Collaborate on Blank Estimate Template for Research and Development with Ease Using airSlate SignNow

Blank estimate template for Research and Development

good afternoon everyone and thank you for joining us to learn more about the cat costume my name is Fred beador and I'm the PI of the project developed at cost I'm gonna begin by introducing some of the background of the project and describing what cat cost is and then I'll hand it over to Kurt Van osburgh who is the lead developer on the project and he'll go through an in-depth walkthrough of the tool so the problem that we sought to address when we started this project was the high commercialization risk associated with biomass conversion technologies analysis work out of our laboratory has shown that in a number of biomass conversion technologies modeled catalyst costs can constitute up to 10% of the total capital cost in addition the uncertainty surrounding the cost of potential breakthrough catalysts drives uncertainty in the minimum fuel selling price of fuels produced during these processes and to address this uncertainty and help mitigate risk we have developed a spreadsheet and web-based catalyst cost estimation tool called cat cost that is easy to use and requires no outside process design experience our cat costume aims to enable researchers to build an understanding of economics of catalyst production and make more informed R&D decisions early in the catalyst development process the release of cat costs in the fall of 2018 is the culmination of a three-year collaborative effort between NREL and pnnl with the guidance of an industrial advisory board both the spreadsheet and web-based versions of the tool complete with in-depth documentation and user tutorials will be released in the fall of 2018 we built cap costs integrating it with industry standard estimation methods and it's adaptable to a wide range of catalyst synthesis types and user experience levels cap cost provides researchers with a number of ways to input their own cost data or built in raw material libraries users are able to select from two modes of processing cost estimation including a detailed full plant analysis or a simple step based approach both methods are bundled with pre-populated templates to help users initiate an estimate for a wide variety of common catalysts including metals on metal oxide zeolites and nanoparticles in addition cat-cows captures the value remaining and discharged catalysts at the end of their usable life to understand the effective catalyst cost and so we've effectively integrated some of the best industry standard methods into the cost estimation to make a powerful analysis tool and so researchers are able to use cat costume form detailed sensitivity analyses compare multiple catalysts and component cost analyses with our simple tool that has been verified with industrial market data cat Costin tables researchers to make better R&D decisions by providing them with actionable cost information and powerful interactive visualizations that make their cost analyses easy to understand it has been built up built from the ground up with industry verified analysis features including the ability to scale any estimate to a desired production rate scenario and sensitivity analysis options allow researchers to test what-if scenarios rapidly and see what steps and mentor materials contribute the greatest uncertainty and researchers can also enter and manipulate data in any desired unit removing the need for TVs conversions and allowing users to focus on the content of the estimate and not syntax coupled to the estimation capabilities of the tool is a suite of powerful visualizations that allow researchers to view and manipulate their data graphically for ease of analysis and presentation we have designed the cat costume to be flexible for a variety of use cases to empower researchers to make better are indeed decisions and so as I mentioned this will be free and will be released in the fall of 2018 you can get it at cat cost chem cat by org where you'll be able to interact with the online web version of the tool and you can download the spreadsheets and the documentation and some of the tutorial videos that we'll be putting out in the future and if you have any questions from here on out you can contact us at cat cost at NREL gov and with that I'm going to hand it over to Kirk Van osburgh who's going to give us a walkthrough of the system okay so let's start with the demo and what I'm going to do here is take you through the process of completing a typical at catalyst estimate using the cat cost tool the Excel spreadsheet version and the idea here is that you get a sense of both kind of design philosophy and some of the estimation methods that are included in the tool and I've completed a lot of the inputs already but some of I've left open so that you can see a little bit of the process so for this I'm gonna do a platinum on titania catalyst and so the first thing that I need to do is put in some broad overall inputs that go into the tool and you can see that starting out in the cat cost excel spreadsheet that things are laid out in these tabs at the bottom in a sequence of steps that you need to complete in order to finish your estimate we've tried to make it very easy to navigate and use so we have to start here first at the inputs tab and I'm going to input some information like the catalyst name and the bassist year for cost estimation so this is the basically when you're building the plant so this uses built-in price escalation at databases both from chemical engineering and US Bureau of labels labor statistics and then we want to select what units we're going to do our estimate in so I'm gonna select kilograms here you can see that I have a lot of options and all of these things are implemented in a way that makes it so unit conversions price escalations and so forth they're all transparent and done for the user for your convenience so that you can focus on the really interesting parts of the catalyst catalyst costing so then over here we have some inputs that basically size the the production plant that we would be making this catalyst in of course this is important because if we're trying to scale information from lab scale to industrial scale we need to know what industrial scale means in this context now as Fred mentioned we have two approaches to processing cost in cat cost one is a very sort of simple step based method where you have an all-in cost that's here in this first section step method an all-in cost for each step like a filter and that includes all utilities costs operator costs capital and operating in a single hourly rate for that piece of equipment this is based on contract manufacturer approaches to giving a price quote for manufacturing a catalyst and say a Toller the other approach is the capex and optics factors approach this is what you would be more likely to find in a traditional chemical engineering process design text and this involves a list of equipment and operators costing every individual item of and capex so this is a little bit more detailed and I'm going to show you both of those approaches but you can see here that we have to enter some things for either of these approaches if we were doing this step method we would say that we want an order size of between one and a thousand tons and that determines some things like what size equipment at the catalyst manufacturer since they already have existing sizes of equipment what size of equipment would be used and then determine some things like the length of this synthesis campaign and you're selling margin so you can see if I were to go for an order size of 200 tons that the selling margin would be substantially lower we actually haven't just accepted paper on this in organic process research and development on that part then on the again on the capex and OPEX factors approach where we're doing everything in detail then you just have to enter some information like how big is this plant in terms of annual production of catalyst how many operating hours do you expect how much maintenance downtime will there be so these are all things that are pretty standard in design reports like those published by our RTE a group at NREL and elsewhere and also by companies like IHS so let's then proceed from these basic inputs to the next step which is materials costs in materials costs I've already completed a number of these things but what we're trying to do here is capture both sort of the stoichiometry and materials balance considerations and actually what materials are used in the synthesis and so the first thing is to enter information about how large this you know you kind of put in context the synthesis that you're entering so if you're entering a particular consumption of materials that has to be for a particular production rate of product so in this case the synthesis information that I've entered is to produce one kilogram of catalyst so I'm going to enter that here and you can see that some calculations are already done based on these inputs here and we also have the option of using a percent yield calculation or to enter active phase mass instead which might make more sense for a different application we also assume something about some losses because inevitably when you're loading reactors and carrying materials around you will lose some so we've tried to capture little components like that so down here I've already completed how much I need of my metal source but what I'm going to do is select that from our materials library this is actually just a subset of the materials that we offer to users but I wanted to make it reasonable to scroll through here you can see that selecting a material and entering it in the list is really quite easy you just select from the drop-down and now that I have my metal precursor in here the quantity and the units I am getting a whole bunch of quantities calculated for me notably the consumption in kilograms of this material per kilogram of finished catalyst and the unit price which is looked up from the library and then ultimately the cost of that material per kilogram of finished catalyst so what is its contribution to the final cost just to show you how easy this can be I'm just gonna add one more material here I'm gonna say let's do hydrochloric acid which is right here and maybe I want to enter it in volume units so I'll say I want to use 25 I can either type milliliters or I can look in here and you can see that if the density is entered appropriately in the backend for this in the materials library then it will automatically do all of these calculations to give me the amount of HCL that's required in kilograms the units I selected earlier and flow all the way through to a cost in the bottom line turns out HCl is quite cheap even at this consumption rate so that's our materials our materials cost estimation component and the idea is by the use of convenient unit unit conversions and stoichiometry calculations and the bundling of a materials library for which it's easy to users easy for users to add their own materials in their own library of common materials including proprietary ones that they wouldn't though you wouldn't find in our library through all of that the user is able to accurately get materials costs for this component of catalyst coaster now let's move on to the first method for doing processing cost estimation and that is the step method this again is the all-in approach where you have just a single hourly cost number for each particular step of a procedure like a spray dryer or a ball mill and what I'm going to do here is introduce a concept that it also applies for the other more detailed approach and that concept is that what the user can do is either select from a list of pre-built process templates so this is a pre-existing list of steps that that we've developed for things like an FCC catalyst a metal carbide a PGM metal on carbon or metal oxide for this one I would choose the PGM on metal oxide even though I'm gonna look in more detail here as you can see at the top it says this is not included in the final estimate I wanted to demonstrate the step method for you but I think actually going to look in more detail at the the alternate approach so you would not normally do both of these because then it would sort of be duplicating the same elements of cost but one thing to note is that it is possible to combine these two approaches the step method and the detailed capex and optics factors method the idea of being that if you have this really detailed plan design and all these steps with operators and capital costs operating costs but then you want to change the process by adding just one additional step it might be easier rather than trying to figure out how to size that piece of equipment just to use our built in step method and add a single step so that's the kind of use case that we would imagine that would be usable for now as I mentioned you can select from one of the process templates or you can just enter a custom process so in the custom process oh actually I have something entered here but normally that would be blank but you can see down here I have all these process templates so I'm gonna look at the one that we're actually using right now which is metal PGM on metal oxide and you can see that it has a number of process steps that are included and these automatically scale to the correct to the correct order size that you selected and so basically the user could interact with this and modify these things the power user could or someone who's just looking for a quick estimate could just accept this information they don't even have to look at those details all they need to do is select from this drop down the metal PGM on metal oxide so now let's switch to the more detailed approach the capex and OPEX factors approach which covers sheets three B through three e here at the bottom again this would be the alternate approach you do not have to do both the step method and economic factors so if we look at the equipment we have the same choice essentially we have a set of process templates but the information included in these process templates is a little bit different now we're looking at a lot of detail what is the piece of equipment what material of construction is it made out of how many what size are we requesting and of course the size units are different for each piece of equipment so for a bin for a feeder it would just be you know a volume and cubic feet for a pump or a compressor it might be horsepower for a tank naturally it would be volume and a few things to note here the there is a very we have a very large list of pieces of equipment that we have available from from various textbooks this is I think the largest list of equipment cost correlations available anywhere that I'm aware of at least in the open in the public domain so this allows you to select from a very wide range of high quality cost correlations so what you do is if you want to add a a piece of equipment it's gonna automatically select it to default material construction or you can override that you can say whatever quantity you want maybe you want two of those and then the horsepower I don't know what an appropriate horsepower is for this so let's try 50 that's apparently too large so this is giving you feedback here one thing to know these size limits here are giving you feedback on whether you maybe have chosen the right piece of equipment but either way even if you are outside the limits or if you were inside the limits at the scale that you entered but then as the as you chose a different industrial production scale and ich and the cat costume automatically scaled it up or scaled it down for you it incorporates logic to say that if you go above the upper limit of a cost correlation it is going to automatically double or triple that piece of equipment until you're back in the correct range or if you go both below the minimum size for a piece of equipment it is going to automatically go to that minimum and price it at that which is pretty standard chemical engineering process design practice so these feedback mechanisms right here really just to let you know that maybe you want to choose a different kind of compressor or something along those lines so then let's go over here and see what it's doing with this these inputs that the user is given so the first thing is that cat cost is automatically going to scale the user inputs to the production scale in pounds per year tons per year whatever that was entered on one inputs so it will take the entered quantity and the entered size and scale it to an appropriate quantity in size at that design scale and then using the cost correlations that are built into the tool it will develop a purchase cost and an installed cost for that piece of equipment along with a labor factor this labor factor is just the number of operators at any given time that are needed for that piece of equipment so in this case where you see 0.1 that means one Operator could split his or her time between ten such pieces of equipment if it were one that would mean that this piece of equipment needs a dedicated operator and this information stepping back this information is then summed and it is brought up I haven't selected one yet since we're doing platinum on titania I'm going to do what impregnation of metal on metal oxide but that information is then pulled from down there from whatever process template or the custom process you've selected and is pulled up to here and then that information will now flow through to the rest of the the rest of the sheets the next step after doing the equipment is your utilities consumption again here we also have process templates for each one of the equipment lists we have a list of the utilities consumption associated with that process design and this comes from asmin modeling so that the user if they want to use a process template doesn't doesn't have to do that so again the wet impregnation metal on metal oxide is selected already and what that's pulling is the consumptions and then we have unit costs and ultimately that gets us to our utilities costs for this component of catalyst cost then the next part is where we get to the factors part of capex and out fix factors here what it's going to do is it will pull that total for the purchased equipment and the installed equipment from the equipment list and it's going to then apply a number of fixed factors to get to other components of capex and OPEX costs so purchased equipment here then is defined as a hundred percent but then we have factors for things like instrumentation and controls piping electrical indirect components like engineering costs and legal expenses these are all going into building the plant in the first place and then analogously we have the same type of factors for components of operating cost in the effects sheet so most of this information is based on the direct labor cost so it will round up the number of direct labor operators from the plant design and then is going to add things for say laboratory charges supervisory labor overheads and distribution and so forth all of these factors here are just fixed percentages and one thing that I didn't highlight already that I'll just quickly show now is that for each of these values we've built in scenario or sensitivity analysis to this tool so that if I click up here at the top there's this little plus icon it's going to show not that I not only have a base cost so for in this example I'm estimating supervisor in clerical labor at at 18 percent of direct labor up here but I also have scenarios where I have a low scenario of 10 percent in a high scenario of 20 percent so some of that information is built-in and of course the user can customize these numbers too maybe in house values that they may have or they can just accept them as is the last component of the actual catalyst estimate that I want to show you is the spent catalyst part of course in order to really accurately compare two different catalysts it's it's essential to understand what's going to happen to each at the end of their life if one of them is a PGM catalyst and the other is not and we're not considering the value of that platinum metal content then it's going to be a really grossly distorted comparison so this to this section of the tool relies on some robust libraries that we have in the backend thanks to our collaborators at Ian and Elle and some some consultants that have helped us with this and the all the user has to do is complete a set of inputs here I just deleted a few of these so I can show you the process of entering those but we've already entered that we have platinum on titania that the active phase is 100% platinum and the bulk density which I have a lookup 204 over here so that if you aren't sure of what the bulk density of your catalyst might be you can look it up and then I'm gonna select that we're using a fixed bed which will affect how much attrition losses we expect for that catalyst we do not have any contaminating metals from this list and if we needed to landfill the catalyst it would fall into the category of PGM our node noble metal catalyst so all of these inputs have been now generated a series of calculations of how much metal will we lose during the course of running this reactor with the catalyst in it how much of the support will we lose and thus how much total catalyst solids will we get after unloading the reactor to send to a refiner potentially with that information then we can calculate based on the spot price for the metal one thing you'll notice is very important that if if you want to be using this in the future that you're updating your spot prices because of course that does vary a lot it's gonna calculate how much recoverable metal value there is there and then based on information that we have that I believe has not been published in this form before we also are able to estimate how much it's going to cost to do that recovery so then you get a net recovery value and this the tool is automatically going to choose the best option here which we can see that the rip the value of the metal at 1:04 is quite a bit higher than the refill than the fees at $6 so it's definitely going to be worth it to recover and that's what we see down here in a different situation if I may be selected aluminium we would find that the best choice for this catalyst might just be to sell it we will be selecting the sale value instead last thing to show is that we have we have sort of a range of complexities of outputs from the tools starting with a very simple approach which is just to show kind of a financial summary the style description of all the all these results so if we were using the step method we have a list of the step method outputs here step costs and raw materials cost you can see that raw materials costs are really dominating here which isn't surprising considering that it's a platinum catalyst think oh I should go back and change this from platinum to aluminum because that's distorting my results then down here for the capex and OPEX factors outputs this is designed to sort of just be directly comparable to something like you might find an IHS VP report formal ESRI so we have a breakdown of our capital investment both broken down in terms of its annual depreciation cost and its cost per unit kilogram per kilogram catalyst and so forth and so the idea here is the user can do what they want with this information and they can drill down to greater detail we have more detailed outputs also I'm not going to go into more detail here because the last thing I want to do is show you the web tool that has been designed to mirror the functionality in this tool and we even have I should highlight we even have thanks to a really great intern working for us we the ability to interconvert between the libraries that are found in the excel tool and the web tool and last thing I'll say that about that is even if you are using the web tool all of that information is stored locally on your browser so there's no risk there's no disclosure of your proprietary information to us the whole idea here is that you own your library you can use our tool we hope it's useful but it would not be something where you have to worry about where your information might go so we now are able to - to use these two tools very closely in tandem so I'm now going to swipe over and see whether we can it looks like this is working so I'm just going to go to the home page here I think I have too many things open on my computer this is the web tool version of cat cost and as I mentioned it's designed to mirror what we see in Excel in Excel I didn't show you the actual materials libraries and equipment libraries they were farther over in the sheets list of sheets but you can see that I have materials library an equipment library I'm going to fast and the spent catalyst library all incorporated into this web tool and that's what allows us to make estimates in here and have confidence that they will use the same calculation approaches in the Excel version so I'll open this up and you can see that the same flow of information is here we go from one inputs to five outputs and you put in your basic inputs materials costs including adding materials to the list add pieces of equipment and we have the factors for capital and operating costs one of the things that's great about the web tools we have some really powerful and exciting visualizations like pie charts where you can zoom in on each individual component you can click on materials and then zoom in to see what are my metal sources and supports and other materials and then zoom in from there and great tornado plots that are customizable on the fly so it's it's a really powerful tool and I think it goes a little bit beyond the capabilities that we have in Excel so with that I am already a few minutes over the initial 30 minutes I think we're ready to take some questions thanks very much for your attention so we do have one question how is the input data for the web based tool managed what information is retained great yeah so I already touched on this a little bit but I'll give you a little bit clearer picture of how this works because I know that this is something that could cause concern and we want people to feel comfortable using the web tool so the way that this works is the application that that you're doing the estimate in and this is if if there if a question comes up about some of the technical details then we can refer this to our web tool team but the application is the only thing that is downloaded from the server and nothing has ever uploaded to the server unless we will have one capability to send data over to your personal site on the data of the chemical bio data however that would only be your site it would not be public and you'll know when you're doing that because it will say upload to the data hub however that's not the way that you would normally be interacting with the tool as you go to the website and that automatically downloads the application within your browser then when you create estimates or add a materials library from Excel or from one of the ones that we provide all of that information is stored locally in your browser and this is important to note too because that means if you switched browsers it would be you wouldn't see that same information now this was important to us because this allows you to have confidence that your information is not out there for potential server vulnerabilities or for data mismanagement or anything so the inputs that you provide are solely stored on your machine and so even though we call it a web tool you might think of it as sort of like a downloaded browser add-on right and then is there an ability to maintain multiple databases of cost estimates for for instance spot prices of metals etc if we wanted to evaluate using internal yeah absolutely so in both the excel in the Excel spreadsheet it's really quite easy because I mean I think many of us are used to using Excel for this kind of thing you can just have multiple versions of the Excel spreadsheet that are sort of like your your master copy that has one set of raw materials prices that maybe you want to keep separate from a different set in the web tool it is also possible and the reason for this is that let's say we go to the materials library here what we can do is download the it's a JSON file is the file format that contains all this information and it's actually human readable so that's a nice feature that you can go in there and see what's in there and if there were you know if there were anything that concerned you you know exactly what's in that file it might be quite large because as you can see there's a lot of information here but you can download this file and then you could clear your library so that then you only have the information in there that you upload from the file so you would just you could keep keep control of those versions and those different materials libraries by having different files for different data sets if that makes sense so I think absolutely that works and if there are any questions or problems with getting that to work for you please reach out to us we have this new email address cat cost at NREL gov and we will definitely be monitoring that as people are starting to play great question yeah so what we've decided on we were originally thinking we were kind of debating about whether to have if we update something on our end is that information then going to be pushed through to everybody's individual local version of the tool and what we've decided on is giving the user the most control over that so the way it works initially is if I want to open a materials library JSON file here I can either drag a file from my desktop that would be your personal library that you've created separately or you can import it from the data hub that would be where you get our most up-to-date materials library or spend catalyst library or equipment library so the way the idea here is that you always know when you're choosing to update from the are version and I think it's not maybe in there yet but there will be something that asks you whether if there's an existing material in your library whether you want to overwrite it or you want to duplicate it last question how many custom estimates in Excel can I see within the document do I say multiple versions of Excel great question so that is one potential limitation of Excel it is really sort of one estimate per sheet unless you know some way to do this that I'm not aware of so the way that I recommend handling this is to have if you are the sort of user who will be adding materials a lot of materials or even pieces of equipment that you would expect to use from estimate to estimate then you might consider keeping a master version of the Excel spreadsheet for yourself and then you create your estimates from that I think we we looked at other ways to do this in it we rapidly got very large files and things got sort of complicated so I found this as a somewhat better solution so that's that's the way that that is managed so it's one one estimate per file he excelled it the web tool of course is a little bit more flexible because you have a library of estimates that you've completed I think I only have one here but I can just add another and you can see I now have these two here all right so that was it for questions yeah if you can do that I think we're ready for what was said oh I think we have your we're ready for you to make your announcement she's about to yeah okay somebody Ron yes thank you from Vito the reason I wanted to talk to you about is that we have an RFI that is currently open the RFI is understanding catalyst production and development development needs a National Laboratory and this RFA will be open to over 12 so if we have some time and take a look at that affiant for what your responses we would appreciate that and the RFI number is one nine twelve on again the title of the other place understanding catalyst production and development needs and National Laboratories thank you great and yeah can they contact you with more if they need more info about that RFI or did you say there was a website for that great thanks if there are other questions feel free to type them into the into the questions box in your GoToWebinar application or muted right now someone asked to send the download link Oh for the spreadsheet yeah yes I just tell them is it re unmanned enough so we had one question about the actual download link and where this is going to be hosted so it is not on the website in final form yet but the the web address that you would want to use is cat cost.com cat by org so it's just cat cause cam cat bio and you can also access it just by going to the chem cat by a web page directly and it is under capabilities there so we will we will probably be doing some email blasts inevitably there's you know you put like a software tool together especially with a team of over 10 people and there's a there's some things that come up at the last minute so we have been wanting to make sure we know everything is buttoned up before we really push it out and advertise it to people but that is the web addresses cat cost chem caballo org and the email address is cat cost at NREL gov will there be a publication that compares that estimates to actual production costs great question so we we have for the step method approach we actually have an accepted paper in organic process research and development and that will also be linked from the cat cost website when it's when it goes live for the capex and OPEX factors approach to processing cost we have compared three catalytic materials actually both approaches we've found that we can get within twenty percent of some industrial cost data and so the I think for that second one for detailed capex and OPEX factors that might just go into the documentation that accompanies the tool we've got a big PDF with all the information that you'll need and that's going to have you know like a change log for each time we update the tool with you know we change this in the web version we change this in the Excel version so just like any other software or excel-based tool you'll be able to track what's going on with the development so the last thing I'll say on publications is that we do intend to submit a publication that highlights overall this approach what catco's delivers by doing some performance cost kind of comparisons between different catalytic materials and highlighting the benefit that considering cost alongside performance can provide to a research program this is really important to us and really especially to advertise this tool and its usefulness and perhaps its accessibility to a more fundamental audience who might find that seeing a paper on it is the best way to convince them that it's worth using so that is worth coming and all of that information I think will be clearly displayed on the cost website as it becomes available great well it looks like we don't have any more questions so I think with that I'll say thank you very much for your attention and it was my pleasure to present this really exciting tool and the work which has involved a really big team we have just at NREL we have four or five people that have worked with us on the web tool we have a great team at PNNL that has developed the spent catalyst component and the step method as well in fact all of that work was originated by a guy named John Super's who some of you may know really really knowledgeable and has been a huge help to us in this project so a big shout out to John so it's been a very fun exciting team effort and we appreciate your interest and attention we hope that when it is publicly released and very soon that you will use it and hopefully it's useful to you and that you will tell us what we could do to make it better so thanks a lot