Brant Makowski leads three of ESI's engineering disciplines. His teams stay with a landfill gas-to-RNG project from feasibility to first gas, and every project feeds the next one.
Most RNG projects change hands several times between concept and first gas. Each handoff is a chance for design intent to get lost. At ESI, the same engineering team stays with the project the whole way.
Brant Makowski leads three of those disciplines: mechanical, CAD, and process engineering. He joined ESI after a decade in oil refining. At ESI, he has taken four RNG facilities from concept through commissioning and is midway through two more.
Process engineering starts first. The team studies what's coming off the landfill and what the pipeline requires, then defines everything in between: equipment sizing, vendor quotes, a high-level facility design. Mechanical runs in parallel on the physical side. How big is the footprint? Where does it fit on the site? Where's the tie-in?
Front-end engineering design turns the concept into numbers. Inlet and outlet pressures at each piece of equipment. How much H2S each step removes. What size vessel, how much media. Equipment goes out for fixed-bid quotes.
Detailed design follows. P&IDs down to valve size and trim material. Piping isometrics for fabrication. Steel drawings for pipe support. Concrete pads placed to within an eighth of an inch. Insulation and painting standards. The building, down to where the doors go.
"How do we get from a chunk of land with trees on it to an operating facility?" Brant says. "We provide those drawings from start to finish."
Then the team stays. Engineers answer contractor questions during construction, walk the site for as-builts, and hand off to ESI's commissioning crew. Process engineers go back to the field with commissioning and controls until the plant produces pipeline-quality gas.
Brant leads lessons-learned sessions after each project. Where did design, workflow or communication break down? What changes next time? After several rounds, he says the open items are mostly nice-to-haves. "We've iterated the design so many times. We're really getting a solid product."
He doesn't call it finished. "I don't think we're nearly to the point of saying we've learned it all."
Gas composition depends on feedstock, and feedstock depends on what's happening in the region. After a hurricane, a landfill can take in a wave of construction debris that decomposes differently than household waste. Then it goes back to normal intake. Brant calls the result a layered cake, with gas that changes layer by layer.
That's why ESI doesn't drop one standard design onto every site. The "S" in ESI stands for Solutions, he notes, because the work demands flexibility.
ESI also operates RNG facilities, both its own designs and others'. That gives its engineers a direct line to what works in the field and what doesn't. Peter Martens, from ESI's operations side, sits in Brant's weekly meetings and design sessions and brings that field experience into the drawings.
Refining has spent decades solving unexpected chemistry under tight regulation, especially corrosion. Brant sees direct parallels in RNG. When an earlier ESI project ran into corrosion in a deoxygenation system, Brant, a process engineer with a refining background and Peter worked through half a dozen options. They chose the most cost-effective option that was straightforward to install.
"It isn't a new problem. It's new to RNG, and it's a little different flavor," he says. "But we could draw a lot of parallels."
Brant credits Nick Skeans, ESI's Director of Engineering, with building a detail-first engineering culture. He also borrows a rule from an old mentor: "just" is a four-letter word. Anyone who says you just need to add a valve doesn't know what it takes to get it done.
Owners who work with ESI get one team accountable from feasibility through commissioning. They get designs refined across multiple completed facilities, operating experience built into the drawings, and engineers who have solved hard process problems in refining. ESI can come in at the start of a new build or at any stage of a project that isn't performing.