For decades, the chemicals industry has competed on feedstock access, scale, and paper-thin efficiency margins. This means industry players have become highly adept at squeezing operations for fractional gains amid an unforgiving landscape. 

Yet in doing so, those same organisations often overlook a more transformational lever: process design. 

This engineering discipline – right from the very start – determines how raw materials become product, from reaction pathways to energy usage and equipment specs. These choices are then locked in for decades.

Today’s investors demand capital certainty, while operators require agility. Yet paradoxically, most engineering workflows remain sequential and rigid. This scenario pushes uncertainty downstream – where it is most expensive to resolve.

This trade-off may have been considered acceptable when chemical plants operated in a siloed way for decades. But with supply chains in flux and decarbonisation deadlines hastening, the cost of slow iteration has become prohibitive.

In one sense, it’s easy to understand the conservatism. In an industry where a single plant can represent billion-dollar capital commitments, risk aversion has been the norm. Sequential design workflows give the perception of minimal risk through phased reviews and approvals.

But this traditionalism backfires. Chemicals projects fail mainly because the adoption curve is too slow. A plant’s nameplate performance is determined during front-end design, long before construction begins. By speeding up design iteration, companies can increase project ROI certainty.

So, competitive advantages will not stem from optimising a ‘single best process design’. They will come from scenario velocity: the ability to test, refine and compare multiple viable plant designs quickly, under real-world constraints.

Achieving scenario velocity demands a shift from isolated tools to integrated digital platforms that enable parallel exploration and rapid iteration.

A changing process 

The chemicals industry has undergone transformative change in the last five years, accelerated by the global pandemic and volatile supply chains. 

EPCs have leveraged cloud-based models to enhance flexibility, while owner operators have embraced digital twins and collaborative platforms to improve transparency, enhance decision making, and reduce project risk.

Digital twins and batch simulations can cut concept design time by up to half, according to McKinsey research. They do this by compressing design cycles and enabling virtual testing of countless scenarios without building physical prototypes. 

Take materials giant Covestro as an example. The German company has delivered transformative results by using flexible process simulation to accelerate more sustainable, bio-based polymer production.

The challenge was sizeable: achieving net-zero scope 1 and 2 emissions by 2035 while developing less energy-intensive processes, transitioning to climate-neutral steam, and enabling circular recycling at scale.

By using its existing process simulation solution, along with a new bank of processes, Covestro now rapidly builds and iterates models to assess the commercial and technical viability of new process candidates. This capability has dramatically accelerated innovation timelines, enabling process concepts to move swiftly from initial simulation to trial phase.

Meanwhile, Eastman Chemical has seen similarly transformative results. The Tennessee-headquartered company implemented a data-centric platform to allow global teams to share engineering information within a single database, while enabling collaboration across teams in engineering, construction, operations and maintenance.

Eastman achieved a 30 per cent reduction in engineering and design costs within a year, while shaving 3 per cent from testing, inspection and certification (TIC) costs. 

Speed over scale

The shift from operational optimization to process redesign represents the industry’s next evolutionary leap. For decades, chemicals companies eked out marginal improvements from mature plants; now, value creation begins right at the start.

Companies all over the world are increasingly demonstrating the value of integrated platforms. Organizations that build scenario velocity into their engineering blueprint are setting new capital project benchmarks, accelerating sustainability transitions, and capturing impressive returns. 

It’s no exaggeration to say that the integration of digital twins, cloud platforms, and collaborative workflows has reinvented what’s possible in front-end engineering. 

The chemicals industry is entering an era where speed of learning matters more than scale of assets. What’s more, companies like Eastman and Covestro are building institutional capabilities that compound over time.

As sustainability mandates proliferate and market volatility becomes the norm, the industry’s future will be defined by organizations that take the bold leap to engineer faster and iterate relentlessly.