About Xspiceo

1987 – A young process-chemist, Mr Arvind Sundaram (today our Managing Director), saw an alarming pattern while working in a fertiliser complex: hidden crevice corrosion was destroying heat exchangers long before their design life. Spare parts were imported, downtime costs were soaring, and vendors battled over whose product was to blame. Arvind believed the industry needed vendor-neutral forensic analysis more than another “miracle additive.”

He founded Spice Consultants—a one-room lab in Pondicherry—to run simple, reproducible bench tests on scale inhibitors and biocides. His first customer, a local textile mill, signed on for a three-month pilot. The programme cut blow-down water by 22 %, saving enough in steam costs to fund a full-time water-chemistry technician. Word spread quickly.

In 1993 a coastal petrochemical giant (name withheld under NDA) approached us with a chronic issue: sulphidic corrosion in a 18 MW heat-recovery steam generator. Previous suppliers blamed brackish source water; the client blamed uneven dosing. We proposed a long-term, data-logged study:

• Baseline – six weeks of corrosion-coupon monitoring at 24 critical points.
• Chemical fingerprinting – ion chromatography to trace contaminants back to their sources.
• Pilot correction – phased introduction of a proprietary phosphate-zinc blend married with polymeric dispersants.
• Digital reconciliation – custom spreadsheets (this was the ’90s!) aligning metallurgical loss with process metrics.

Results after 18 months

• Corrosion rate: – 63 %
• Fuel consumption: – 9 %
• Unplanned shutdowns: 0

The project earned Spice Consultants a “Gold Vendor” rating and—more importantly—taught us that evidence + impartiality = trust. By the end of 1995 we were re-christened Xspiceo Global Traders, reflecting our twin paths: consult first, trade only what the data justifies.