[Originally published on LinkedIn at: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/office-diaries-what-all-written-equipment-manuals-take-srivastava/
Some 16 years back, I retired after 34 years of service. During my career, after spending about a quarter of professional-life in Research & Development, I opted to be transferred to the Business Development wing. Here, I headed business operations of a division which was a pioneer in development of indigenous know-how and production and marketing of a group of 8 speciality-chemicals called catalysts and other chemicals, those were widely used in the Industry. I will be describing real-life situations and what lessons future managers may learn.
This is the 3rd article in the series. See others at:
Not giving up till the last (Nov 18, 2020)
Excess of everything is back (Nov 24, 2020)
At that time, the Indian Fertilizer Industry was relatively young. When India got its independence from British Raj in 1947, there were no large capacity Chemical fertilizer plants. It was in 1951, first fertilizer plant was set-up in eastern India at Sindri, in District Dhanbad, then the state of Bihar (currently part of state of Jharkhand), on the western bank of the river Damodar. Across the river is adjacent to town Purlia, in West Bengal. Keeping in view advantage of its location, in vicinity of large coal mines in Jharia, Digwadih and others, the plant was designed on imported process know-how of Coal-Gasification process, and with relatively small capacity of 350 MTPD Ammonia. The end-products were Ammonium Sulphate and Others.
In those initial days, India was dependent mostly on imported know-how and equipment to the tune of 85% of project-costs and rest was indigenous materials. The country had very poor industrial infrastructure.The basic process adopted in those times at Sindri was gasification of coal in batteries in Coke Oven plants, cleaning the gas by scrubbing it with water and then converting Carbon monoxide in the gas to Hydrogen and Carbon dioxide at High Temperature Shift Convertors (HTS ) in presence of Iron-Chromium based HTS Catalysts. The HTS catalysts available globally had relatively low catalyst-activity (at present-day standards) and poor physico-chemical properties, making it very fragile in real life situations. Sindri had to import about 500 MT HTS catalyst for initial fill from Europe, costing sky high foreign exchange. It was too much for India, but she had no alternatives.
The real problem started during commissioning of the Sindri plant. In spite of the presence of a battery of expert’s-team from Europe at the plant’s floor, the worst possible had happened. The imported HTS catalyst got buggered-up and the plant was closed for an indefinite period. It was a herculean task to import another charge of 500 MT HTS catalyst on an emergent basis. The European catalyst vendor has offered a delivery-schedule of after 6 months and the plant was to be closed down for the period. It was a very gloomy situation. All about 10,000 employees at the plant were idle, waiting for re-start of the plant.
Some of the enterprising chemists at the plant’s laboratory asked the Management to allow them to do some experiments with the foiled-catalyst. Management did allow them, but it was not very hopeful. The manual / operating-procedure provided by the European HTS catalyst vendor mentioned it very clearly that the catalyst should never be allowed to come in contact with water, to avoid leaching-out of the promoters in the catalyst. After a very long and arduous experimentation, it was found by Chemists,to the utter surprise of everybody, that the HTS catalyst could be revived with hot water only. The Management allowed to revive the whole lot of buggered HTS catalyst, in-situ , without discharging it from the converter. It was finally regenerated fully to full activity in a fortnight's time. The regenerated catalyst gave an actual active-life of full 8 years ( normally 5 years life is considered optimal), avoiding the import of replacement-charge of HTS catalyst.
Jubilant with the incident, the management and the Government of India were very excited and, in turn, sanctioned funds for the start of indigenous R & D in the fertilizer industry. It was the foundation stone, in 1961 of the then Planning & Development Division of The Fertilizer Corporation of India. Now the indigenous component in the fertilizer industry has gone up from meagre 15 % to 85-90%.
One needs to be alert and awake intellectually all the time and can’t be following manuals and operating procedures blindly.