Oswal Greentech Limited had the appetite for a significant manufacturing investment. The Delhi-based company had been watching India's chemicals and FMCG sectors expand steadily, and the leadership team had a clear enough sense of direction — specialty chemicals, downstream integration, something with genuine long-term demand. What they needed was someone to translate that instinct into a validated, financeable project.

NPCS evaluated several manufacturing opportunities against the company's investment profile before landing on Linear Alkyl Benzene, or LAB, as the recommendation.

If you're not familiar with LAB, it's the primary raw material used to make Linear Alkyl Benzene Sulphonate — the surfactant that goes into virtually every liquid detergent, household cleaner, and laundry product on the market. It's biodegradable, it's in consistent demand, and India consumes significant volumes of it while still importing a meaningful share of domestic requirements. That import gap is the kind of structural opening that makes a domestic manufacturing case straightforward to build.

India's detergent and personal care market has been growing steadily, with consumption rising in Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities as incomes and hygiene awareness have both improved. Beyond the domestic story, export opportunities to South Asia, the Middle East, and Africa are real — the detergent industry across those regions is expanding, and buyers are actively looking for reliable supply sources.

NPCS worked through the project across six phases. The market analysis covered domestic and global LAB demand, end-use industry breakdowns, pricing dynamics, and growth forecasts. The raw material assessment looked at feedstock procurement — specifically n-paraffins in the C10 to C14 range and benzene — mapping domestic suppliers and import sourcing alternatives to give the client a realistic picture of input cost stability.

The technical feasibility work covered the full manufacturing process in detail. LAB production starts with isolating n-paraffins from kerosene using molecular sieve adsorption — typically through the UOP Molex process or its equivalent. Those paraffins are then dehydrogenated to mono-olefins using a platinum-alumina catalyst in the UOP Pacol process. The core reaction — alkylation of benzene with those linear olefins — can be run using traditional hydrofluoric acid catalysis or, preferably from a safety and environmental standpoint, through the Detal-Plus solid acid catalyst process. The crude LAB is then fractionated and distilled to commercial purity specifications, with heavy alkylate separated as a marketable by-product.

We specified the plant equipment at each stage: molecular sieve adsorption units, dehydrogenation reactors, alkylation reactors, multi-stage distillation columns, HF acid recovery systems where applicable, DM water plant, nitrogen generation, steam systems, and a quality control laboratory set up to NABL-aligned standards for GC and analytical testing.

The financial model covered capital expenditure across land, civil infrastructure, production equipment, utilities, environmental systems, and working capital. Projected financial indicators pointed to strong ROI potential anchored by consistent FMCG sector demand, an attractive IRR supported by both domestic and export revenue streams, and a payback period competitive with industry benchmarks for specialty chemical plants. The import substitution dimension added further upside to the revenue case.

Oswal Greentech reviewed the feasibility study and formally committed to moving forward with LAB plant implementation. That's the outcome this kind of work is designed to produce — not a report that sits in a drawer, but a decision made with real clarity behind it.