Clean Atlantic & Clean Pacific, I'm reading the Path between the Seas, by David McCullough, about the efforts to build the isthmian canal bridging the two oceans, begun by the French in the late 1800's and then completed by the Americans - Sweetie picked up a copy autographed by the author at last year's 39th ECC conference. Embedded within this tale of international arbitrage, diplomatic derring-do and political intrigue, is the epic drama of a vast, global engineering feat unparalleled by any peacetime effort within its century. Particularly inspiring is the untiring efforts of the French patriot engineer, Phillipe Bunau-Varilla, who championed the Panama case versus its Nicarauguan alternative, first as a newly-minted engineer working in the malarial Panamanian jungle and then as a lobbyist extraordinaire, criss-crossing oceans and touring the U.S. to extol the virtues of the Panama route. The historic 1902 Congressional decision opting for Panama was swung in some part by Bunau-Varilla's last-minute “going postal” - he circulated a current Nicaraguan postage stamp that featured an erupting volcano, thus dramatically underscoring the dangers of any route through that country.
Among the many other pearls of project wisdom found within the pages of McCullough's Panama story is this, attributed to an instructor at Exeter Academy: “If I had five minutes in which to solve a problem, I would spend three deciding the best way to do it”, which is a 100+year precedent to the 21st century concept of Front End Engineering & Design [FEED]. If it's not already, Path between the Seas should be required reading for CH2MHill University, being that that storied firm has the contract for the Panama Canal Expansion Program, and is certainly recommended reading for anyone involved in trans-global projects. In any case, FEED was a prominent sub-theme of daratechPLANT and has emerged as its own category of projects being awarded to EPC's, featuring an accelerated approach to better planning, optimized engineering and accurate cost estimates for new facilities. SNC-Lavalin with vendor ASD (www.asdglobal.com), demonstrated a knowledge-based, automated pipe router applied to a FEED project that delivered more design iterations faster than could be done using existing manual methods or detailed design 3D CAD tools . . . hmmm, FEED for thought.
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