The Challenges of Pilot Plants

A good friend now consulting in Egypt asked me the seemingly innocuous question, “How do you define a pilot plant?” The question arose because a government agency wanted him to examine several facilities in Lebanon and help determine if they should be certified, whatever that means there.

My first response was this: “A pilot plant is a flexible facility housing adequate utilities and a variety of relatively small-scale equipment that can be configured to study or simulate new or existing processe…