PTT is the fibre of the future. It's a brand-new polyester that can be spun into yarns and fibres and made into applications in carpets, textiles and apparel.
PTT was synthesised in laboratories as early as the 1940's. But it's not been available commercially because of the cost of the key raw material, which is PDO or 1,3-propanediol. My team led the discovery of a commercial route to 1,3-propanediol in the mid-1990's. It was in essence innovation on demand. We knew there was a market opportunity and really went after it in a big way.
We put together a cross-functional team involving organo-metallic chemistry, carbonylation chemistry, engineering, reactor design, and process scale of extraction and separations. We succeeded by brute force effort and really making up ground and covering a lot of experiments to find that key stranglehold on how can we get a footing on this technology to make something that would be commercially viable.
We simply kept experimenting until we found a foothold that really broke some of our paradigms of how we thought this chemistry worked.
It was a very fast track process development where in the course of nine months to a year we went from a very small scale to designing a semi works demonstration scale commercial unit. Our Geismar Louisiana facility was started up in 1999, on time and on budget. And this was within six years of the innovation of the concept so a very good success story in terms of rapid deployment of new technology.
We're currently in the start-up phase of this business, but if you look at the opportunities and demand growth in carpets and in textiles, we believe it can be a very good moneymaker for Shell Chemicals well into the future.
It proves that when the incentive is there and one has the will that Shell as an organisation can really deliver big on big projects.
I've been with Shell for eighteen years and challenges are new and exciting on a daily basis. The opportunities to leverage training in chemical engineering and really to apply the knowledge and go out and do something in the marketplace... I still feel like I'm just out of graduate school in terms of the challenges and the excitement of the projects that I get to work on.
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