Monthly Archives: February 2009

Make or Buy? Gaussling’s 11th Epistle to the Bohemians.

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The most important reaction in chemistry is the one in which you transform chemicals into money. Some chemicals convert into a lot of money per kg, others not so much. The kind of money you want to focus on is profit. Just turning cash over at cost wears thin rapidly and is hazardous to your career. At the end of the day, after you’ve paid the raw mat vendors, payroll, and the feds, you want to have a steaming heap of luchre left over as profit.

At some point in the game, everyone in fine chemical manufacturing realizes that you can’t make everything in-house. There are good reasons to consider making as many intermediates as you can. When you buy an intermediate, the vendors price (cost + profit) becomes the cost you plug into the economics. Optimally, you might be able to make the material cheaper than buying it … eventually. But some raw materials are deceptively simple looking. A company can rack up a lot of brain damage and wasted time trying to make certain kinds of materials outside of your skill set.

We used to joke that at some point in process development, you have to shoot the chemist and get on with scale-up. Often, the decision to make-or-buy an intermediate gets to the table only after you try to make it. In process development, it is important to identify the make-or-buy decisions as early as possible. This can save valuable time. While you may end up spending more per unit mass for the material, not having to make it is equivalent to opening up extra capacity in your facility. Ideally, your want precious reactor/equipment hours spent on the highest value added steps. With each successive step, the value of the intermediate becomes greater.

If your make-or-buy decision revolves around a known item of commerce, then the economics and scheduling is relatively easy. You will have to settle on specifications, delivery schedule, shipment details, and pricing. If the material is not TSCA listed, then you will have to get the vendor moving early on a filing with the EPA, if they are in the USA. If you intend to import a non-TSCA listed fine chemical, not for pharma, ag, food, or other covered use, then the importer of record is responsible for the TSCA paperwork. This can take a few months of lead time.

But if the compound is novel and/or proprietary, then it is instantly much more complex. Not only do you have  to deal with the EPA on TSCA filing, but you have to find a vendor who is willing and able to ramp up a new process. They will need specs, projected delivery information, an agreeable price, and quite possibly a lined-out process and analytical methods. If the vendor has available capacity, this might happen as quickly as 3-4 months. More likely than not, this can take 6-9 months.

If your raw material is part of a critical technology or major account, then you may have to consider dual sourcing. If one plant goes down or the quality or delivery drifts beyond what is acceptable, then you still have one facility that can deliver. And, if you have two vendors, you can start a dandy little bidding war between them for your business. Many companies require their purchasing managers to qualify two vendors for crucial materials. You can argue that you should always have two vendors, but many times the amount of business the material feeds into is too small to bother with.

Chemical manufacturing is much more than reaction chemistry. A chemist in manufacturing can find him/herself involved in many kinds of work.   Regulations, chemistry, process safety, engineering, packaging issues, IP, marketing, and process economics add up to the knowledge set that a chemist needs to acquire while heading up the career ladder.

What?

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A business acquaintance recently said that his 10 year old son wanted to be an entertainment industry lawyer. What the …? Young Poindexter will be going to beach parties with busty young starlets when I’m in the old folks home with moss growing on my north side. Sigh.

Buddy Holly

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I was a grubby little 18 month old Iowa farm toddler, eating dirt and tripping over cow pies when Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and The Big Bopper augered into a frozen cornfield near Clear Lake, in northern Iowa. The date was February 3rd, 1959.

The pilot, 21 year old Roger Peterson, took off at 1 AM in light snow flying a 1947 Beechcraft Bonanza. A few minutes later, the aircraft impacted the ground at high speed a few miles from the airport, killing all aboard.  Tommy Allsup and Waylon Jennings, Holly’s backup musicians, were supposed to be on board the plane with Holly. But at the last minute they were pursuaded to give up their seats.

Last night, on the 50th anniversary of the untimely death of Buddy Holly, we went to a dinner theater production of the Buddy Holly Story. It turned out to be quite entertaining. I say “turned out” because in truth I’m not much of a 50’s music fan. Being a serial doofus in the area of music, I didn’t realize that Holly was such a prolific song writer. Wasn’t paying attention.

On a side note, a Beechcraft Bonanza has been flown underneath the Eiffel Tower. It is hard to imagine that permission was given, much less, an insurance policy.

Bye Bye JOC

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I’ve decided that I’m going to let my subscription to Journal of Organic Chemistry lapse. It’s getting too expensive and they’re accumulating in my house at an alarming rate. The spouse unit is beginning to dig in her heels. My kid thinks it’s normal to have chemistry journals and molecular models all over the house.

Instead, I’ve subscribed to Journal of Loss Prevention in the Process Industries. Much of my time is taken up with process safety and reactive hazards these days, so I may as well accept the transition. I’ll probably subscribe to OPR&D as well. It feels strange, though. I’ve had a JOC subscription since  my junior year in college in ’82/’83.  Carrying around stacks of journals is like carrying around blocks of wood. And, after a while the collection gets a little … odd.

It’s the Schist and a Lot More

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The Front Range of Colorado is roughly comprised of those mountains that can be seen from the eastern plains. There is no precise definition that I am aware of, so this will have to do. 

Superficially, these mountains run north/south and appear to be organized into ranges, which are really just a series of roughly parallel ridge structures punctuated with the occasional high points that are refered to as peaks. The origin and orientation of these ranges is defined by the orientation of faults and with the effect of eons of erosion to form river channels. Erosion has the effect of removing the weakest materials and leaving behind the most resistant rock structures.

The present epoch of the Rocky Mountains are the result of the Laramide Orogeny, the most recent period of mountain building thought to have begun 70-80 million years ago in the late Cretaceous period. The cause of this mountain building episode is attributed to a shallow angle of subduction of the Kula and Farallon plates below the western margin of the North American plate.

Geologists propose that the shallow subducting slab of ocean bottom applied a drag on the root of overlying continental lithosphere. These forces lead to the broad belt of disturbance to the overlying rock leading to the formation of the Rocky Mountains.

As mountian building proceeded, overlying sedimentary formations were bent and fractured along the margins of the upward moving rock. Today these sedimentary formations are visible in the form of ridges of protruding lamanellar sandstone, mudstone, and shales whose surface planes sit at a high angle  relative to the horizon. The uppermost sedimentary formations are exposed further east in the plains, and as one moves a few miles closer to the mountains, the deeper and correspondingly older sedimentary formations are exposed. These parallel ridges of exposed, upthrusted sedimentary formations are collectively referred to as “foothills”.

Along much of the northern Colorado front range, the westernmost sedimentary formation that abutts the metamorphic rock is called the Fountain formation. Adjacent to this upthrust of metamorphic rock is a layer of disturbed Fountain formation that has been drug upwards to a near vertical orientation. If you have been to Boulder, Colorado, and have seen the Flatirons, you have seen the Fountain formation. Red Rocks Amphitheater and the Garden of the Gods are also part of the Fountain formation.

Here is my question- Somewhere, there should be an interface (I think geologists call it an unconformity) between the metamorphic and sedimentary formations. Where can it be inspected? A road cut or riverbed?

So, it turns out that Th’ Gaussling’s brother owns a spread that is comprised of Fountan formation sandstone. He has a mountain. And down from this mountain and into his yard come elk, deer, mountain lions, bear, and rattle snakes. One of his house cats, in fact, was last seen in the jaws of a cannibalistic mountain lion trotting off to a quiet spot to munch this fresh, tender kitty morsel.

To satisfy my curiosity about this interface, Th’ Gaussling was out in the brush scrambling over snow covered rocks, cactus, and yucca looking at examples of the Fountain formation and, nearby, a formation comprised of schist and gneiss. Not surprisingly, I did not find it in a single outing. But I was close- it’s buried in deep rubble, no doubt. The hunt continues.