FEED

Until very recently, the life cycle of a CPI project followed the familiar well trodden path of Technology Selection, Basic Engineering and Detailed Engineering followed by the process of implementation and start-up. This comfortable situation has been rudely disrupted of late by a new activity called Front End Engineering and Design, known more popularly by the acronym FEED. In the earlier days the inadequacies of Basic Engineering, and there were a surfeit of them, were taken care of by the Detailed Engineering contractor. These inadequacies were primarily because the project owner (the client) would rather pay the local DEC for the touching up than pay through the nose to get a ‘perfect’ Basic Engineering Package (BEP) from overseas. But with projects increasingly being bid on a Lump Sum Turn Key (LSTK) basis, the BEP cannot be incomplete, inconsistent or inadequate. The main purpose of FEED is thus to flesh out the BEP into a level so that the LSTK bids can be obtained in the shortest possible time.