Services

Technology scale-up and commercialisation

Laboratory data does not tell you what the plant will do. Heat and mass transfer, residence time, impurity build-up over hundreds of cycles, the recycle streams nobody modelled — these are what separate a promising bench result from a process that runs.

I take technology from bench through pilot to production: defining what each stage has to prove before you spend the next tranche, designing the pilot so it answers those questions, and carrying the answers into full-scale design. I have run this arc twice in the same technology family, thirty years apart, including the regulatory trial work needed to sell into food-contact applications.

When you need it: you have laboratory results and a board asking what it costs to build.

Capital project delivery

I have delivered capital projects from $2M to $15M inside live operating plant without losing production — which is a different discipline from greenfield construction. Tie-in planning, shutdown scope, commissioning sequence, and the operational readiness work that decides whether the plant runs on day one or limps for six months.

Most recently I took an R&D plant from approval to operation in eight months.

When you need it: you have an approved project and nobody internal who has run one.

Owner's Engineer

This is what I get asked about most. Holding external design and construction providers to scope, cost, schedule and technical risk, on behalf of the company paying for it.

Most people have sat on one side of that arrangement. I have sat on both: I engaged a third-party Owner's Engineer, then brought the function in-house and recruited the process, mechanical and controls engineers to run it. I know what a good OE catches, what a poor one waves through, and what the arrangement looks like from the contractor's side of the table.

Scope definition is where most of this is won or lost. How I approach scope definition →

When you need it: you are paying an EPC and have no independent technical voice in the room.

Technical due diligence

An independent read on whether a technology does what its promoters say, what it will cost to scale, and where the engineering risk actually sits — as opposed to where the pitch deck says it sits.

When you need it: you are investing in, acquiring or licensing process technology.

Operational and process engineering review

Plant that is not doing what the design said it would. Yield below nameplate, variability nobody can explain, a bottleneck that moves every time you fix it. I work from the data rather than from opinion — control charts and process variation analysis before hardware changes.

How I read process variation →

When you need it: the plant runs, but not the way the design case said.