Projections minimum development times

Figure 2.1 The maximum and minimum development times for a drug in 1996 and projections for the year 2000. (Reprinted with permission from Banerjee and Rosofsky, 1997. Copyright 1997 Andersen Consulting.)...

So far, the economics of developing discovered fields has been discussed, and the sensitivity analysis introduced was concerned with variations in parameters such as reserves, capex, opex, oil price, and project timing. In these cases the risk of there being no hydrocarbon reserves was not mentioned, since it was assumed that a discovery had been made, and that there was at least some minimum amount of recoverable reserves (called proven reserves). This section will briefly consider how exploration prospects are economically evaluated. 

Most technology used for groundwater treatment was developed for wastewater facilities. Wastewater equipment is usually designed to last a minimum of 20 to 30 years. With continued maintenance, the equipment should survive this long. For the wastewater market, the design is based on the life expectancy of the equipment, not the waste stream. Groundwater treatment equipment systems will typically be in use for a much shorter time the controlling factor is the life expectancy of the project, not the equipment. 

At that time the synthesis of a disaccharide was considered a major undertaking, and preparation of the more elaborate oligosaccharides must have appeared as an unrealistic project. The successful completion of such a program required, at a minimum, the development of new glycosylation methods, especially for the synthesis of the a-glycosidic linkage, and the development of new methods for the structural analysis of both protected oligosaccharide intermediates and of the final synthetic products. 

Historically, the standard deodorizer held 60,000 lb of oil (one railroad tank car). Except for refineries making only a few kinds of oil, as for export, building of continuous deodorizers slowed with the advent of Just-In-Time (JIT) delivery, supplier self-certification, and customers buying on the basis of their projected production schedules. This has led to development of improved batch-continuous systems, which are designed to handle many batches of different oil blends per day, with minimum cross-contamination and delays for process. 

Indirect FAA methods, in which the hydrocarbon matrix is eliminated and the analyte is concentrated, could have been applied to all elements studied by the Project if a large enough sample were used. However, since indirect techniques still may encounter chemical (interelement) interferences, a minimum of 5 ml of solution must be available so that standard additions techniques can be applied. Some trace metals have been determined in petroleum by indirect FAA after a 100-g sample had been ashed (17), However, ashing such large samples, particularly crudes or residual fractions, is difficult and time consuming. Sulfated ash procedures were used in the Project to prepare various petroleum matrices for determining Cd, Co, Mo, Ni, and V by FAA. However, procedures were developed only for the first three elements, and cross-check data were collected only for cadmium. Since alternate techniques had greater sensitivity and allowed smaller samples to be ashed, flame atomic absorption was not widely used. 

The effort and duration estimates should be developed from the bottom up, preferably by the persons responsible for their execution, in contrast to the top-down, high-level estimates prepared during the project definition phase. They should take into account past experiences with similar, standard processes, to the extent possible. As predictions, the estimates should be equally Ukely to be above or below the actual results rather than represent the minimum or maximum time. Figure 4 provides an example of task time estimates. 

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