Ian Chester - Process Engineering Consultant

Experience

The following is a brief summary of my career and experience to date. Please contact me for a more detailed CV or further information.

After graduating with a 1st in chemical engineering from Imperial College, London in 1983, I worked for the UK Atomic Energy Authority before joining Monsanto at their Seal Sands site in the North-East of England a year later. With the site acquired shortly afterwards by BASF, that began a 10 year spell for me working in the chemical industry in a variety of roles. During this time I gained experience in operations support, process development and design, and project management. By the end of my time with BASF I was a process engineering specialist with particular responsibility for distillation technology.

I began working in a consulting role after joining Linnhoff March in 1994. For the next three years I undertook a number of projects using pinch technology to identify energy saving opportunities for various process industry clients.

In 1997 I joined AspenTech as a founder member of their Advanced Process Design team which was to gain a strong reputation over the coming years in providing novel process design solutions for capacity revamps and energy saving. I was instrumental in developing many of the techniques and methodology used in the analysis and optimisation of process plant.

Since 2009 I have been working independently after founding IC Technologies.

My main area of expertise is in the large-scale petrochemicals industry, with studies completed on approximately 25 ethylene plants around the world. Other processes I have worked on include aromatics, phenol, VCM, acrylonitrile, PTA and many others.

In addition to my experience in the petrochemicals industry I have also carried out projects in the speciality chemicals, oil refining, pulp and paper, food processing, fuel cell and nuclear industries.