Comparative cost advantage

The production of PVC is very dependent on the health of the construction industry. When the price of oil is relatively high, this gives PVC an economic advantage over other commodity plastics. Because PVC contains a large amount of chlorine (from inorganic sources), its content from petroleum is less. This fact can give PVC a comparative cost advantage. 

There has been much interest in making chemicals from brine because of the low expense compared to alternative methods. Lithium, for example, had been mostly produced from spodumene ore, but now most is produced from brine. Those now producing from ore are seriously researching brine reserves and contemplating converting to brine sources before the turn of the century. Similady, solar salt has cost advantages over mined rock salt. Potassium chloride produced from brine has more than doubled from 1980 to 1990. 

Detailed economics of individual industrial processes, including SCP processes, are usually regarded as confidential, out of fear that publication may lend advantage to competitors. In addition, economy of scale rule generally applies (that is as the production capacity increases, the cost of the product decreases), so that direct comparisons can only be made between systems of similar capacity. Some economic data on SCP processes have been published and are presented in the Resource Material at the end of this chapter. You should appreciate that the data are outdated by more than a decade, during which time substrate costs will have varied relative to each other, and technology will have improved. This means that the comparative costs presented in Table 4.13, for example, may not be now as presented there. Nevertheless the data presented do provide an outline of the economics of SCP production. The processes referred to in the Resource Material are not necessarily those mentioned in the text and so you may find some differences in detail. 

Offers cost advantages when compared to other stabilization alternatives (2 to 5 times less expensive than conventional methods of solidification or stabilization). 

TLC is not the best chromatographic technique for quantitative analysis and, although it can provide quantitative results, the necessary procedure tends to be more cumbersome and tedious compared with other chromatographic methods. Furthermore, for accurate work, expensive scanning equipment is required, which, as already discussed, rather reduces the cost advantage of the technique. 

Many solvents commonly used in academia are rarely used for scale-up in industry. A list of such solvents is shown in Table 4.2, along with the disadvantages of these solvents and alternative solvent choices. While any solvent can be used on scale, one must compare the advantages of using an undesirable solvent to the inconvenience, additional costs, and extended process times required to protect operators and equipment. All of these considerations reduce productivity and drive up processing costs on scale. 

---