As the industrialized world’s hunger for resources grew, the field of chemical engineering evolved to produce these resources more safely and more cheaply than ever before. Chemical engineers were needed to design and optimise the equipment and chemical processes required to produce these resources.
Chemical engineers also had to figure out how to build plants required by novel processes to manufacture products at a scale never seen before. The Haber-Bosch process is an example of one of these novel processes. It was the first economically viable process for directly synthesizing ammonia from hydrogen and nitrogen. It was so significant that its development won Fritz Haber the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1918. Suddenly untold amounts of ammonia could be produced, and huge chemical plants were needed to keep up with demand.
Today, the developments and achievements in the chemical engineering industry would have been unheard of when the profession originated less than two centuries ago. Raw materials are being refined and valuable outputs are being produced at a gargantuan magnitude. Sadara, for example, a chemical plant in Saudi Arabia and the largest chemical plant in the world, has a production capacity of 3 million tons per year. What could be produced using batch production before the Industrial Revolution is microscopic when compared to a plant of this size.
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