Featuring John Zink

Have you ever wondered about the intricacies of vapor capture and control technology? Or how the unexpected chill of cold weather could seriously impact system performance? Well, you're in for a treat with this episode! We had the pleasure of speaking with the Application Engineering Manager at John Zink,  Emily Rohr. John Zink is an established name in the combustion world from the 1920s to the present day. 

With her rich knowledge and hands-on experience, Emily delves into the nitty-gritty of how equipment is shipped and sheds light on the importance of a pre-checklist and regular visual inspections. She also emphasizes flame scanners and air intake's significant role in ensuring optimal system performance. The depth of insight she provides into this complex topic is truly eye-opening and a must-listen for facility and plant managers seeking a deeper understanding of the combustion world.

Emily wraps up with some downright hilarious anecdotes about her unexpected encounters with wildlife in her work. Picture alligators sunbathing on skids or owls nesting in stacks - yes, it's as wild as it sounds! Join us for this episode as we dive into the fascinating realm of vapor control technology, laugh at the unexpected, and learn from Emily's wealth of knowledge and experience.

 This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be considered legal or regulatory advice. We are not responsible for any losses, damages, or liabilities that may occur from using this podcast. This podcast is not intended to replace professional regulatory or legal advice, and the views expressed in this podcast may not be those of the host, which would be me or Integrity Environmental. Thank you very much for listening. We would be happy to provide professional regulatory advice as part of our consulting services if you need professional regulatory advice.  

Transcript

Shannon: 0:43

Good morning. Welcome to Tank Talk podcast. I am very excited to welcome Emily Rohr to our podcast today. She is the application engineering manager for the vapor control systems division at the John Zink company and she is the design engineer on many of the vapor control and capture projects that our firm has also been a part of. I am incredibly excited to have her here today to talk about vapor capture and vapor control technology because many of our clients are required to have that capability under 40 CFR 63, which is a very large, very complex air regulation. Emily and I have worked together on the installation of a couple of different vapor capture units in vapor combustion unit systems and I really wanted to pick her brain about these systems. Good morning, Emily. Welcome to the podcast. Good morning.

Shannon: 1:37

Thank you for having me. So I have to start out. I have to ask was John Zink a real person?

Emily: 1:44

That is everyone's favorite question and everybody always calls the hotline saying is John Zink available? So that is not a unknown question to us. So yes, john Zink was a person. So the company itself was started in the 20s. So this company has been around for a very long time in the combustion world and with specifics to that it was found in the 20s. But one aspect of John Zink that people don't know is Coke industries acquired John Zink in the late 1980s. So we have been part of the Coke Industries Company specifically for about 30 years now. So a lot of the actual background and a lot of our knowledge and applications have come from you know, driving that Coke relationship as well in other aspects of business moving forward.

Shannon: 2:32

And they're pretty heavily involved in the oil and gas industry, so I can see that would be a good matchup.

Emily: 2:39

Yes, we like to work with other companies that we can drive, you know, optimization and create efficiencies and maybe other ways that other companies don't have those luxuries like we do.

Shannon: 2:50

Well, and I am curious and I ask a lot of our guests because, you know, bulk fuels is not an industry that most people get into. And then vapor capture and controls and even more specialized niche how did you get involved with vapor control technology? Would you go to school? What kind of career path did you experience?

Emily: 3:08

So I did not get my you know special degree in vapor control.

Emily: 3:12

I did not know about that in college as well. I graduated from the University of Kansas, so I am from Kansas originally. I graduated in chemical engineering, so a lot of my background in college was specifically around chemicals engineering bases. I had done some experience with oil and gas as part of my internships, in addition to some pharmaceutical involvement, so kind of hit every direction that you could. Coke industry has actually recruited me out of the University of Kansas. I ended up taking the position in Tulsa, oklahoma, so that's where our headquarters are, and I started as an applications engineer in vapor control and I've been here for now 10 years, so it has been a long stint. It was something I was not directly familiar with. I learned a lot about it just in my first year in my career and ever since I haven't left. So I still love it, still love to do it and it's a really fun field to be a part of.

Shannon: 4:07

What about this field like intrigues you, or like what made you stay this long in that industry?

Emily: 4:13

It's a field that allows me to expand, of course, my process knowledge, so I really enjoy using my process and understanding the engineering behind it. But I also get to interact with my customers, so I get to interact with people, I get to have conversations, I get to find why you need something, so in particular, you know in this case talking, why do you need a vapor combustion system or why do you need a vapor recovery system. I get to solve problems and it's a really fun career to be able to always be on your toes, never doing the same thing every day. I would love to say everything is the same every week, but it never is. It's been really fun and it just it's ever changing in my 10 year career, so it's pretty exciting.

Shannon: 4:55

Yes, we have found that as well, for as uniform as tanks can appear on the outside, once you get into the details, every single tank is different. Every single system is strange and unusual. Your company creates vapor capture and control systems, and the reasoning behind that is a very complex regulation 40 CFR 63. At the very basic level, 40 CFR 63 is looking to reduce vapor emissions in the United States overall, with specific regulations for all sorts of different industries. Bulk fuel storage and terminaling is one of them and so I was wondering if you could sort of review how vapor capture and control can benefit human health and the environment, because that's what the EPA is pushing and that's what these systems are intended to do. It's to reduce the amount of vapors being emitted, and I just like you to go over how the systems you guys designed make that happen.

Emily: 5:52

John Zink as a whole. We have multiple product lines that, of course, are looking to reduce overall emissions at facilities. We have boiler burners, flares, thermal oxidizer, where the company you come to when you need emission control and various aspects of many oil and gas you can say that, of course, with chemical companies, other variations, where there's emissions either from a safety or, to your point, a regulation, is driving you to reduce that emission In particular my team. So we focus on what we call vapor control, which can get many different names associated to it.

Emily: 6:27

We work a lot of time in a lot of loadout facilities or, to your point, bulk storage facilities, where typically you are moving a product or some type of refined product is probably down the line of a refinery so that can include gasoline, these distillates, jet fuel, you know all of these different things that are kind of the end of the line of a refinery and we are trying to take what is residual vapor or stuff coming off the liquid and we're trying to either burn it so we can combust it or we can actually recover it in some cases. So we have kind of driven our market to find those loading operations that are commonly including air as a backfill. So a lot of tanks bring in air, truck tankers when they're loading they push air out, they bring air in. So a lot of our applications are kind of driven in that direction.

Emily: 7:20

So the benefit of our systems is, you know, if you don't have anything, it's all just going to the atmosphere. So it's just releasing, which is everybody knows. You know, hydrocarbons aren't great necessarily just to release to the atmosphere. It's better to control them in some way, and so our technologies give you the option to control them by burning. So where you're actually disrupting it or converting it to something else, or you can recover it, so you're actually taking it out of the stream, recovering it back into a liquid product and now it's like air coming back out. So there's a lot of value to companies to install these, because for what would be just going to the atmosphere and potentially affecting the atmosphere, now we're actually going to do something with it.

Shannon: 8:04

Yep. Recovery is a big economic incentive, I think, for many companies, although in Alaska our ecosystem and environment make recovery a little less economically viable because we're just not as hot as, say, texas or Oklahoma. And then just a brief overview for those of us who are really new in the listening audience all of the distillates that you mentioned. They're broken down into sort of these five basic categories there's aviation gasoline or abgas, low lead 100. There's gasoline, there's jet fuel, jet a, jet eight, jp eight, jp five. There's all these different kinds of jet fuels. And then there's, typically in Alaska, we have number one and number two, diesel, probably in the lower 48, you only have one kind of diesel. We have to add additives in our diesel so it doesn't gel up in the cold, and all of those have different vapor thresholds and so things like diesel and jet a are actually combustible liquids. They don't. They do have vapor but it's much lower, and the lower the temperature the lower that vapor.

Shannon: 9:03

But for two specific types of fuel, the gasoline and the aviation gasoline, those two are flammable name it vapors quite frequently.

Shannon: 9:12

In the higher the temperature you're going to get a lot more vapor, and so for many of our clients the control of vapor is also about stopping product loss to vaporization.

Shannon: 9:21

And if you have nothing in place, not even a pressure vac vent, which unfortunately I have totally seen many times, but you're losing a significant, sometimes up to 10% of your storage volume over a really warm summer, and you can actually, with gasoline because of the low vaporization rate, which is all the way below zero, I believe, fahrenheit you can actually lose fuel in the winter too, even if it's very cold and deep as darkest Alaska.

Shannon: 9:47

So the vapor control and combustion systems are that you're in firm designs is looking at capturing and controlling those vapors, and the control can either be burning it, which is turning it into something that's not as noxious, converting it, like you said, or it can capture it and return it back to the tank, and those are closed systems. And then I think from the EPA's perspective, benzene is probably the most chemically harmful to the environment component of those vapors, and so they're trying to make sure that overall, in the entire United States, benzene levels go down, and that's why they target two specific fuels which they generally call gasoline, because they are different kinds of gasoline.

Shannon: 10:27

But I definitely get people being like oh yeah, I've got my gasoline covered and I'm like, oh, but you have to have gas too. Don't forget those guys. But all flammable liquids at a fuel farm emit vapor, and so the EPA is trying to reduce that volume. And benzene, as many of us know, is like a cancer causing agent. It's not really great for the environment or people in general, and so the more we can do to capture and control it, the better, which is why I really like your systems, because they are working so well with the existing atmospheric systems that we had built years ago and meshing with them to do that capturing control. We mentioned briefly that this can be a benefit to the business. Do you want to talk specifically about what these systems can do, like the upside of vapor control, to like the bottom line?

Emily: 11:13

Yeah, absolutely. One thing we always say is you do have vapor control on your system, and it's another piece of equipment. But what currently is there is it's just releasing around people and that's kind of scary to think about. That's not something you want your team or your company to be exposed to. So you want to make sure everybody feels safe and feels safe in their operation, and so our system can be integrated to take away that fear of anything being around employees and, of course, that concern directly tied to it. So that is an upside to a business, with specifics to that, combustion is a tough one, because everyone knows combustion. You're burning it, you know. The joke is you're burning money because it's residual gas.

Emily: 11:58

That is an eight paper face, and so although it's burning, it is still allowing the safety aspect and it's allowing you to maybe extend your business model to hold more product or it's extending you other opportunity that maybe you weren't before, and so there's benefits to that. And then we did talk a little bit about vapor recovery, as you mentioned, in Alaska. It's not necessarily a perfect option. We have some systems up in Alaska, but these recovery systems have value for a lot of locations around the US and then some in Alaska where we can actually take the hydrocarbon.

Emily: 12:40

We can take that volume that is being released, as you mentioned, from the product and convert it into a product. So we're actually taking it and we're reintroducing it as a recovered product that you can do and then take and resell. So it's an investment, of course, to the system, but there's value that's coming from that recovery and that you can use it again and it's good for the environment. And then, of course, you know, doesn't hurt to get some money out of it too. So there, definitely recovery has more, you know, bottom dollar benefits from you hear recovery versus burning. There, of course, is the twofold. But I do think both technologies give you an opportunity to make sure your business is running safely and, of course, letting you optimize your potential future growth as well.

Shannon: 13:28

Yes, vapor capture and control systems, once installed, allow companies to operate at a much higher level and have a much higher daily, monthly and annual throughput of those gasoline products. They also allow you to continue operating under 40 CFR 63 if you have met certain criteria in your operational history. And then you're right, there are vapor recovery units in Alaska. It does make sense in some places We'll talk about this later but I think sometimes the entry cost plays a factor as well. The recovery systems tend to be a little more expensive than the combustion systems, and so a lot of our clients when they're looking at the cost analysis, they're trying to see how many years it'll take them to pay off the system, and so combustion typically wins out because it's shorter recovery time.

Emily: 14:18

It is something that we understand. We jokingly say there is a breaking point on vapor recovery where you decide if it's free or not. Not to say you can't do it on every system, but sometimes commercially it may not make the decision. So the nice thing about our team is we're very equipped to look at both. We can give that analysis back and say, hey, maybe combustion's a better option, both commercially and just long-term the life of the equipment. So I do agree with you. There are losses and minuses above.

Shannon: 14:50

Well, in every capital expenditure project has to go through that cost analysis and I do appreciate your team's ability to consider all of the factors. I mean your team was amazing working with limited internet record keeping options. Like I was really impressed with their flexibility and with your technology's flexibility of doing things different ways to be able to help us figure out the problem or solve the problem. And could you give us a brief description of the difference between a vapor return system and a vapor combustion system?

Emily: 15:24

Yes, I can do that. So, as we mentioned, you know, vapor combustion is a lot simpler and it kind of goes with the name. So vapor combustion systems, how they work is we will connect. It's what we call a VCU. You'll hear that a lot. So it's a vapor combustion unit. You'll see that as a short acronym on most of our PFDs or things like that.

Shannon: 15:46

Oh, air, air is full of acronyms. It's an acronym, so.

Emily: 15:51

And I am portable at acronyms so I do my best to explain them when I talk with them what we'll do and in you know a specific case in Alaska we'll take a truck loading operation. So say, a truck pulls in, you're going to load product, so you're filling the truck with liquid, so from there the vapor or whatever is in the vapor space from the truck will be displaced to what we call a vapor collection system. So what? The vapor collection system is a pipe built out where you will modify your truck racks, you have certain safety, you know features underneath to capture the vapor and then of course, that will then be piped over to our system From there. The combustion system is very simple in its nature. So we have what we kind of walk it through of how it would go through the system, but we have a valve. We have also three levels of what we call flashback prevention.

Shannon: 16:44

This is something that we find very important.

Emily: 16:46

You know if you're burning, if there is flame, you got to have safety. That is a big feature for us that we like to talk about. So how our system will work is you go through the valve. So this is just an actuated valve. It'll open and close depending on pressure. So one of our features for safety is actually pressure control. So we make sure that we're staging based on pressure. We don't want to send just a constant stream to our system. We want to make sure it's pressurized and that it's going to open and not just sit open. And what happens if there's no truck loading and we're burning? You know that's not good for assist gas usage, it's not good for operation of the system. So one of the things we do is pressure control.

Emily: 17:25

From there We'll have what we call a detonation arrestor, or in a lot of terms people say DA. That's another, another version. There are other things in the market called a flame arrestor. That's another version of flashback prevention. We specifically use a detonation arrestor due to its capacity to be able to protect a detonation in the pipe. So they both have differences in terms of what length of pipe they can take a detonation or flame. So we prefer the detonation arrestor, based on our operation. If you look at them, they're big, old, bulky looking things. What they are is they're just actually it's a lot of crimped metal. So internally they have these gaps. So they've crimped metal to have these gaps to help with flame propagation. So it's actually trying to minimize what actual exposure to the flame it has and it's kind of stopping it.

Shannon: 18:19

It's breaking up that big vapor cloud or whatever, into small pockets.

Emily: 18:24

Yes, Exactly so it's. And you know we are not the the builder of those. We get those from a supplier but we typically define those as based on the grouping of the either chemical or product that you're loading. Those buyers will talk about groupings of, say you'll hear group D or group C or all the groupings, and what that's telling us is if for the most part we have a group D, so in this space on gasoline vapor, that would be what we define as a group D, and we define it as a group D because of the constituents of gasoline, so that's the butanes, the pentanes, all of that. And they have designed these arresters for what that actual detonation would look like from those chemicals. So that's how we go through that selection, but that is a big piece of the vapor combustion system.

Shannon: 19:13

So there's piping that's collecting the vapor from the truck at the truck rack and it's pushing it back to this D A unit and the vapor is collecting inside of it and then it's pushed, it's pushed through that.

Emily: 19:25

Yes, so it looks like a kind of trying to describe. So it's like coming into a pipe. We'll have pipe on our skin as well, so you'll see pipe. The pipe leads it to a valve and then we'll pipe outside of the valve to the detonation arrester. It's a passive device, so it's in that line, and then the pipe will actually go from there to what we call our vapor combustion stack. So that is actually the cylindrical shell stack where the burning happens.

Shannon: 19:50

So that's where the actual flame occurs.

Emily: 19:54

They are impressive.

Shannon: 19:55

Yes, they're very tall and they're set off away. They have to be set back so far from the tanks and the truck rack because, of course, the fire. But yeah, they look like a big chimney up to the sky, exactly.

Emily: 20:08

And there. And you know we try to keep them as simple as possible because the intent is to contain the flame. So we are trying to make sure. One joke that we always get is so we do have open flame systems. They are not, they're not the typical norm.

Shannon: 20:26

They in in in New World a lot of folks don't like to see open flames, as much anymore.

Emily: 20:32

So we created a vapor combustion system that has a shell, so it actually it is not an enclosed, so it is not, there's not a top, but they are enclosed to minimize, you know, the outturnal reach out reach of the flame.

Shannon: 20:50

The visual impact of the flames in the sky.

Emily: 20:54

Exactly, and there are benefits to it as well. So we kind of walk through the staging skid and you get through the staging and what we call pressure control in that line. Now you have the vapor combustion stack, which the stack is where we actually do a lot of our modeling to know what type of destruction efficiency we're getting. How are we temperature controlling? So, kind of going back in the day of what we used to do, a lot of the systems you see, in the past were either open flame, so there's no temperature control, so they just you light it with a pilot, it burns. That sounds good, that's, that's what you're doing. We've come a long way where we even took a step from there and they started enclosing it, but they actually didn't temperature control. And when I'm describing temperature control, what that means is we're actually modulating the air coming into the system. So on the stack itself you have these dampers, or they're kind of big air dampers that you see on the side of the stack.

Shannon: 21:53

And they cannot be blocked by snow. We know this.

Emily: 21:58

Yes, I have had my fair share in that region of getting a little creative with how you put things next to a stack with a four feet of snow. So, yes, it cannot be blocked by snow and the benefit we have those on there. We design them for a certain amount of air infiltration because part of combustion is you need the air with the hydrocarbon, with something to light it, so we have a pilot system that comes in. It's actually the gas that, either propane or natural gas. A lot of cases in Alaska, of course, are propane.

Shannon: 22:31

Most of our facilities are propane. I don't well, that's not true. I do maybe know of one that's on natural gas. I think all the rest are propane.

Shannon: 22:40

And then I do just I want to clarify this the burning of it and we deal with this in public outreach meetings as well is that it's a very striking image and I think, if you work in the oil and gas industry and you're used to flaring off a stack or whatever, those are normal, and I think, if I could for our listeners when we're breaking it down by combustion, it's a process where we're taking all these complex chemicals that are cancerous and no good and we're turning them into their basic carbon elements and ash, and so it is striking. But if you imagine that what we're doing is destroying chemicals that are not good for you instead of looking at it as a flame, I think that goes over well. And the temperature modulation let's talk about that, because that is driven by the EPA's requirements. They say you have to be 95% or better efficiency and you have to show that you're meeting the 95% efficiency.

Emily: 23:36

Yes. So, as I had mentioned, we went from no temperature control completely to then the regulation and actually the market was driving us to be temperature control. Temperature control has been around for a long time. This isn't something that's new to the industry, but there is opportunity to be more strategic about how we do it.

Emily: 23:57

I'm trying to optimize the system because part of temperature control as we alluded to talking about propane is with destruction efficiency. On a system, you have to have temperature and you have to have residence time, and so when we're looking at a system, we're taking the vapor that's coming to us and saying, okay, we have to pick a temperature at a certain residence time to get us a certain destruction efficiency. So in this case, 95% has to be a guarantee, and we have all of this process knowledge to know how to control and what those parameters should be. But in operation, what happens if you get a vapor stream that has no hydrocarbon? So what if it's air but you're loading and so you have to meet a temperature? So the way to do that is we introduce a supplemental fuel.

Emily: 24:48

So in in Alaska for the most part it's propane, and that fuel is actually what helps us heat up the stack. So it is getting us to the process guarantee of, say, a typical standard is 500 degrees Fahrenheit in our stack, and so it's getting us to that baseline to prove that we are meeting a 95% destruction efficiency. But then you also have to consider the other side of it.

Shannon: 25:13

So what if your stack is?

Emily: 25:14

too hot. You know, our stacks do have limitations. They are refractory lined, they are built to withstand temperature. But you don't want to run it too hot because now you're going to potentially, you know, hurt your equipment. You're going to maybe not, the longevity of the equipment is not there. So we also have a high point where we'll temperature control. So we'll say, oh, our stack is too hot, let's open up that air damper at the bottom and introduce air.

Emily: 25:41

So we're trying to control to kind of a perfect temperature where we know we're meeting destruction efficiency, but we're also not. You know, we're keeping the longevity of the equipment, we're not operating too hot. And then, of course, we're minimizing supplemental fuel. We don't ever want to have to have too much fuel. That is our goal is to minimize that fuel. We know it's cost to the customer, we know it's kind of not good for us to do it anyway. So this temperature control is really important with the system itself and that's really how we make sure that we're meeting all of those requirements.

Shannon: 26:16

So this system what I really like about it as somebody who works in the regulatory side of things and the operations side of things not necessarily on the design side is your system has those guardrails and it will not operate and it will not allow you to load fuel if it cannot attain the 95%. If it's too hot or too cold, it turns itself off and sends you an error code. So from an operational perspective, it's basically making sure you never are in violation of your EPA requirements at a fundamental level and there are definitely some like false codes and it can cause some problems sometimes, but your team is really good about answering that phone call really good. I've never had a case where a client has called you guys and not heard back from you within 30 minutes. Like it's been pretty good.

Shannon: 27:02

I did have one question about the temperature piece of it. How does the ambient air temperature affect that? Because some of our locations have really wide varieties, like one in Western Alaska it could be up to 88 degrees in the summer and all the way down to minus 45 in the winter. Like that's a pretty wide range.

Emily: 27:18

Yeah, definitely not Texas From that standpoint. So yes, I will say cold weather does affect our system. You know in every which way you could say so from an ambient standpoint. So our systems are typically built out of carbon steel. They are very we don't have the need for, you know more efficient steel. Carbon steel is really good in our application it does the job. Now, in really cold weather there is the potential for that steel rating to be not as low as potentially where the location is. So that may be a change in, of course, materials of construction looking at things like that. But a lot of things that we also include or recommend, I guess, in that way is heat tracing and insulation, a lot of low points in a line. So that can be the valve seat. Right at the bottom of the valve seat the detonation raster naturally has a kind of curved bottom where it can collect liquid that can freeze up, and that's all just due to the atmospheric cool.

Shannon: 28:18

Yeah, so air, as many of us know, is not just gases. It also has humidity and it has water in it and some of the spaces and things like your detonation raster are very small, so it doesn't take a whole lot of water to be collected over a season for it to really throw a wrench into the whole system.

Emily: 28:38

Yes, yes. And then of course the ambient air. As I already mentioned with the temperature control, so we bring in ambient air. So in our stack we are exposed to ambient air all the time and if you're heating space, so think of the stack as like an enclosed space is at negative 40. That's a lot colder than starting from, say, a 30 degree or 40 degree starting point. So what may end up happening is we may actually need more supplemental fuel just to get us above, to be in an ambient condition, because so I guess I'd say a more normal ambient condition than a negative 40 condition. So that also affects our system and that it may cause an increase in supplemental fuel.

Shannon: 29:28

The hope is that's more part of the startup of the system.

Emily: 29:31

So that's getting it warm, getting it ready to go Once it's operational. Then of course the hope is that you're maintaining the temperature. It's not turning off too often. But yeah, one of the negatives, unfortunately, is you do have to use a little bit more gas to get it up to temperature.

Shannon: 29:47

And that's an allowance for the environment that it's operating in. And when we go through the initial startup, there is a whole startup phase that you guys go through, which I also really enjoy because it ensures that everything's working. But during that initial startup, we always give our clients guidance. I'm like, whatever you propane you think you're going to use, just double it, because a lot of our communities get it by barge and so there is no other way to get more except to fly it in at great expense.

Shannon: 30:12

I'm like if you don't use that much great, you'll have more propane next year.

Shannon: 30:15

But if it uses more than we think it is, because it's an especially cold winter, you're going to. You know you need a cushion and once you've operated it for a year or two you'll know exactly how much it takes. But one thing that's bitter clients before is you know if they have an unusually high demand here, like they're selling a lot more gasoline than they normally do, it can really like, depending on what time of year they're selling it and how much supplemental propane they need, it can really affect how much propane they need to have on hand for that. So it's not just the system itself but also the throughput. If you're going to increase the throughput, you need to look at when you're going to increase it and what that might do to your system. So thank you. I think that's a really good overview of combustion and my favorite part about the combustion stacks is there's a little step in a viewing window and you can like watch it burn, which is my favorite. I always take a peek when I go up to them.

Emily: 31:08

Well, and it's funny because we have them, of course, for you all to see it and get to look in. But it's actually really important for us too, because that's how we can make sure we're aligning pilots, that everything flame scanner is lining up to see the pilot. So we joke that it's a viewing window, but we actually use it too to be able to make sure the system's operating well. So if we don't have those, we'd be a I think a lot of our technicians would be pretty disappointed. They'd have to look through a damper trying to figure out how to align a pilot.

Shannon: 31:36

So I don't even know how you would see inside it without it. There's no way. So vapor combustion systems we've definitely installed more of those, but there are vapor recovery systems, and so could you talk a little bit about how that system works? I have a feeling it starts the same You've got a truck rack and it's pushing vapor out, but then what's different about the recovery system?

Emily: 31:59

Yeah, absolutely so to your point, everything upstream is still the same. We're still receiving the vapors in a vapor collection. Nothing is really changing. It's when you get to our skid edge, and what you're looking at on the system itself is very different. So our vapor recovery systems are what we call in it's an AD-AB system, so what that means, it's a carbon adsorption system.

Shannon: 32:24

I love being very enunciated in these words because I still you have to with add and absorb, being so close together but exactly opposite in meeting.

Emily: 32:32

Yes, yes, so I will reference AD a lot, or AB, as in boy, I say that a lot and I always say I'm not trying to talk like a kid, they get very muddled together. But how our system works is we utilize activated carbon, or what we call these little coal pellets. In that way, it's an activated carbon system that we will collect the vapors on. So it's these two vessels. So think of it. Like we've probably seen maybe in Alaska too, there are a lot of confusion comes from carbon canisters or a lot of, where they are used as more of a passive carbon filter, if you want to say it that way. We also use carbon filters in water.

Emily: 33:18

We use them in all these sources so we're using a carbon that's applicable to hydrocarbon service, so we're actually taking a certain volume of that carbon. It's a batch process. So we have two vessels that we actually put this in, and the reason behind that is in one vessel we'll collect the vapors, so it comes in a pipe. We have kind of what we call almost like a staging skid, very similar to a VCU, and what that staging skid is doing is it's isolating the two vessels, so one vessel will receive vapors. So what that's doing is it's opening a valve. It goes into this vessel and it passes through that vessel. So it's a passive, very similar to other filters, and it's going to collect all the hydrocarbon. So it's collecting it and then it comes out the top. It actually goes through a vent stack and it's clean air. So it's kind of like a filter. It comes out as clean air On the other side. So because passive carbon canisters- they fill up.

Emily: 34:18

So they get to a point where they are full and a lot of times those are not advantageous in our field because we have such high hydrocarbon that it would fill up too fast, the cost of ownership having to replace it, and all of that is not good for our service. So instead what we do is we actually use a regeneration system or a vacuum system to clean off the carbon. So in the other vessel that's now full.

Emily: 34:45

So say it already went through this process, it collected all these vapors it's what we are saying is it's full, so it has hit its peak of capacity. From there we're going to use a vacuum system to actually clean it. So we're going to desorb it or pull that hydrocarbon off with a vacuum system and that's what gets the carbon back to being clean again, so it actually is in like a working state.

Shannon: 35:08

So it's like cleaning the filter off. It's cleaning the filter off so it can be reused again.

Emily: 35:12

Okay, Exactly so. The intent is because our service is so high-hydrocarbon in a lot of cases. It's a reusable system, so it can be continuously used over the course of its life. It's not a carbon canister. We have to replace it every six months. Now it does have a working life. So carbon and its nature it has a working life.

Shannon: 35:36

It will eventually get spent. Yes, Exactly.

Emily: 35:39

It's like anything you have to filter, you have to replace it. We typically say in our systems it can range anywhere from seven to 10 years of life of expectancy. So we know it's a big piece of the system. It's a commercially expensive piece of the system, so we try to always look at opportunities for different types of carbon. Folks always joke why you use certain types of carbon. Because it can come from coconut, it can come from coal, it can come from wood, it can come from all of these things, and what we're trying to do, of course, is find the best working capacity, so making sure that it can capture everything.

Shannon: 36:16

But then of course, looking at cost.

Emily: 36:17

We know cost is a big driver. So we want to make sure we're meeting all the process guarantees that we are setting forth, but of course, considering long-term life of the equipment too.

Shannon: 36:29

So when it cleans it off, where does the carbon that it cleans off go, or the hydrocarbon? So you've wiped it all out, the filter's good to go again, but where are you putting the hydrocarbons that come off of that? Yes so the hydrocarbons will be pulled off.

Emily: 36:42

So we use a vacuum pump is what we call it, and so it's some type of vacuum system where it pulls a deep vacuum, so almost a full vacuum on the carbon itself. And it'll actually desorb all of those hydrocarbons, so mostly hydrocarbon coming off of it.

Emily: 36:58

It goes through our vacuum system and then that will actually discharge to the. So the AB part of the conversation, so the absorber part of the conversation, where this is kind of like a packed tower. So we'll actually discharge the vapor into a tower and from there what we use is we actually use a slipstream of the product that's being loaded or some type of product on site. So a lot of cases we use is gasoline and we bring a slipstream into our tower so the vapor will actually come in, the liquid comes in the top and they collect together. So it's kind of like a packed bed where we actually will have random packing inside the absorber itself. That allows contact time, it allows those vapors to be recovered and then that's where the actual recovery happens.

Shannon: 37:46

You're laying the vapor alongside active liquid and allowing it to absorb right back into the stream. Oh, okay.

Emily: 37:54

I got it Exactly, yep, and so then we actually have a return line. So then at the bottom of the vessel we'll send that liquid product back. So typically we get the product from a tank. So tanks are the most common operation we use. They're stagnant products. It's sitting a volume of product. That's great for us. We've also done loading lines. We've done other scenarios where we've had to pull from other applications. The system in itself is really unique in how a lot of it sounds very simple. I know not to convert to combustion, but it sounds simple.

Shannon: 38:31

I can see where your chemistry degree comes in handy for this because you're right, there's a lot of chemical processes. Just the word absorb and absorb. Have a lot of chemical processes embedded in them?

Emily: 38:42

yes, I know we jokingly have a picture that maybe I'll have to send you all as part of a reference for absorb and absorb where it's for adsorbing. So AD, we say it's adhering, so sticking. So the picture is a guy getting a pie in the face. It sticks and pie into the face and then the absorption is like taking in or in that case it's eating the pie.

Shannon: 39:07

That's a very good physical. I like it.

Emily: 39:09

Yeah, so I'll have to make sure to get, because that helps us from just a simple looking at it.

Shannon: 39:16

So you reintroduce it to the stream and then you run return lines back to the tank or generally, usually in 99% of the cases, you're doing it back to the tank. Yes, so let me ask you this specific to tank type, because we have facilities. Our largest facilities have large vertical cylindrical tanks, but they also have smaller horizontal tanks and especially for some of our products like aviation gasoline, they just don't store it in the volumes that they used to. Now that most airplanes have converted to jet fuel and so they have smaller horizontal tanks, does that impact this return system at all? Does it return in a different way or does it have different components?

Emily: 39:57

It does. So it's not necessarily how it returns or how we get it, how we look at our system to make sure that it's running at its peak capacity is. We want just constant replenished product. So anything that is a we joke and say a really big tank like a really big tank is great for a VRU because that means it's constant replenished product. We're looking for a low vapor pressure product. We're looking for something that's not gonna peek out really shortly because we're recovering to it, so it affects the vapor pressure and we wanna make sure that we have enough to operate and not impact the actual product itself and not saying from a contamination standpoint or anything of the sort, but because we are recovering that product back into it.

Emily: 40:44

The concern is if it's not if it's already high on our VP in the tank and you're only using a small volume. It doesn't allow the true VRU to have it's addition to the tank.

Shannon: 40:59

But now you may be in a tank restriction versus the VRU restriction when you bring fuel from the tank to go through your vapor recovery unit. It's too rich and it's not gonna absorb too much very much at the recovery unit, and so you wanna make sure that you've got a big enough volume that when you're returning this rich fuel to it, it's not raising the richness overall and make your system not work.

Emily: 41:22

Exactly. See, you're a chemist, you figured it out, I am definitely a biologist.

Shannon: 41:28

So I think I got you, I got you. It's like dissolved oxygen, but we're talking hydrocarbon. I'm gonna say it.

Emily: 41:35

Okay, I got you to use absorb in a sense. So there you go, you already got it.

Shannon: 41:41

So okay. So the bigger volume of the tank, it gives you a bigger source of, like, lower saturation material. But in a smaller tank what do you guys have to do? Because if it's a 15,000 gallon tank, that's not a lot of source.

Emily: 41:54

Yes. So that's a tough one. So a lot of times we have to look at. So we can actually also look at calculations of length of turnover of a tank. So we can say, based on the product, here's our VRU, here's the influx of what the VRU is going to do we can calculate how long that tank is actually gonna last for not exceeding vapor pressure parameters. So that's something we can do to figure that out with you. But then the question does come up is this really a viable VRU product or is this? Maybe combustion is the next step? We've also done loading lines. So loading lines I mentioned, and the reason why we say loading lines is because it's constant product, so it is constantly getting replenished. A lot of the restriction of that is now the recovered product is going back into the loading line, which is going into the truck or into other applications. So it's hard to capture what that true recovery is.

Shannon: 42:53

So it's exiting the system and you can't track once it's exited because it's just going straight into a truck and getting delivered somewhere Exactly.

Emily: 43:01

So we've looked at ways you can also cool the product and so you can almost do like a slipstream cooling product where you're trying to minimize vapor pressure influence. So I'm sure in Alaska a lot of folks know the colder it is. As to your point, the less it moves into vapor.

Emily: 43:17

So it stays cold and so similar with that. If we're exceeding vapor pressure in a tank or in a product, we can cool it and bring it down to make sure that we're not just because the system itself will add heat. So because it's compressing, because it's absorbing, because it's doing that, we're adding heat to the system. So if we can mitigate that, bring the heat down, we can try and maintain vapor pressure the best we can.

Shannon: 43:46

I can think of at least one client that has. I think one of their business models is to have multiple horizontal tanks rather than one large vertical, because you can mix and match. You can take tanks from this location and move them to another. They're a lot more portable of an asset, and I'm thinking specifically of this, like I can see where maybe combustion is where you would wanna go with that, because, well, I mean, I guess if you have lots of horizontal tanks, you could just borrow from different ones. Like, how would you do that, though? Would that be an operational? Like someone would have to go and open a valve.

Emily: 44:20

Yeah, so that's the fun part. With added tanks comes added complexity. We have done it before sometimes, and users prefer to have multiple tanks. To your point, because what if a tank has to get cleaned and the VRU is only connected to that tank? That limits them. So there are situations where we can actually put what we use as a pump or supply pump, so we're actually pushing the product from the tank to our system. We can put multiple pumps at various locations so we can put out one tank or the other tank or however we do it, and then we can actually control on our system. So we have a control system and we can pick which pump is working. So we'll say like oh, p1, that tank, that's what we want, and this is something of course the site can do. So this is on the operation screen that the site can go oh, that tank's out for commission, I'm gonna go to the other one, I'm gonna go select that.

Emily: 45:18

And what it'll do is you can do automatic valves, so you can say, hey, isolate, isolate, here you go, it's ready to go. A lot of folks prefer manual. They're all the different options. You can go down, you know all the things, but it's been more common to do more tanks than less on a VRU system, to give you flexibility.

Shannon: 45:34

Yeah, that's a really good point about ULJ and being able to operate while also taking the tank down. I will say, that for many places in Alaska that is a very complex system that requires access to consistent electricity and internet. Yes, we don't necessarily have it in all those locations, and I mean rural Alaska has electricity, of course, but the quality of the electricity can surge pretty frequently and it's really difficult on these very complex, highly engineered systems. So, thank you, That was a really good overview of how the recovery system works how how the combustion system works and how it works with different kinds of tanks. So I'm thinking, if you're following along on this podcast with us, if you have your own facility, you're probably thinking how how do I know which system is best for me? And l what are some of the considerations that someone would look through when they're like picking out a system for what they're trying to do?

Emily: 46:33

Absolutely so. This is something that you know our team is. That's what we do every day, so we are always happy to help go through all of the options and all the things that go into it, but high level. When you're looking at the two systems and you're looking at your facility one big point that you mentioned so we can start with recovery Recovery the big thing with it you want a lot of product to load.

Emily: 46:57

It's valuable in that you're recovering. So the more product you load, the more throughput you have better opportunity for return of investment. So we call that an ROI or return of investment. And you mentioned one analysis that's performed is, you know, looking at the term of the project and how long is it gonna take to pay that off? As we've kind of alluded to, and in the scope of work, of what's included, a vapor recovery system has a lot more stuff, so there's a lot more cost upfront that may not be valuable to a smaller facility. It's a big investment cost and maybe with the throughput or the volume it might not be worth it.

Shannon: 47:39

So let's talk about throughput scale, because I would say most of Alaska, even in our highest volume, would never exceed even 50,000 or 100,000 gallons of gasoline in a day. They might for jet fuel and they might for diesel, but they probably won't for gasoline. What's like the highest throughput capacity you've ever designed a system for.

Emily: 48:02

Oh, my goodness. Um, I really have to think about this one. So for probably, me personally in my team. So we've looked at anywhere up to 90,000 barrels per hour. Um, uh, I'll take it, I'll take it, I'll take it. So scaling, you know, pretty large marine applications with really high throughputs. In addition, we have a Luxembourg counterpart in Europe that they are very common to have a lot of large operating facilities.

Shannon: 48:37

So for, let me do the math, 90,000 barrels an hour is 3.7 million gallons an hour. So just for apples and apples, yes. Alaska throughput volumes are very low compared to what they could be in some of these really large port facilities.

Emily: 48:54

Yes, Exactly Yep. So and that's, of course, looking at applications. So that's another piece that when you're looking at your applications in Alaska, you know a lot of its truck loading or tank fencing or lower volumes coming out. There are other applications in the United States, in the world, where you know how they're loading they're loading a ship or they're loading a real car or they're loading all of these really big vessels that take in a lot of volume In a very short amount of time, which means a lot more vapor, because you've got a lot more displacement.

Emily: 49:24

Exactly so a recovery system is actually a really good option potentially in those cases, because you quickly learn. You pay it off in a very short amount of time.

Shannon: 49:33

Yeah, even a 1% recovery on 3.7 million an hour would pay for itself pretty quickly. But we are based in the Northwest and Alaska.

Emily: 49:43

So for most of our clients.

Shannon: 49:45

It's just not gonna pencil out ever.

Emily: 49:47

Absolutely and honestly. That's why we like to sell both. So me and my team, we sell both and because there's value in both applications. That's why combustion when you kind of lend itself to go to combustion, combustion is tried and true technology. It has been around for a long time. It's really simple in its nature. It has an opportunity for flexibility of product. So you can we jokingly say it just burns it, but you get the opportunity to say if you wanna start loading a chemical or you wanna start doing other things. Recovery may have its restrictions from a process standard, but combustion, okay, we may have to look at the detonation arrester. We may have to consider a different temperature operating set point, but for the most part it can take in a lot of product.

Shannon: 50:35

So it can take in variances of product.

Emily: 50:37

And then, of course, the biggest thing, as we have alluded to, is cost. So upfront cost is a lot lower. There's a lot less stuff, so it's very simple in its nature. Another negative of combustion and I think you actually talked about it earlier is it is the flame, so you do have to put it in a non-hazardous area.

Shannon: 50:58

It's an exposure to external sources that could potentially cause fire, so you have to be aware On the design teams they do so much Tetris trying to fit those stacks onto the limited property that the client has available.

Emily: 51:13

Yes, yes, and it's tough because that's not something that in a refined facility filled with all of these leak points and tanks and things like that.

Emily: 51:23

it's not super simple, but that is one tough part about combustion In addition it does require supplemental fuel so you do have to engage some type of propane or, if you're in a location that has natural gas, something to be able to light our pilots and temperature control. So that's kind of another disadvantage on the combustion side. But it's a lot simpler and it works great and it does the job. So when looking at the two in particular, you know I think the VRUs are a lot lend themselves to having opportunity for high throughput facilities. In addition, if you're restricted in hazardous area location, vrus can be installed anywhere.

Shannon: 52:06

Yes, I was going to say I think there's some specific locations in Alaska, especially like maybe high impact port areas or airport areas, that they're not allowed to have something like that, so they have to invest in the vapor recovery option. So there's regulatory restrictions, there's throughput, there's cost, there's environment too, because the colder the ambient air temperature, the less vapor you're going to produce. I imagine Texas has a lot more vapor just by virtue of it being hot. Yes, and then we also, when we work with CAPEX projects, we talk about the system complexity and the ongoing maintenance and operation of it.

Shannon: 52:44

And, as you alluded to, the vapor combustion unit is a go-no-go system and you guys can actually access it virtually to do sleuthing. You don't have to go to the site often. I mean sometimes you do, but based on some other systems we've worked with, not vapor control and capture but just other like tank gauging systems, and so they often have to send a technician out to actually look at it and see what's going on with it. But you guys can access everything remotely and it's a much easier operationally to have a vapor combustion system than that return unit. And I feel like, is there additional training for the return unit as well to operate it so typically because of the more things on it.

Emily: 53:26

So there is rotating equipment. There are some other pieces of it that aren't on a combustion system. It's still something that local technicians can take on and do. The biggest difference is there's just more to do. So it's not as you know. You're maybe how many pieces of equipment you have on a combustor versus a recovery system. It may take you a lot less time to get through it because of the amount, but a recovery system you do have to consider. For example, on our vacuum pumps you have to change the oil. It's things like that that you may not necessarily have to do on a combustion system.

Emily: 54:02

But, we try to build both units to be very user-friendly, to be able to have local operations take place. Take true ownership of the product itself, because you know we have a fleet of technicians on our side that are across the United States and they are more than happy to get out and to see you, but you know, our goal is that we don't have to.

Emily: 54:22

We want to come and do your maintenance yearly. We want to come do the stuff that like it's more of. It's nice to have our technician come and check those things and go through these steps, versus every time it shuts down or something breaks or things like that. It's something that someone locally could do.

Shannon: 54:37

We definitely appreciate that on the operational side because it never breaks during your schedule visit. It breaks, you know, in the middle of winter when it's very difficult to get here.

Shannon: 54:48

Yes that's always how it works. Okay, so we've talked through like selecting the system and I want to switch gears a little bit for those of us that have one installed or maybe are going to in the near future. We've been through four different startup processes and there's definitely some troubleshooting that happens during the startup phase. Could you talk about some startup troubleshooting, like if someone's going to go through this whole process because they have decided to invest in this technology, for whatever reason?

Emily: 55:18

what are some?

Shannon: 55:18

troubleshooting startup issues that you've seen that maybe if someone was thinking ahead they could head off.

Emily: 55:24

Since vapor combustion is the driver in the area, we can talk about that one probably first and for majority of the conversation. As you mentioned, we'll ship the equipment. So that the equipment comes to site, we have what we call a startup pre-checklist, so we give the site this checklist and we're not trying to be the person to bug you about getting all these things done or anything, but what that's helping us do is, before we send a technician out and maybe you know like we're trying to avoid all these potential things that could happen we're giving a pre-checklist from our service team to say, hey, have you?

Shannon: 55:58

for example, have you checked the electricity?

Emily: 56:00

Are you connected? Have you run the propane or natural gas line? Have you done all these things? And the drive behind that is we're trying to make sure we do as much as we can before, of course, our technician comes to site, because we're trying to minimize the overall time. Our technician is there just to make sure that we're getting all our ducks in a row.

Emily: 56:19

So once all that happens, so that's a big piece of it once our technician will get there. So we typically send a John's Inc service technician and they will actually come to the site and what they'll do is they'll pretty much double check work. So they'll make sure everything looks like it got installed correctly, making sure you know it's up to safety part, making sure everything looks right, and then they'll even do wiring point to point. So they're going to go and say, hey, is this about? Can this about move? Is this thermocouple reading correctly? It is like so we're going through all these steps and the reason why we're doing that is because we don't want to turn it on and have an error. We want to go through all these diligent checks. We want to make sure that before it even touches anything, it's gone through these checks.

Shannon: 57:02

We really appreciate that checklist because from a regulatory perspective, when we are notifying the EPA in the state of Alaska that this vapor combustion unit or vapor recovery unit is going into service, we have to show that it met the 95% criteria and your entire startup checklist. By the time you're done, I can just send them that document and it shows that the facility is fully in compliance and it's installed correctly and it's just. It's really valuable from a regulatory perspective. We don't see that with a lot of other systems we install in tank farms. So it's really nice to be like here, epa, we're fully compliant and here is the documentation for it. So that part, just from a record keeping standpoint, is really helpful.

Emily: 57:47

Yes, absolutely, and that's we want it as well. So we want to make sure we did our job. Our goal is to be the source that you come to. At the very beginning. We walk you through the design and then from there we walk you through execution so we actually build it, put it together and then we want to start it up. So we want to make sure it comes from beginning to end and we're that source.

Emily: 58:07

So that's one thing the technician will go through as well is they'll have a cause and effect. So they'll look and see has everything been safely done? So that's safety shutdown, that's alarms, that's all of the things you guys love to see on your screens. When it pops up and says MOV 101, failure, something like that, we're actually purposely making it fail so that we know that alarm will come to you all. We know when the system's going to fail. So then what it'll do is it'll pull that permissive so it'll say, hey, you shouldn't be loading because my vapor combustion system's not working. So it's doing all of those interconnects as part of that as well.

Shannon: 58:45

And then as part of the startup, you actually run quite a bit of product through the system to ensure that it is meeting the 95% combustion goals, and I know that your team's pretty good about preparing the client for that. But we also work with them to make sure that they are able to meet that need and have enough fuel to run through it, because it's a pretty robust test.

Emily: 59:08

It is, and you said it exactly right. So the other big piece of combustion that we want to make sure we have is an adequate fuel line. A lot of times, in the cases that you mentioned earlier, propane may not be readily available, so we want to make sure it is, because if we're going to start up and make sure we're operating at temperature, which is what defines a true destruction efficiency, we have to make sure to have that gas, and sometimes it might be, say, a lack of pressure or a lack of flow, and that's a big piece to make it operational.

Shannon: 59:39

And then I do have one operational hint from us doing this recently is that a lot of our clients are stressed with truck availability and truck driver availability, and when this startup test occurs, there's a lot of truck loading that has to happen to generate the vapor, to test the system. And so what we've run into is that, in addition to making sure you have enough propane, you have to make sure you have enough drivers and trucks and an ability to potentially backfill the tank, because a lot of our communities don't sell eight trucks of gasoline in a day or something, and they just don't have anywhere to put it, and so they have to be able to load and offload the truck on a cycle and that takes time and we have to time it super carefully so we're not interrupting the vapor flow during that test. And so that specific operational piece we learned that we have to be very specific with the scheduling of that and making sure that they've got the capacity to do it.

Emily: 1:00:39

Absolutely yeah, and to what you alluded to too, we typically call that a source test. So a lot of times we have our startup sequence, so we go through the startup. The equipment is running and I'm not sure in Alaska specifically what the requirement is for source testing. If it's 30, 60 days, I know in some other locations it falls under a certain category. But once it's operational, to us we have met the parameters based on temperatures and things like that. So the source test is what actually proves by documentation that hey, it's doing its job. And that's where we like to be involved as well, either from a remote support standpoint or we can even have a service technician come out and do a pretest is what we call it to be able to just test the system and say hey can we?

Emily: 1:01:23

can we do it? You know that kind of thing, because it does require a separate source testing capacity from a third party.

Shannon: 1:01:30

In my mind I was thinking it was all one startup process. But you're right. There's the John's Inc startup and then there's the actual source test, but John's Inc's heavily involved in it. I think that's why we put them all together.

Emily: 1:01:40

Absolutely yeah, and we want to be. You know, the intent for our goal is we want you to meet your compliance needs. So if the system is not doing that, you know that's where we want to get called. We want to say, hey, let us troubleshoot, let us figure out what's going on so that you know if it's a parameter on site, great, we can work with you all to fix it. If it's something on our system, we can work remotely and fix it. So it's great from that level and we want to be involved on that aspect as well.

Shannon: 1:02:06

John's Inc does a really great job of being available for that, and you guys have installed so many kinds of systems at this point, and your team especially has done quite a bit in Alaska, so it's really helpful. They're not it's not like somebody who's only worked at the port of Los.

Emily: 1:02:18

Angeles and is now looking at Western.

Shannon: 1:02:20

Alaska. You guys have done the right scale to have good, good, thoughtful feedback. So, related to that feedback, what are some common operational issues that you guys have helped troubleshoot over the years?

Emily: 1:02:33

I'm sure, as we've already talked about many times, it's not the warmest climate at all points in Alaska. So one of the biggest operational issues we see is freezing or temperature control concerns really cold climate. It can be tough on the system, so making sure that you know we're either insulating where needed or making sure we have enough gas to keep up to temperature. That's a big troubleshooting one in Alaska that we've run into many a times just because of the cold climate.

Emily: 1:03:04

Another one that it's funny it's not just in Alaska, it's everywhere are the pilots. So we have a pilot that we manufacture, so pilots are great and that they're a little warm spot and they have a little tiny little gap that's off the pilot. Bugs love it and other things really enjoy that little tiny heat spot, and so a lot of times bugs can actually get in our pilot line of fire and it can cause pilot issues. There can also be more electrical issues like grounding, you know, like flame scanner, not aligned things like that, and a lot of times what that can happen is, say, just it got bumped or someone went up and readjusted it and no one knew it, or maybe just I feel like it was like one in South Central Alaska.

Emily: 1:03:53

Exactly so. Flame scanners are really important because that's what proves our pilot, that is what makes sure. So we want to make sure there's a flame, because we don't want to just run it through our burners, we want to make sure that it's actually burning. So the flame scanner is really important to make sure we have a flame, it is truly burning and it's doing its job in that way. So we have had some, you know more like flame scanner, misalignment, you know troubleshooting things like that, but a lot of that. You know all kind of stems back to the pilot a little bit, but for the most part, as long as you're doing your walkthroughs and double checking things and doing that kind of stuff it can be easily remedied.

Shannon: 1:04:31

What about air intake management? Because I know we had at least one system that had a wind issue, like it was facing into the wind and it was blowing into the intake and it was really messing up the air ratio.

Emily: 1:04:46

If I were to guess it was bringing in too much air. Yes, Probably what was happening. Yeah, so when that happens and it's funny because a lot of times you don't have to have concern about that, but it may be a operational step point change, so that's on the damper. And particularly we can try, and you know, modulate that a little different. So maybe keeping it partially closed is almost seen as like 100% open because the wind intake is so much higher.

Emily: 1:05:13

So, that's where things like that, of course you can't control, I can't control, it's just where it sits.

Shannon: 1:05:19

So in this particular case, we parked a connex in front of it and created a windbreak. There you go, and that was an incredibly easy solution to that. But I think we went through those troubleshooting pieces first, and the wind was still enriching the environment too much, it was way too much air. And then we have the opposite that gets plugged with snow or you know, it's not shoveled out and it's unable to get enough air, so it's you need to dug out. And then I think we had icing. We had icing on it once where, like they weren't moving because they were iced up.

Emily: 1:05:52

Yes, that can happen a lot. You'll actually see that with actuators as well. Yes, because your actual ice forms on it and it doesn't move, so that's not good for the system by any means. So we you know any type of. To your point, you did a great job. Put a connex in front of it, make it block some of the wind, but that will actually blow out of flame potentially, so there's concern with that. And so, yeah, to your point, environmental concerns are always probably the biggest one in Alaska, but there are ways we try to mitigate it and fix it, and even if you need to install, we've, I think, one system.

Emily: 1:06:29

Maybe we put up on a concrete pad so that it was like four feet above ground so that, if four feet of snow were to occur, it never touches the system and from our standpoint that's a no-brainer for us. You know, it's like sounds great. Put it on a pedestal. You know, bright, bright, shiny picture of it on a pedestal. It looks great.

Shannon: 1:06:54

I just hope all the engineers listening to this take that into consideration, because when we do the design work for these CAPEX projects and I am not an engineer, but we work with many of them like you there's definitely some of those considerations that have to happen, like you have to look at snowfall for the region and or wind availability if you're stuck out on a peninsula over the water, you know.

Emily: 1:07:15

I remember one of the teams that we worked with. They were very proactive in that we do have an air assist blower on our stack, so it looks like a kind of big old piece of equipment jetting out from the side of the stack and that's actually what we're using to mix the stream coming into our burners. That's how we get the like pre-mixure. And they proactively said we get four feet of snow, so that blower is actually sitting right at grade and if it gets covered in snow it's probably going to not do well. So they proactively worked with us to create a ducting solution where we actually like duct it up. So it actually went up onto a pedestal and we were able to help them kind of come up with a design that didn't impact the actual blower capacity or flow or anything like that. But they did a great job of thinking proactively of.

Emily: 1:08:04

That's probably one item. We don't want sitting in a lot of snow.

Shannon: 1:08:08

Do you have any suggestions or tips and tricks for operating the system to like make it live longer or not decrease the life or functionality of that system? If it's your job, your responsibility, to operate this vapor combustion unit, what are some things you can do to make it live longer and what are some things that can really shorten its life?

Emily: 1:08:26

The system as a whole. Our real thumb is you got to check it. It's going to operate great. It's going to give you the go signal. That doesn't mean it doesn't look a little needs a little love at some points in time. So we at least recommend doing daily, if not weekly, checks, just to make sure everything looks OK. A lot of guys on site are very familiar with when things don't look right. So when you're looking at something.

Shannon: 1:08:51

Just a visual inspection goes a long way.

Emily: 1:08:53

That can include, like rust, for example, to your point, humidity. You know what, if things started chipping away at paint or things like that? You know it's steel. It rusts pretty quick.

Shannon: 1:09:03

I have seen humidity in the control box. You have a very robust system with gasketing but the older they get, the more often we see humidity building up in the corners of those control boxes. I imagine that's not good.

Emily: 1:09:16

It is not so any any type of Any type of humidity and moisture, if you want to put it that way. That gets into our system is not great. They are called vapor combustion systems, so they do have vapor.

Emily: 1:09:27

That's what they like, but if there is rust spotted, it's always, you know, recommended to go ahead and take care of it, try and prevent damage, get some type of pain on it, just just to fix it. Especially with the vapor combustion system, we always recommend the detonation arresters and the burners. So the burners I didn't allude to too much earlier, but they're an anti flashback burner that have a very similar crimped metal as the detonation roster and over time things just can't get in them. You know it's things that get into the pipe. You're trying to capture it but it happens.

Emily: 1:10:00

And you'll start to see increased pressure drop across them and that's not good for our system. So a lot of times our technicians will at least recommend annually just cleaning them out, so you know, actually looking into them, seeing if you can take a flashlight through them. Now this is pretty clean service so you shouldn't worry about it too much. But in a lot of our crude applications or things where stuff can just get in there, it's amazing how quickly those things plug. So the burners and the detonation are really important for our system. So we recommend just looking at them annually just to make sure, and then of course, just how you operate it.

Emily: 1:10:34

So I think we talked about longevity of the stack itself, the refractory. You know refractory has a certain limitation of temperature that it can operate at. If it's not operating at its good conditions then it's probably not going to last as long as life of the equipment. So we definitely recommend making sure it's operating as it should, Checking those parameters, doing those checkpoints, just kind of to make sure that you're actually just to your point, taking ownership and really just going through making sure set points match and, you know, making sure the kind of the basics of just does the system look okay from that level.

Shannon: 1:11:10

Not all error codes stop functionality, but they can be really important clues for technicians later about what was going wrong before it finally stopped working.

Emily: 1:11:20

Yes, that is a great point and we everyone jokingly says we have so many errors and we're like well, we promise they have a purpose. They either will help you with maintenance life. So if it's, say, like a differential pressure across the detonation or ester, it's like it's increasing, Maybe the detonation or ester needs some cleaning. So we're trying to kind of give the looting to your point. If you capture those and you start to see variables changing and errors popping up, maybe it's time to give it a little. You know, look down, see how things are going and doing those checks.

Shannon: 1:11:51

Error codes and the performance parameters of the system are closely tied to EPA compliance and state of Alaska compliance. Both of the regulations that govern air emissions place the burden of privilege upon our clients to show that all of their equipment is operating at all times, and we've talked about this before. There's definitely a feeling in the industry of like well, if it's working, it's operational, so I don't need to keep records because it's either go or no go, especially for the vapor combustion unit.

Shannon: 1:12:25

And we've seen with the specifically with EPA compliant. That's not enough. They need to be able to see that it was operating and you can limit your own risk by having records that say until this day it was operating within 95% capacity. Because if you don't have those records the EPA can say all the way back to whenever you installed it maybe it wasn't operating since then and so we have. We definitely counsel our clients on having record keeping specific to like the daily, the weekly and the annual records, to like the daily, the weekly and the annual walk down of the system. But your company has tools that can automate some of that. Could you talk about some of the automated record keeping that you guys can embed if needed in the system?

Emily: 1:13:10

One really simple version. We still use it today because, to your point, sometimes internet connection things like that may not be the easiest to get out in a tank farm, but it's what we call a temperature recorder. So it can actually just as simple as it sounds, it records the temperature. We jokingly say there used to be a chart recorder.

Shannon: 1:13:30

or physically give you paper to be able to record it. Oh, but yes, I do remember having the little pieces of paper ripped off.

Emily: 1:13:37

Yes, some people still like paper. It's okay, there's nothing wrong with it. But from a long term it may make sense. The temperature recorders are really easy device that we can install on our systems. It does kind of the bare minimum that really you need to get you compliant. We also, you know, on our systems itself we have PLC integration. That's a PLC system. So the PLC system is a logic controller where it actually controls how our system runs.

Emily: 1:14:05

So it can be Alan Bradley, ge, you know we have all these different brands that you can use, depending on preference and location and things like that. But the intent of those is that we can of course control the system. But it's also another form to be able to send information. So there's a connection that can be an ethernet port, so actually DCS connection, so it pulls that information out of that and that's pulling, you know, temperatures, it's pulling valve status, it's pulling all of these different things and it can actually just fully integrate into your system. So that's more of a hard wire kind of connection that gives you kind of the luxury to pull from that. We have a few other options that are more, you know, I would say they get you a little bit farther. So one of the technologies we provide is called VaporWatch. Vaporwatch is actually a PC monitoring system.

Emily: 1:14:58

So we'll pull all that data in and it actually collects into a graphical form and then it can actually pull into a report form. So it can make it really easy to collect all this data and see it on a live screen to say, hey, oh, this isn't working, I don't know this isn't working. Or hey, my emissions peaked on this day. Why did it peak on that day? And the functionality of it is really nice. If you just need to go pull data on, say, three months ago and for some reason I can't find you know that one file that said that, so you know it gives you that functionality to do that. So it's really nice.

Emily: 1:15:33

And then we've actually, you know, started in the past couple of years integrating what we call it's an insight system. So that is actually where we can log into your system. So it gives us capability in remote locations. You know I can't say a ton of the Tulsa folks go up to Alaska all the time, but it gives the Tulsa folks some opportunity to troubleshoot remotely and see opportunities to do that. And actually we can also trend more data so we can actually look at trending over the course of time as it got better or worse. You know all these things, and so we have a lot of opportunities to be able to trend. It's just a matter of what complexity, what type of data do you want it local? So it's nice that we have so many options.

Shannon: 1:16:18

That insight option is really nice for facilities that have remote locations but a central agency or office in a larger population area. They're able to sort of look out and see how the more remote locations are doing independently and be able to do like you said track trends, monitor things, troubleshoot error codes to help the terminal manager out. So one thing I wanted to say is that Starlink is really changing the landscape of Alaska right now because for a very reasonable price point, we are able to have internet in locations we've never been able to have internet before, and so I do have a feeling that some of our limitations that we previously saw are going to go by the wayside. We also have some massive subsea cable projects that are federally funded that are going into effect, and so I think, just personally, I went to one of the most remote locations in Alaska. It's a place called Portmolar, and I was able to check my LinkedIn and post from there, which previously I didn't even bring my phone because it wouldn't work.

Shannon: 1:17:25

There was no internet there was no cell, there was no nothing and thank you. That was an incredible masterclass in all things vapor combustion and vapor recovery related. I appreciate having access to your incredible knowledge, emily, related to that do you have any? Free resources for our listeners if they want to learn more.

Emily: 1:17:44

Yeah, absolutely so. Everybody's favorite channel, youtube. So we have many PFD modeling videos specifically on our YouTube. I can, of course, give the link for that to make it easier to view and things like that, but it gives you great overview of how our systems work. I always say you can talk about it all day, but when you see a visual it makes a lot more sense. And we do it for multiple applications so you can see combustion and recovery and kind of differences in the market and what that looks like. And then, of course, we do have our website that has all of our brochures and detailed data and things like that. And then another thing that's technically free is giving us a phone call. So we're more than happy to have a phone call talk through concerns, questions. Sometimes it can be overwhelming reading all the as we joked about absorption, adsorption, all the little details, and my team is very well equipped to be able to just talk through with you simply what you need and what that looks like and driving a project to understand what that means more.

Emily: 1:18:56

So a phone call is free, maybe not to some telephone suppliers, but most of us are through internet nowadays anyways, so we're always happy to take a phone call as well, just to help answer questions.

Shannon: 1:19:07

I would second that you guys have been really helpful on multiple projects. We've come in as the subject matter expert for regulatory pieces, but I had specific operational questions and you were really efficient in getting me to the right person who would be able to troubleshoot that for me, which is partially why we reached out for this interview. Because we've worked so well with you for so long, it's been truly a joy working with your company. Okay, and so, lastly, do you have any fun facts or interesting history about Vapor Control that you wanted to share?

Emily: 1:19:37

Yeah, so funny enough, one of my co-workers specifically mentioned this one for the open flare, the LH flares that we talked about earlier. They used to light those with a bow and arrow. So the good old bow and arrow that blip there and see, you know, back to the good old medieval days of shooting a bow and arrow to light something. But I thought that was pretty cool.

Shannon: 1:20:03

So this is like Texas in like what time frame?

Emily: 1:20:07

Like 1920s 1930s yes, a very long time ago because this has been well before we did in closed systems and it's just so funny to think about because of how automation and everything else has improved.

Shannon: 1:20:20

I would love to see the RFP for like need need archer very accurate when flame proof.

Emily: 1:20:29

Yeah, and if they miss man that could be really bad for a lot of facilities. So you know you got to be careful. So I'm happy that automation and all of these things have improved significantly since that day.

Emily: 1:20:42

But so I thought that was a pretty fun. You know little thing and in our life of being in this world for so long, you know, I'm sure the stories are endless of what we've seen. I know a lot of our technicians joke about fun animals that come like to sunbathe on our skids. Yes, I know, we. I know one of them specifically had an alligator, that was like the best friend on skid no, no alligators.

Shannon: 1:21:12

Thank you.

Emily: 1:21:14

Yeah and I was like, oh, I don't think that's a skid, I'd be walking to really quickly. And I had another coworker too who actually other refractory on a VCU is really good insulation. So if you have not fired up your equipment very often, you should probably check it. He was at a site and noticed there was insulation sitting on top of the burners their chunk and was trying to understand where that was coming from. And what do you know? He peeks into the stack and there's an owl that had actually erode itself into a lot, he's like what a cozy little one.

Emily: 1:21:52

Well, and they couldn't, and they couldn't start it up because it was a protected species. So they had to actually call someone to come remove the owl, and then they could actually. Yes, so animals are our friends. They really enjoy our equipment from the heat perspective, yeah, and all various things.

Shannon: 1:22:11

So those are always funny stories to hear, oh, my gosh, that owl was like wow, the rent's real cheap. I wonder why no one else is really good here.

Emily: 1:22:20

Well, no wind, no rain, you know, just spinning a little cubby. You know love and life. So, yes, we always say beware of the critters. They do like our systems, so oh.

Shannon: 1:22:32

Emily, thank you. What a wonderful interview. Thank you for so much of your time. I appreciate all your expertise. It was a joy to have you. Thank you for coming.

Emily: 1:22:41

Thank you so much for having me and I really appreciate, you know, the relationship that we built and I can't wait to continue it.