The CE Plant Cost Index: An Update

Changes in the availability of source data for the CE Plant Cost Index periodically necessitate updates to how the index is calculated The Chemical Engineering Plant Cost Index (CEPCI) is a widely used tool for comparing plant construction costs in the chemical process industries (CPI) between different time periods since 1963. Over its history, the underlying details of the index have been revised and adjusted several times. For a discussion of these changes, readers are directed to Chem. Eng., January 2002, pp. 62–69. This article aims to explain the most recent change that has been made to the CEPCI. The CEPCI The CE Plant Cost Index is actually a composite that consists of four sub-indices: Equipment; Construction Labor; Buildings; and Engineering and Supervision (see Table 1). The Equipment subindex is itself a composite of seven other indices, each focusing on a particular category of process equipment. The component indexes are compiled, and weighting factors are applied to make up the Equipment subindex. The three other subindexes are compiled independently from appropriate inputs. Information on these four indexes has been reported running back to 1947. After weighting and normalizing the values, the four sub-indexes…