Ken Lunde was the founder and first director of the Process Economics Program, affectionately known as PEP. Since 1965, this multiclient program has provided technical and economic data to the chemical, petroleum, polymer, and energy industries worldwide as well as to government agencies and planners of many kinds.
Ken was one of the first chemical engineers to join SRI. Starting in 1948, he worked in the Chemical Engineering Laboratory under Nevin Hiester and became the Manager of the Industrial Air Pollution Section. After a 4-year hiatus at Kaiser Engineers, Ken returned to SRI in 1963 to develop new Chemical Engineering Economics services for the Economics Division, which already offered the successful Chemical Economics Handbook. He recognized that the patent literature represented an untapped repository of technical information on which the design of chemical production plants could be based. Design and economic evaluation of chemical processes could thus be done independently of proprietary company information.
Until he retired in 1983, Ken Lunde wrote PEP reports, led and worked on single-client projects, traveled to market PEP, and recruited and administered the PEP staff. One of the keys to PEP’s success was Ken’s insistence that the PEP studies be conducted by experienced chemical engineers, preferably those with 15 or more years of design and operating experience in the chemical industry. He also devised the format for the reports, which has been followed uniformly ever since—along with the dark-green 7-ring binders, custom-made for each report.
Since 1976, the economics tables from the reports of the Process Economics Program have been assembled into a Yearbook, providing comparable cost data for the production of several hundred chemicals and polymers. The PEP Yearbook International gets thicker as the years go by. The PEP program has spawned other multiclient services, such as the Environmental Processes Handbook.
PEP has attracted (and outlasted) imitators. After 35 years, it still serves 70 to 80 clients each year. The program Ken Lunde started has spread SRI’s fame around the world.