Various Speakers: CRI delivers collaboration, leadership, solutions, performance, customer satisfaction, loyalty, leading technology, process improvement. CRI: delivering innovation.
Andy Gosse (President): Over the last three years, we’ve invested heavily in enhanced experimentation in our micro reactors in our pilot plants in Houston, Amsterdam, Leuna, and also in Bangalore.
John Lockemeyer (Senior Staff Research Chemist): Westhollow is the central research laboratory for Shell America, and here you can find scientists, engineers, and support staff in a wide variety of fields.
Paul Himelfarb (Global Business Development Director): We have these very advanced tools that we can test a lot of catalysts a lot quicker and what that does is actually makes us develop products that are far superior than we used to be able to do in the past in a shorter amount of time.
John Lockemeyer (Senior Staff Research Chemist): Micro reactors are used to test catalysts that we develop on a grand scale and we can translate the data from the testing and predict how a catalyst will behave in a customer’s unit.
Paul McAllister, Ph.D. (Catalyst Test Team Leader): We realize is that our customers have tens of millions of dollars at stake each time they put in a new catalyst or make a change in their process. So we want to make sure we do that right.
Mike Lemanski (Research Department Manager): We work with the customer very closely to make sure that they have a successful run. When issues do arise, we’re there to do root-cause analysis. We bring our full suite of resources and once a catalyst has gone through an entire cycle, what we’ll do is use our analytical capabilities here at Westhollow to look at that catalyst and make suggestions on how that customer might have even a better run the next time around.
John Lockemeyer (Senior Staff Research Chemist): When a customer’s finished using a catalyst and it’s time to have it replaced, we take catalysts out of the unit, we look at them, we have the surface scientists analyze it so we can determine if there was any problem with the unit. Perhaps, that we might be able to find the cause of the problem by analyzing the catalyst’s surface, and more often than not, if there was a problem, we find it there.
Safa E. George, Ph.D. (VP, Catalyst Technology): We pride ourselves with fairly rapid innovation, for example, ethylene oxide. Ten years ago, we were somewhere around 84- 85% selectivity. Now we’re in excess of 90% selectivity.
John Lockemeyer (Senior Staff Research Chemist): A high performance catalyst does this; it maintains its selectivity higher than any previous catalyst system.
Paul McAllister, Ph.D. (Catalyst Test Team Leader): Each selectivity point we can deliver to our customers is a major benefit to them on the order of millions of dollars annually in savings of ethylene consumption.
John Lockemeyer (Senior Staff Research Chemist): We actually have laboratories that go on eighteen-wheelers and we send them to the site. We plug into their plant. We can monitor very closely what’s going on at their plant while the catalyst is starting up. Then there are no issues with respect to differences in analysis that might come from our own facilities.
Andy Gosse (President): There’s enormous value that we get when we combine the catalysis experience, the process knowledge that we’ve gained over the years, the analytical testing capabilities we have, with our modeling that we’ve developed over many years. And we bring this together to really push the boundaries. (3:03) The studies that we’ve got from a pygas gas perspective are a great example for this. Our new C2 tail end and gas phase catalyst have been real success stories for CRI. We’ve been able to bring these new products to Shell and go on to successfully implement them across multiple units in the company.
Alan del Paggio, Ph.D. (Vice President of Upstream and Renewables): IH squared represents a cost effective and efficient technology. It’s one very important piece of the puzzle that allows people to take biomass and convert it directly into liquid hydrocarbon fuels. Essentially, you can put it in the pipeline; it’s just like young gasoline. It’s an advanced fuel and it also by virtue of the fact it’s a hydrocarbon, has about 50% higher energy than say, per gallon, compared to some of the oxygenated fuels.
Chi-Chang Lee, Ph.D. (Research Development Manager): One of the greatest accomplishments for CRI is really to develop a low-pressure drop system that are able to deal with both destroying the NOx that are emitted in the world as well as dioxin, which a lot of people might not understand that is one of the more toxic materials.
Andy Gosse (President): CRI’s 20-year relationship with Zeolyst puts us in a great position. This relationship, and the scientists and engineers that come together from Zeolyst combined with those from CRI is allowing us to drive new solutions for the industry. And it’s that together that is giving us a unique advantage. Looking forward, there are many opportunities and also challenges the industry will face. Now in CRI, we’re committed to continue to invest in R and D, delivering innovation. We’re always looking for ways that we can create greater value for our customers. We’re positioned to make a huge difference for the industry and we’re really excited about the future.