I would assume the development alone of a working prototype that is able to collect some interesting data and transmit them from isolated locations (appeared to be the main idea) will cost in the range of 20-50k $.
I could do it for much less, based on commodity hardware like the Raspberry pi or other arm-based minicomputers and commodity sensors.
5-10k for development (1-2 months of work), around 150$ hardware costs for the device per unit.
What state is the middleware/condensator in? Could we just use MQTT?
Please keep the IoT idea, this is what makes this project special.
Maybe you can code. But are you aware with chemical analytics? Or communication analytics? It's not enough to take a pi and code some lines...