Gordon C. Cheng

Mr. Cheng, President of ChemicaLogic Corporation, is a consultant to chemical industry management. For over 24 years he has been resolving chemical process technology issues from the perspective of business management; for 18 of those years he was associated with Arthur D. Little, Inc.

Drawing on his expertise in process technology, process economics, project and operations management, Mr. Cheng assists clients in selecting technologies for implementation, evaluating project or venture feasibility, benchmarking performance, debottlenecking for productivity improvement, environmental management, and planning strategy for corporate development.

Mr. Cheng's assignments have taken him to a wide variety of industries, including air separation, ammonia, LNG, sour gas treatment, polysilicon, chlor-alkali, soda ash (natural and Solvay), salt and brine chemicals, sulfuric acid, hydrochloric acid, precipitated calcium carbonate, magnesia, potassium sulfate, ammonium nitrate, hydrogen, fermentation ethanol, olefins/polyolefins, styrene, p-xylene, methanol, MTBE and other octane enhancers, glass, pharmaceuticals, pesticides, fertilizers, silicon chlorination, and tea processing.

In addition to providing a good grounding in the traditional areas of the chemical industry, Mr. Cheng's work has kept him in touch with many novel developments of applications or processing technologies, such as metal hydrides for hydrogen storage and purification, pressure-swing-adsorption and membrane systems for air separation, landfill-gas separations, low-pressure storage methods for natural gas, gas processing systems for fuel cells, catalytic combustion for NOx and VOC abatement, supercritical fluid extractions, and separation of CO2 from natural gas.

Many of Mr. Cheng's assignments have been of these types:

Functional Management of Chemical Operations

Mr. Cheng is experienced with assignments in restructuring the functional organization of chemical operations for productivity enhancement. These assignments range from developing business plans for an embryonic chemical equipment supplier in China, business process redesign for the engineering and maintenance functions of a multi-national chemical companies in the U.S., to restructuring of an ailing chemical company in Colombia.

Technical/Economic Process Studies

Within chemical plant operations, Mr. Cheng has worked with companies to determine the causes of impurities or poor yields, to assign costs or transfer prices to the several steps of an operation, to compare the financial attractiveness of alternative process technologies or feedstock, to optimize process control, or to set up models to maximize the information obtainable from limited experimentation.

Trouble-Shooting Studies of Manufacturing Operations

In manufacturing assignments, Mr. Cheng has helped to identify and to remove technical bottlenecks in production system, to enhance operational efficiency and to select the best means to achieve compliance with safety and environmental regulations.

Project Tasks

Mr. Cheng has worked with both contractors and companies to conduct feasibility analysis, to provide assistance in preparing bid tenders, to evaluate bids and to perform acceptance testing.

Appraisal of New Technologies

Mr. Cheng is often asked to quantify the competitive benefits of new process technologies or products for technology developers, manufacturers, contractors and venture investors. Such assignments include consideration of alternative technologies and costs, market forecast, and projections of investment return. These assignments can range from brief fact-findings, valuation of new business, feasibility studies, to the development of comprehensive business plans.
Strategic Market Analyses for Clients Who Wish to Expand or Diversify: These tasks involve determining the status of development, identifying core competencies and strategic businesses, assessing competitive economics based on value to end-users, studying pricing mechanisms, market segmentation, and formulating corporate development strategy. Such studies are also frequently demanded by clients considering acquisitions, mergers, or divestitures.

Mr. Cheng studies the soda ash business internationally. He has conducted analyses of Solvay systems for a number of producers, assisted in the planning of a grass-roots plant in the Middle East, surveyed the soda ash industry in China and restructured a business entity in Colombia. He monitors the dynamics of soda ash supply/demand and inter-material competition globally.

Mr. Cheng consults extensively in China, Taiwan, and other Asia Pacific regions for the World Bank, Asian Development Bank, governmental agencies, international and local enterprises, regarding venture analysis, technology transfer, and development strategy. For the Spark Program Office of China State Science and Technology Council, he delivered a training course on enterprise management and technology evaluation to a group of senior project officers. This training program included the fundamentals of enterprise management, financial performance evaluation, project feasibility assessment, market/competition analysis, and enterprise restructuring.

Early in his career, Mr. Cheng spent five years with Cryogenic Technology, Inc., responsible for developing several proprietary systems currently in use for treating liquid and gaseous radioactive wastes in nuclear power plants. He also designed gas purification systems involving adsorption, specialty heat-transfer equipment, and thermodynamic cycle analysis of cryogenic systems. Prior to that, he was employed by Kahn & Company in 1971-1972 as a project engineer on gas-drying adsorption systems. In both of these early positions, he acquired valuable experience in bench- and pilot-scale process development, process equipment design and fabrication, capital and manufacturing cost estimation, and project management.

Mr. Cheng received a Bachelor of Engineering from Chung-Yuan College of Science & Engineering in Taiwan and a Master of Science from the University of New Hampshire, both in Chemical Engineering. He is a member of the American Chemical Society, American Institute of Chemical Engineers, and the American Nuclear Society.