Chemical Sector Analysis Capability

Chemical Sector Infrastructure Dependence

The chemical sector depends on both several critical infrastructures (principally Petroleum, Energy, and Transportation) and a complex, globally distributed, multistage processing chain for their successful operations. Understanding how these components work together under normal and disrupted conditions is critical for accomplishing the asset prioritization, consequence assessment, and policy guidance efforts.

NISAC has embarked on a five-year effort to analyze the full range ofpotential impacts to the chemical industry infrastructure from manmake and natural disasters, including human impacts and economic consequences.

Multiple Perspectives - Multi-faceted Problem

DHS needs to understand the chemical production system in degraded states, under new operation rules. The chemical analysis project integrates a number of existing NISAC models with industry data.

• System dynamics
• Network models
• Economic models
• Transportation models 

Each of these modeling approaches provides a different but complementary prerspective on the questions of interest. NISAC feeds all the models from a central data repository built from a fusion of data from SRI Consulting, DHS, the Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Census, and commercial infrastructure data providers.

Following a 2007 demonstration and workshop on the current phase capability, a number of major U.S. chemical corporations have asked to participate in the project. 

 

System Dynamics Model

A high level aggregate model of the chemical production process allows analysts to determine where system dynamics may be important.

Network-based Analysis and Insights

Using the sophisticated algorithms and techniques of the LOKI network toolkit, NISAC analyzed the petrochemical subsector to predict the nonlinear impact of the loss of typical and atypical production capacities on overall systemic throughput. The high-level view in this idealization of chemical supply chains is also used to identify problematic areas.  For example, a network analysis reveals that propylene and styrene are connected tomany other chemical products; such interconnectedness merits special attention from other higher fidelity modeling approaches.

Economic Model

NISAC's high fidelity micro-economic simulation provides insight into the potential exonomic impacts of system disruption. This approach is used to analyze the Chemical Sector's:

• Complex supply chains
• Capital intensive nature of high volume production and manufacturing plants
• Notable price volatility of raw materials and feedstocks

Individual, geospatially located firms are represented as collections of agents that interact in markets and through Transportation Sector infrastructures to acquire and convert chemicals to their final products.

Markets in the petrochemical supply chain are truly global. The image above at left illustrates simulated daily business-to-business transactions between producing facilities for 63 economically significant chemicals.

Transportation Representation

Utilizing the most likely source-destination flow and transportation mode per chemical, this representation allows transportation infrastructure network constraints to be integrated with comodity flow dynamics.