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Economics Overview

Jasper turns a converged flowsheet into a provenance-tracked CAPEX + OPEX estimate. Every number in the result traces back to a cited source with a basis date — the engine never invents a cost.

The pipeline​

Converged flowsheet
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Equipment sizing            (area, power, volume per unit — see Equipment Sizing)
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Cost database lookup        (correlation + material factor, by unit type)
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Purchased cost              (at the correlation's base year)
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Bare-module cost            (installation factors)
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Escalation                  (Jasper Cost Index, monthly 2001 → today)
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Location factor             (US-GC base · US-MW · EU)
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Contingency                 (by AACE class)
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CAPEX  +  OPEX (feeds, utilities) − revenue (products)

Each step's math is documented in Costing Methods; the data layer behind it in The Cost Database.

Accuracy: AACE Class 4–5​

Every result is stamped AACE Class 4-5 (+/-30-40%). This is a feasibility / study-grade estimate built from published correlations (Turton, Seider et al.) — not vendor quotes. The class is honest: where two independent sources cost the same equipment, they agree within a few percent for some classes (heat exchangers, 3.3%) and disagree by up to ~67% for others (compressors), which is exactly the band Class 4–5 declares.

Honesty principles​

  • Provenance on every value. Each cost carries the source of its correlation, material factor, escalation index, and contingency. Sources are listed in Data Sources & Licensing.
  • Gaps, not guesses. Anything that can't be costed (missing correlation, unpriced chemical) becomes a gap row — visible, excluded from totals, never silently filled.
  • Representative prices are flagged. Chemical prices are literature values until you override them; the estimate says so whenever they're used.
  • Margins are computed, not promised. Revenue − feeds − utilities can be negative; the engine reports what the numbers say.

Using it in the editor​

Economics is a Pro feature. With a converged run:

  • Console → Economics tab — project totals: CAPEX, feeds/yr, utilities/yr, revenue/yr, margin/yr, with per-item tables, source citations, and any gaps. Region (US-GC / US-MW / EU) and AACE class (5 / 4) are selectable.
  • Node sidebar → Cost section — per-unit module cost with provenance; per-feed and per-product annual flows and prices.
  • Sink roles — each Sink declares whether its stream is a product (counts as revenue), waste, or ignore. Defaults to product.

Operating hours for annualization come from the project's economic settings (default 8000 h/yr).

Prices you can override​

Chemical and utility prices resolve through an append-only override system with scope precedence (scenario → project → global → default), so you can pin contract prices without losing the audit trail. See Prices & Overrides.