I started my career as a Utilities Engineer for Standard Oil of Ohio (now part of British Petroleum) at their Toledo, Ohio, refinery. My tasks were to look for and implement improvements in boiler feedwater, cooling tower, and refinery furnace operations. I determined that installing excess oxygen control systems on refinery furnaces would result in improved efficiencies and fuel savings. After installing on eight process heaters, these controls resulted in over $350,000 in fuel savings per year. I spent three years working as a Process Engineer at Arthur G. McKee E&C (now part of Kvaerner E&C) in Cleveland, Ohio, where I specialized in the design of boiler feedwater systems, cooling towers, and process heaters. I was the lead engineer on a process heater revamp project at Getty's El Dorado, KS, refinery. Using HTRI computer programs, my team designed a Dowtherm hot oil heating system, using one furnace and individual heat exchangers to replace nearly a dozen antiquated process heaters. I worked as a Project Engineer at the corporate headquarters of The Lubrizol Corporation, the world's leading developer of performance chemical additives for lubricants and fuels, where I was brought on board to modernize and standardize their corporate engineering process design practices and bid document procedures. My project team designed Lubrizol's first continuous process for additive manufacturing, the AMPS Monomer process.

I was project manager of the 24 hr/day operations of the Coal Liquefaction Pilot Unit program at Texaco's Research Center in Beacon, NY, and designed the hydrogenation reaction system that was the heart of the pilot unit. Working in the company's Strategic Research Division, I studied and helped develop processes for coal gasification and shale oil retorting. I helped develop proprietary biopolymers for water flooding in enhanced oil recovery, developed fermentation processes at the 500 L batch level, and designed, built, and operated a diafiltration system for the separation and purification of biopolymers. I programmed and operated Texaco's first PC-controlled pilot unit, using it to study the continuous production of dimethyl carbonate from the partial oxidation of methanol using a homogeneous catalyst, and helped develop new heterogeneous catalysts for the production of higher alcohols from syngas.

In 1988, I joined a new research team whose mission was to apply advanced separation techniques to Texaco's separation problems. By 1990 I had become Texaco's specialist in the application of membrane technologies to wastewater treatment and water reclamation. I worked on a project team that developed a process to recycle coal gasifier quench water using reverse osmosis (RO) membranes at Texaco's Cool Water gasification demonstration plant. We demonstrated the use of nanofiltration membranes to reduce oil and grease levels in offshore oil platform produced waters to well below ocean discharge limits. I was a principal member of a multi-division team that developed and patented an RO membrane process to reclaim oil field wastewater for irrigation use. This eliminated the need to reinject this water back into the oil field to dispose of it, and created a valuable water resource for farms bordering Texaco's properties. Working with analytical chemists, we developed x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy and molecular modeling techniques for identifying RO membrane foulants, and learned how to change the process conditions to eliminate them. I received Texaco's Outstanding Contributor Award for my work on this project.

In 1993, California was proposing new wastewater discharge guidelines that would reclassify many non-hazardous refinery wastewater streams being deep-well injected as hazardous. In response to this, I put together a team of engineers, technicians, and operators that took on the challenge of developing a treatment process for Texaco's Bakersfield, CA, refinery wastewater that would remove every contaminant necessary to allow it to be recycled back into the refinery, or sent to the city of Bakersfield POTW. In two years, my team researched, designed, built, and demonstrated a zero-liquid-discharge process, using RO membranes, that reclaimed 99.8% of the refinery's 720,000 gallon per day wastewater stream, at an annualized cost of less than 1/2 cent per gallon. A by-product of this project was the development of a separate RO process to remove 97% of the selenium from the refinery's stripped sour water, reducing Se levels in the discharged wastewater to below 0.05 mg/L. This process was reviewed in a study completed by the Western States Petroleum Association in 1995, and was found to be significantly better than the best available technology then in use. These two processes have been patented in the U.S. and abroad.

In 1996, I took over a project that had as its objective the creation of a waste oil-in-water emulsion lubricant reclamation process for the Texaco Lubricant Company. The process used conventional filters and ultrafiltration membranes to remove solid contaminants and over 90% of the water from waste metalworking fluids and other similar wastewater streams. The water was recycled back into plant operations. It was also clean enough to dispose of in sanitary sewers. The recycled lubricant could then be re-fortified with additives for reuse. I was in charge of the start-up and operation of the first full-scale treatment unit, installed at International Paper (IP) in Sellers, SC. The result was the recycling of nearly 550,000 gallons of water in the first six months of operation from that plant's waste oily water emulsions. Texaco, the owner-operator of this treatment plant, realized $120,000 in net revenues while at the same time saving IP $120,000 in waste hauling charges. This development work was the beginning of the Texaco Fluid Management program.

In 1997, I was appointed Chairman of the Process System Safety Committee, responsible for reviewing and approving all pilot plant design and operations in our division. Our first accomplishment was to develop safe start-up and operating procedures for a natural gas-to-liquids plasma reactor system that had been shut down for safety reasons. In a leveraged project with GRI (Gas Research Institute) and MEDAL L.P., I worked on a team that scaled-up the production of novel polyimides, fabricated hollow-fiber membranes from these polyimides, and field-tested and demonstrated the superiority of these polyimide membranes for separating carbon dioxide from natural gas.

In 1999, I began to work as a consulting engineer. I was approved by the New York City Department of Environmental Protection to work as a Managing Professional on eight New York City Watershed Wastewater Treatment Plant (WWTP) Upgrade Program projects. These upgrades involved the design of microfiltration systems to remove Cryptosporidium and other enteric pathogens from wastewater. I was responsible for construction services and startup of the first DualSand tertiary filtration system in the NYC Watershed WWTP Upgrade Program.

I have presented my work to numerous professional audiences throughout the world (see Publications and Patents), conducted in-house training seminars, have been a secondary school science fair judge, and a National Engineers Week speaker. I am currently a Senior Technologist for CH2M HILL, and consult on water and wastewater treatment projects throughout North America.