ABSTRACT
In addition to capital cost estimating, an engineer must be able to estimate production costs to create economically viable designs. This chapter will review the methods for creating study-grade production cost estimates. These have a couple of similarities to order of magnitude and study-grade capital estimates:
• They are used to determine economic feasibility and to analyze options. • They have a wide range of accuracy. My observation is the accuracy range
is about ±50%. The main reason the range is so broad is that plant design details, and thus production cost details, are sketchy.
