Chemical Pricing Information for Student Design Projects and Cost Engineering: Challenges and Opportunities

Abstract

Chemical prices are an important component of cost engineering for chemical engineering students and researchers, as well as other disciplines that might be interested in chemical processes (e.g., agricultural engineering, business, economics, and industrial engineering). Students in chemical engineering senior design (or capstone) courses are especially in need of chemical pricing to demonstrate the economic feasibility of their process designs. Over the last 12 years, bulk chemical prices have become increasingly difficult to locate as information providers publishing such information have consolidated and gradually removed that content from their publications. This paper first summarizes the history of published chemical prices in the literature and then reports on a quantitative content analysis of library research guides containing chemical pricing sources at institutions with ABET-accredited chemical engineering programs. Despite the aforementioned challenges, there are some opportunities for engineering librarians. One such opportunity involves locating citations for chemical prices from a variety of sources and placing them into a searchable database that could be a community-based solution.History Some of the earliest surviving published prices of goods in the Western world emerged during the late sixteenth century in major trading cities like Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Hamburg, and Venice, and then spread throughout Europe, and ultimately to the United States via England. [1][2][3] These publications, referred to as price-currents, listed market prices for various goods that included many agricultural products and a limited number of chemicals, such as potash, saltpeter, sulfur, etc. 3,4 One of the first price-currents published in colonial America was the South Carolina Price-Current and it included chemicals such as indigo, turpentine, and various animal/plant oils. 1,5 Price-currents continued into the early 1800s and then developed into, or

Efficacy of Using Producer Price Indexes for Bulk Chemical Prices in Student Design Projects

“…A brief history of chemical pricing sources can be found in Hubbard. 5 It suffices to say that there has been considerable consolidation and increased monetization of bulk chemical pricing information within the industry over the last 15 years. The result has been less chemical pricing information available to students and researchers in the trade literature, which has historically been a major source of chemical prices.…”

“…Additional sources for chemical prices are found in Hubbard based on a content analysis of research guideswebpages created by librarians listing information resources on specific disciplines or topicscontaining chemical pricing sources. 5 Three chemical pricing research guides cited by other research guides are hosted by Cornell University, 6 Texas A&M University, 7 and University of Texas, 8 thus serving as important lists of chemical pricing sources themselves and worth consulting. Many of the resources listed on those research guides will be subscription resources, so it is important to check access via your local library to see if you have access to those listed and possibly some unique resources containing chemical pricing information (e.g., IHS Chemical Economics Handbook, Bloomberg's Datastream, Intratec, etc.).…”