Hummers Hummin’ Along

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According to the Detroit News, GM has announced that they are going to spend $73 million on the Hummer H3T pickup manufacturing line.  The first units are scheduled to arrive at dealerships sometime 3Q08.  The new model is supposed to be somewhere between the Silverado and the Colorado in size.

It’s a curious thing as we approach US$100/bbl oil that GM is plowing forward with upgrades to its Shreveport pickup truck operations. Could it be that they see enough remaining price elasticity with fuels that their pickup production upgrades will pay off? It is notable that GM is introducing a Hummer pickup and not a mini-Hummer.  Economy isn’t in the equation.

To produce an economy Hummer would be to invite questions (and ridicule) about the merit of such vehicles to begin with. It is like diet fudge. What’s the point?

I think GM is taking a purely market-pull approach with this brand. The brand has value and they will offer the Hummer product line until the demand falls away.  GM hasn’t given up on large vehicles because the public hasn’t given up on them.

Bad Jokes

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Captain Kirk-  Bones, why did the chicken cross the road?

Bones- Damn it, Jim! I’m a doctor, not an ornithologist!

How many nuclear engineers does it take to replace a light bulb?

Fifty. One to replace the bulb and fortynine to figure out what to do with the old one.

The Nanny State. Gaussling’s 5th Epistle to the Bohemians.

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“We live in an age of miracle and wonder” is the refrain from Paul Simon’s album Graceland. All around us and through us are engineered materials devised for their specific physical and chemical properties. Time-released magic bullet drugs that inhibit specific enzymes. Flavorants, colorants, rheology modifiers, and manufactured food substances are engineered and marketed to satisfy our lizard brain’s willingness to shell out cash-for-calories and stimulate our limbic system’s emotive triggers. 

It is nearly impossible to avoid contact with manufactured goods that aren’t modified by chemistry. A century and a half of tinkering with substances at the nanometer scale has given us the ability to optimise the composition and performance of products that make our lives easier and safer.  Microprocessors and Lycra, Hastelloy and Lipitor. The chemical industry has evolved to produce the raw materials and finished goods needed for the performance we have come to expect.

However, history provides a record of the problems associated with the exuberant but uncritical acceptance of this flood of manufactured goods.  From radium poisoning of watch dial painters to chromium VI to asbestos, there is a long list of negligence and environmental insult. The trail blazing of chemical industry leaves behind it a chronicle of tragedy as well as benefits.

The result of the checkered past of industry is a growing (some would say “metastisizing”) intertwined web of state, federal, and international regulatory oversight and requirements. And with it- perhaps as a result of it- has come institutional risk aversion. 

In general way, risk aversion is a type of survival trait and is probably hardwired into our brains. It is hard to blame people for being wary or fearful of risks, especially those they do not understand. But on the other hand, risk aversion is also a type of inertia. It is a fulcrum from which metaphysical rather than physical justifications are leveraged.  

At what point does concern for safety become excessive and how does one go about commenting on it? In a sense, it is similar to being critical of a religion. Similar to interpreting religion, we interpret that safety is important, but we do not often have a clear path mapped out for us through the maze of details and choices.

It is possible for organizations to be dominated by confident voices that are risk averse. Meeting facilitators will piously intone that “safety first” is our policy.  Detailed SOP’s will issue, dragging out the most elementary actions into numerous steps.  There is great merit to SOP’s, but enlightened and proactive management of hazardous operations personel is more important.

Organizations can find themselves spiraling into micromanagement of even the smallest details for fear that a regulatory or liability hammer will fall at any moment. Indeed, if one studies the regulations in detail, it is easy to fall into this habit. Risk aversion isn’t just a personality issue, it is statutory.

Statutory risk aversion is the domain of the Nanny State. The name “Nanny State” refers to the sum total of regulated actions and conditions in our lives as well as the set of penalties.  Though perhaps well intended, the Nanny State seeks to zero out risk, even for the less risk averse.

The Nanny State makes the startup of new chemical technology companies prohibitively expensive.  Nobody advocates the idea that we should be free to pollute and risk the lives of workers and communities.  But even for the most skillful and well intended, there are too many regulatory landmines to dodge: air, water, and waste permits; local zoning; OSHA; EPA (TSCA); fire codes; insurance inspections; MSDS’s in multiple languages; ITAR; and DEA. All have reporting requirements, statutes, and paper trails to maintain.

The plant is the domain of the chemical disaster. The inner offices are the domain of the administrative disaster.  Executives fear being out of regulatory compliance almost as much as an exploding 1000 gallon Pfaudler reactor (alright, I exaggerated … slightly).

In my view, the USA is becoming ossified in Nanny State paralysis in much the same way the EU has.  The combination of technological risk aversion along with the popular sport of outsourcing by our nations corps of MBA wizards only serves to accelerate the de-industrialization of the USA and the EU.

In Memoriam. Professor Albert I. Meyers.

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[Note: An announcement is posted in this blog on 27 January, 2008 concerning a gathering at CSU on 22 Feb., 2008.]

This morning I learned of the passing of one the great pioneers of asymmetric organic synthesis- Dr. Albert I. Meyers, University Distinguished Professor of Chemistry at Colorado State University, on mole day, October 23, 2007.  I do not know the cause of death this moment, but he did suffer from heart problems for quite some time.

Professor Meyers got his PhD at New York University under Ritter in 1957 and later did a post-doc with E.J. Corey. He wrote a book on heterocyclic chemistry and got the highest synthetic chemistry honor of all- a named reaction; The Meyers Aldehyde Synthesis.

Meyers was best known for his developmental work with stereodirecting, chiral auxiliaries. The Meyers group developed asymmetric C-C bond forming reactions with oxazolines, formamidines, and bicyclic lactams. Enantiomeric carboxylic acids, amines, cyclopentenones, etc, were prepared by his group. Numerous natural products, including Maytansine, were the result of methods development from this group.

While asymmetric catalysis would eventually capture more attention later on, the early work with chiral auxiliaries helped to develop a more solid understanding of the mechanics of asymmetric induction or chiral transfer as some put it. The specialized vocabulary of stereochemistry was the norm within the group. Napkins at the local drinking establishments were often covered with scribbled drawings of diastereomeric transition states and arrow pushing over chemical structures.  AIM in particular had a knack for 3-D chalk sketches of chiral alkaloids.

The Meyers group at Colorado State in Ft. Collins was typically rather large and quite international. There was a time in the 1980’s and 1990’s when a special magic permeated the department. This was the era of Jack Norton, Louis Hegedus, John Stille, and Al Meyers- heavy hitters all and located at a northern Colorado Ag school.  It was a time of organometallic chemistry and asymmetric synthesis.  For the student, it was an exciting time and place to be doing chemistry. I count myself as extremely fortunate to have been there.

His love for his mistress- chemistry (as he put it)- was all consuming.  AIM had a sort of panache that generated enthusiam among the group. AIM loved the science and the people of chemistry.  Lunch with AIM was story time. He was very convivial and would regale his audience with amusing anecdotes of his travels and brushes with some of the larger-than-life characters in our field.

The Meyers group was a colorful lot. Multiple languages and strident voices could be heard in the lab against the tapping of chalk on the blackboard. AIM loved nothing more than to be engaged in a blackboard discussion with his sharpest students trying to noodle out some mechanistic or stereochemical problem.

He was a great guy and we’ll all miss him.

Excess Quality. High Purity vs Nominal Purity

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So, the bane of my life right now is water.  You see, the planetary atmosphere that presses down upon us is dilute, wet, oxygen. Given that the planet is generally damp, providing a customer with an anhydrous product requires some care.  For solids, it resolves to the removal of lattice water and/or coordinated water originating from the process and then keeping the dried material from humidity.

Lattice water is the easiest to remove. Azeotropic methods or good old-fashioned vacuum goes a long way to remove this troublesome aqua. Coordinated water is a different issue, however.

Inorganic materials form aqua complexes that are often quite stable. Removal of this ligand opens a coordination site which begs to be refilled with a donor.  Removal of coordinated water may change the stuctural nature of the material and affect its application. Rare earth materials, for instance, often have coordination numbers of 7 to 9, so there are lots of extra coordination sites for water to park. OK, so what?

As a chemical merchant, one has to decide on the specifications of a product either in response to a query or as part of a collection. In the matter of dehydration, the issue that is front and center is how far to go with that dehydration.  How much water can you keep and still have a saleable product? It is quite possible to work way too hard to provide product purity that no one asked for.  Excess quality, call it.

Excess quality is excess expense. This seems contrary to the prevailing work ethic taught by our parents. But, for a given application, there will be a threshold material purity above which further purification affords little or no increase in benefit. Resources spent to obtain or use this excess quality is a type of loss.

Generally speaking, a chemical company will offer what it can make with reasonable effort to meet the needs of the market. If a customer comes along who wants a higher grade, then the manufacturer has to communicate with the customer to determine if the higher grade is really necessary and if so, make a decision as to the merits of kicking up the grade a bit. 

Many times a customer will develop a process based upon material obtained from Aldrich, Strem, Alfa Aesar, etc. These catalog houses provide R&D materials and are often quite pure.  Part of the reason for the purity is that many of the compounds are prepared in 5 or 12 liter flasks and are subject to benchtop processing that is difficult to duplicate in large metal reactors. In particular, tight fractional distillations or the handling of intractable solids, emulsions, or oils, is easier on the benchtop than in a plant. So, sub-kilogram quantities can be easier to prepare in a purer state, generally. Obviously, well engineered bulk manufacturing produces high quality goods as well. But remember, a large fraction of what you see in a catalog has not been scaled up.

It is often a shock for a customer to find that a material will have a different or exaggerated contaminant profile at scale because of their work with commercial R&D materials.  If you need to obtain a material at scale, it is best to work with a manufacturer as early as possible in the commercialization timeline to qualify samples of the needed compound. The assumption that process development with Aldrich samples is good enough could be a trap.  In reality, a user will have to consider to what extent they can live with residual process solvents, suspended solids, water, color, and side products.  Higher purity generally means lower manufactured yields and as a result, fewer kgs of product to dilute the costs. Somewhere the needs curve crosses the wants curve and you’re in business.

Hometown Industry

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Ah, the sweet drone of American English. It’s nice to travel, but it’s nicer to be home.

The conference in Bangkok was useful in many ways. For the most part, it gave Th’ Gaussling some needed perspective in an important segment of the Asian chemical market. North America is far from doomed, market-wise, though it is critical that we curb the rate of chemical de-industrialization going on here.

Manufacturing is the bedrock of our economy and one of the major pillars of our culture. I think that the notion of clean telecommuting promoted by the computer industry leads to the expectation that the country can become one large bedroom community, with dirty heavy industry left to banana republics and Asian tigers.

This notion is absurd and self destructive. If paper mills, refineries, and coal mines are too polluting, then industry needs to collaborate better with the chemical engineering departments around the country. If semiconductor and pharmaceutical manufacturing is too costly in the states, then industry needs to collaborate better with our research institutions.

We have too many non-technical MBA’s driving the country and it has to change. Ruthless finance manipulations must be replaced by ruthless technological advance. Delicate, abstract investment contrivances should be superceded by robust scientific and engineering achievement.

Tuk Tuk Scam

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Temple Buddha

When you get to the streets of Krung Thep, one of the things you first notice is the insane traffic density. The interstitial spaces between cars and buses is filled with pedestrians, tuk tuks, and scooters. The sidewalks are crammed with tables and displays of every imaginable consumer good. At street level, overhead doors are open and shops filled to the brim with stuff of all discription- lawn mowers (where is the grass??), clothing, plastic flotsam, industrial pumps & valves, … everything.  In the evening, the shop owners throw a mattress on the floor between the stacks of merchandise and light up the TV. A pot of soup is on the heat and folks begin winding down for the night.

Like a lot of tourists, we found ourselves stuffed in a noisy tuk tuk careening down the streets of Bangkok being hustled to a well known temple, but with a few stops at the lapidary, clothing story, and jewelry store. It is a well known scam advanced by obnoxious confidence men and women who feign interest in your well being.

It all began when we arrived at the Grand Palace at closing time and were immediately “greeted” by official looking characters.  They took the initiative without delay and directed us to the tuk tuk driver along the curb. Careful to ask our nationality and the nature  of our business, these overseers directed our attention to the identification badges worn by the drivers. Thirty baht for the ride to the Golden Mountain Temple. This was a bargain, we thought.

A tuk tuk is an open air three wheeled vehicle with a sheet metal roof and lots of colorful decoration meant to dazzle tourists into indulging in the local color. 

The driver starts the two-stroke engine and we lurch into traffic. Driving in Bangkok consists of an extended series of lunges for position in the heavy traffic. It’s not at all obvious what is forbidden in traffic, other than running over someone. The tuk tuk driver pulls into oncoming traffic for a few tens of meters gain, then overtakes a car as it turns into a narrow street.  Pedestrians jump out of the way.

In the states, one or two discourtesies that are ordinary here would likely provoke a murderous episode of road rage. No big deal in Krung Thep. 

It became apparent that taking us to the temple was a ruse. The real itinerary was a tour of pre-arranged shops whose proprietors would reward the drivers with a cut of the action. Of course, this is nothing new or novel. It is a form of industry common to many ports of call.

After we visited 3 shops, we convinced our young driver that we were finished and he left us at one of the many gold-leaf festooned temples in the core of the city. Numerous drivers approached with offers of carriage, but we were determined to walk to the Standing Buddha. And walk we did.

Eventually we made our way to a backpack hotel near the river where we enjoyed some liquid refreshment. Using a tourist map meant for advertising, not navigation, we finally found the standing Buddha at sundown. From there we made a circuitous path to a water taxi on the Chao Phraya river and made excellent time back across the city for 30 cents US.

I’m left with some grudging admiration of our Calvinistic traffic system back in the states.

Photo Credit: Th’ Gaussling 2007. All Rights Reserved.

Notes from Krung Thep

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Of the great Pastry and Confectionary Nations of the World, few of them seem to be located in Asia. 

Thailand is not a member of the Organization of Chocolate Consuming States. Chocolate is scarce here. You can get it in small aliquots at the Hotel Gift shop.

Dim Sum is a good thing.

Travelling is fun and easy as long as you have money. Travelling without money is called “walking”.

Thailand is a Kingdom and the King is highly respected.

When greeting, put your hands together under your chin and say “Sawadee Khrap” if you are male and “Sawadee Kha” if a female. It is appropriate and appeciated.

Take Control of Hydrocarbon Consumption

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The US petrochemical industry has had many challenges post WW-II.  The restructuring of Europe and Japan as well as the US after the war lead to an unprecendented network of markets.  Add to the economic map a whole new spread of advanced technologies resulting from the war effort itself.  Advances in piston and jet engines, rocket propulsion, aeronautical engineering, RADAR, and nuclear energy were a direct result of the war or were highly accelerated therein. 

Postwar, the aforementioned technologies were exploited in the private sector and contributed to an unprecedented economic engine driving the growth of cultures and nations. Generous US spending on cold war military hardware added somewhat to the creation of jobs and spending.  The overall explosion of goods and services not only met the demands of consumers, but raised the expectation that technology would provide an endless parade of new things. 

For the present, the range of frontier for paradigm expansion is dramatically different compared to 50 years ago.  In the context of economics, to a large extent we now live in an age of refinement rather than an age of discovery. Most of what we regard as “new” is actually derivative of more fundamental tools. Transistors, penicillin, and fission can only be introduced to the market once as new technology platforms.  Subsequent innovations are derivative. Excited speculation of the future as a place of flying cars and a cure for cancer gives way to the pragmatic adoption of cars that parallel park themselves  and treatment of cancer as a chronic condition.

Today, hucksters promote ethanol or hydrogen as fuels of the future without a syllables worth of consideration for conservation.  The search for the replacement of fossil fuels is really the search for convenient, high energy density combustible fluids that can be mass produced and shipped in the present distribution system for low unit cost. Instead of finding a new fuel stream, why not try to figure out how to get 2x performance (or 1/2 consumption) out of the hydrocarbons we are already using?

One objection might be that we have already squeezed maximum fuel performance out of the internal combustion engine. Further technological improvements to the Otto Cycle engine going forward are going to be hard to capture.

Another objection is that higher material efficiences are always being sought by the marketplace. A 2x jump in efficiency probably is generally not possible across the board, though isolated exceptions do exist.

But the easy fix, the one that no one mentions is to simply burn less hydrocarbons/ethanol by driving fewer miles. The answer is in the hand that holds the car keys. Consolidate trips. Avoid hopping in your Hummer and driving to 7-11 for cigarettes. Car pool. Demand less cheap-plastic-crap from Big Box Mart.

The main stumbling block is this:  how does a market embrace reduced consumption? I think the answer is that it cannot. But it seems clear that our US consumption trajectory cannot continue indefinitely.

The insatiable demand for hydrocarbons has brought out the worst in us. Our oilman White House has lead us into a thicket of foreign entanglements that may well get much worse before there is any relief.

Petroleum Market Mechanics

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Krung Thep, Thailand. The center of mass of the petrochemical industry is slowly on the move.  Middle eastern petroleum states are in the process of building increased capacity in the Middle East (ME). A reported 2.3 million barrels per day (MMBpd) of ME petroleum refinery capacity is due to come on stream in 2011.  A total of 10 MMBpd increase in world capacity is expected by this time.

US refiners have limited their recent upgrades largely to desulfurization and sour grade processing rather than distillation capacity. A relatively minor 500,000 barrels per day of new US capacity over several sites will be available by 2009.

Approximately 3/4 of the total petroleum reserves are controlled by NOC‘s- National Oil Companies. This is a crucial distinction. Only 1/4 of the known reserves are controlled by international corporate entities (the Majors).  The major oil consuming states are increasingly dependent on foreign, nationalized petroleum suppliers.

NOC’s are used for more than just oil production and distribution. They are used as a cash reserve for patronage, political leverage, and even mischief.  These entities are intermeshed in the global market and provide varieties of risk that are hard for the marketplace to understand.

In particular, ethylene cracking capacity is expected to shift significantly towards the ME, providing advantages for regional production and distribution of polyolefins. Despite advantageous feedstock costs, overall manufacturing costs may not be as low as anticipated. The dramatically increasing cost of refinery construction and logistic issues unique to the location appear to provide a leveling effect on cost structure. It is thought that the EU will see the biggest effect of the ME buildup in capacity.

It is unclear how this refinery capacity uptick will effect liquid non-fuel commodity prices (i.e., chemical feedstocks).