tert-Butanol by direct hydration of isobutene over an acidic ion-exchange resin

Tier 0 screening per tonne of tert-butanol: stoichiometry with a patent's by-product rate, electricity and heat from core's defaults (no open energy figure found). No flowsheet; not reviewed.

Calculation maturity: not assessedDesign maturity: Concept (research)Not independently reviewedOxygenatesReport a problem with this process
Research outputNot engineering advice and not an approved design: do not use it for construction, operation or safety decisions. What this means

Tier 0 screening per tonne of tert-butanol: stoichiometry with a patent's by-product rate, electricity and heat from core's defaults (no open energy figure found). No flowsheet; not reviewed.

Capacity
per tonne of tert-butanol (the dataset's basis); no plant size

What goes in and out

In

Out

Utilities: Electricity (core's Tier 0 default (ASSUMED, dated); the dataset's feed:heat (core's default heat from fossil fuel, kWh) has no registry slug and is mapped in lca/mappings.yaml)

Show in the process graph

Life cycle assessment

No footprint assessed yet; the process is part of the life-cycle inventory below.

In the open LCI database (cheme-as-code-atlas-preview-a3c52e4) as tert-Butanol (2-methylpropan-2-ol), tert-Butanol (TBA contained).

Download it for Brightway, openLCA and other tools.

In the LCI database: system model, datasets and KPIs against the benchmarks

In the LCI database

System model
attributional, cut-off (methodology 1.1.0)
Allocation
mass (single-output, from default) · product:tert-butanol 100 %
Allocation findings
none
Change report
Not available: this build has no change report against an earlier release.
Dataset pages
tert-Butanol (2-methylpropan-2-ol), tert-Butanol (TBA contained)

KPI benchmark positions

KPIValueReference rangePosition
Selectivity of the isobutene converted to tert-butanol (molar)– %97.3 to 99.8 %
US 4,307,257 A (1981) Process for production of tertiary butyl alcohol. Sumitomo Chemical Co Ltd (Sada, M., Kato, M., Mori, Y., Sano, M.) (other)
not evaluated
Electricity per t of tert-butanol
No usable open source with a tert-butanol electricity figure found (2026-11-05). Read: LVOC BREF 2017 section 2.1.2.1.8 (routes only, "endothermic process", no figure); patents US 7,179,948 B2, US 7,002,050 B2, US 7,115,787 B2, US 7,709,690 B2, US 4,180,688 A and US 4,307,257 A (no utility figures). Web searches for open simulation studies with reboiler duties found only abstracts and theses that could not be read. One abstract was read and not used: a student preliminary design (Universitas Muhammadiyah Surakarta, eprints.ums.ac.id/47175, 80 kt/a, bubble reactor) states 321.62 kW of electricity, about 32 kWh/t at 330 d/a; its isobutylene use is below stoichiometry and the route differs, so it is not a reference. The dataset's value is core's Tier 0 default, ASSUMED.
– kWh/tnot availablenot evaluated
Heat per t of tert-butanol
No usable open source with a tert-butanol heat or steam figure found (2026-11-05); the same sources as for electricity were read. The student design named under electricity states 9388 kg/h of steam, about 0.93 t per t TBA at 330 d/a; it is not used, for the reasons given there. The dataset's value is core's Tier 0 default heat from fossil fuel, ASSUMED.
– kWh/tnot availablenot evaluated

Maturity and review

Design maturity Concept (claimed): An idea or first flowsheet; numbers are rough. No independent engineering review yet. Automated checks passing is not a review.

Calculation maturity, from the checked evidenceNot assessed

The process has no maturity report (cheme maturity, checks/maturity.json), so no calculation maturity is established.

No level shownThe design maturity (Concept) is the manifest's claim, not evidence. A level appears here once the process's repository holds a current report from cheme maturity --write.

Artifact completeness

Which deliverables exist. They never raise a calculation maturity level: a drawing from unchecked numbers is still unchecked.

Not reported without a maturity report.

Independent review

Not independently reviewed

No independent engineering review yet. Automated checks passing is not a review.

Set by people only. Reaching a calculation maturity level or passing automated checks is not an independent review or an approval.

Where the evidence comes from
Report
processes/tert-butanol-1/checks/maturity.json (not in the library)
Method
How ChemE-as-Code checks the levels (requirement by requirement)

Open items

0 open items · 0 closed

New action itemNew engineering holdNew technical queryNew design changeAll issues

Sources

Library version
a3c52e4 (process last changed in a3c52e4)
Data
Catalog record (JSON) · CC-BY-4.0
Files
View the files on GitHub · change history and authors

References

How to cite

For the data, cite the Process Atlas paper; for the platform that builds and checks it, the ChemE-as-Code paper.

Schweidtmann, A. M. & Weber, J. M. (2026, in preparation). Process Atlas: an open, git-native, reproducible library and life cycle inventory of chemical processes (working title).

For this process: "tert-Butanol by direct hydration of isobutene over an acidic ion-exchange resin", ChemE-as-Code process library, version a3c52e4.

BibTeX
@unpublished{schweidtmann_process_atlas,
  author = {Schweidtmann, Artur M. and Weber, Jana M.},
  title = {{Process Atlas: an open, git-native, reproducible library and life cycle inventory of chemical processes (working title)}},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://atlas.cheme-as-code.org},
  note = {in preparation}
}

Schweidtmann, A. M. (2026). ChemE-as-Code: An Open-Source Platform for Agentic AI in Chemical Engineering. arXiv:2611.07947. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2611.07947

BibTeX
@misc{schweidtmann_cheme_as_code,
  author = {Schweidtmann, Artur M.},
  title = {{ChemE-as-Code: An Open-Source Platform for Agentic AI in Chemical Engineering}},
  year = {2026},
  eprint = {2611.07947},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  doi = {10.48550/arXiv.2611.07947},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.07947}
}