Power producers go with traditional & alternative technologies

Utilities are adding dynamic work in many forms of alternative energy to their ongoing needs for infrastructure development and station updates

“The energy industry is in for positive long-term growth. For nearly every nation on earth, energy is going to be an issue for a very long time.”
– Frank Stewart, AABE

By Claire Swedberg
Contributing Editor

Today’s energy industry is facing greater challenges than ever before, says Frank Stewart, president and COO of the American Association of Blacks in Energy (AABE). Power producers are working to meet the demands of a growing customer base while increasing their own efficiency, and seeking a cleaner, greener way to address the energy needs of the world.

As the industry innovates it must continue its focus on diversity, Stewart insists. He points out that some of the new alternative energy industries are not yet meeting the diversity levels of larger, established energy producers. Diverse engineers must continue to position themselves front and center in this market; diversity-friendly corporations that are major energy customers must demand diversity from the new producers as well.

It’s a brand-new world out there
All energy companies need engineers, business people and public policy specialists who can think creatively. “It’s a brand new world out there” when it comes to energy production, Stewart says, and although hiring may be down in the short term, “The energy industry is in for positive long-term growth. For nearly every nation on earth, energy is going to be an issue for a very
long time.”

Outside the box at UTC Power
Fuel cell technology company UTC Power (a United Technologies Corp company, South Windsor, CT) looks for techies who approach engineering challenges in novel ways. Since 1966, UTC Power’s fuel cells have provided environmentally responsible power solutions for U.S. space flights, the automotive industry, transit bus programs and combined onsite cooling, heating and power for buildings.

Grace Niland, UTC Power HR manager, says diversity helps to keep the company fresh. “Diversity generates creativity. We need people who can think outside the box,” Niland says. UTC embraces enthusiastic people with new ideas, especially MEs, ChEs and EEs, she adds.

UTC engineer Sridhar Kanuri brings a global perspective
Sridhar Kanuri, a staff engineer at UTC Power, brings a global perspective to the company. He completed his BSChE at Andhra University in India in 1999 and went on to an MSChE from Florida State University in 2001.

“When I started with ChE I wasn’t sure where I would take it,” Kanuri says.
As part of his MS he worked on fluid and particle motion in biomedical applications. His thesis work was funded by Therakos Inc, a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson.

But when UTC Power came on campus Kanuri liked what he heard. He began as an engineer at South Windsor, CT HQ, working on thermal and fluid analysis for automotive fuel cells. After two years of demonstrating UTC Power’s technology to automotive customers around the world, he was promoted to senior engineer.

Kanuri used UTC’s Employee Scholar tuition reimbursement program to get a certificate in risk analysis from Stanford University. He’s currently working on an MBA from Carnegie Mellon, conveniently offered at the nearby UTC research center.

Kanuri now works on a stationary phosphoric acid 400-KW fuel cell power plant. The new model power plant will supply 4.8 MW of power to the new Freedom Tower and other buildings going up at the World Trade Center redevelopment site in New York City.

Initially Kanuri was verification lead for the cell stack assembly module of the powerplant; in 2008 he added duties as technology lead for onsite fuel cell technology. His team evaluates alternative components, like advanced catalyst materials and alternate electrolytes. “We look at a lot of ideas, and if any are appealing we take them into the product stage,” he says. Today he leads a team of seven people, and has filed patents for fuel cell related technology.

“I am very happy with the path I’ve taken,” Kanuri says. “Every day has been a new experience for me.”

Kanuri notes that UTC Power attracts team members from all over the world. “That, I think, is where the business is headed: we are reaching much farther around the globe,” he says.

“Our engineers are passionate about what this company is doing. It’s a part of who they are: people want to be working on these products.”

ME Mary Mujica is SVP of LNG at Shell
Mary Mujica is SVP of liquefied natural gas (LNG) for the Americas at oil company Shell. She moved into the job early last year, has a staff of twelve people and works on a project valued at $1 billion.

Mujica began with a 1985 BSME from Bucknell University (Lewisburg, PA). Her first job was with Air Products & Chemicals (Allentown, PA). The work involved visiting chemical sites throughout the U.S., but her main focus was safety improvements, maintenance and operations at a hydrogen plant in Pasadena, TX.

In 1988 she moved to Houston, TX and interviewed with Shell. She was hired to oversee environmental conservation, emergency response and plant and equipment reliability at Shell Deer Park, an integrated refinery and petrochemical plant.

In 1996 Mujica moved into a business planning role, assisting with profit and loss statements for Shell’s CEO. A year later she joined the supply trading organization, looking at moving the company’s products in the pipeline and on barges and ships. “I was the first woman manager in supply trading,” she notes with pride.

In 1998 she moved into portfolio and strategy for a joint venture transition with Texaco, working on integration across the businesses. “My responsibility was to ‘reconnect the dots’ of the new organization, which included both businesses,” she explains.

In 2000 she took a distribution position in trucking and order management, working closely with the retailers. She was responsible for the movement of fuel to retail stations and oversaw a retailer ops call center.

In 2001 Mujica moved to London, U.K. to oversee strategy and portfolios. She managed the portfolios of fourteen European refineries, seventy terminals and five supply areas. “This was my first venture outside the U.S. and it was quite broadening,” she says. The interesting challenge was working with the different management style of companies in Europe.

In 2004 she provided design assistance for Shell’s globalization efforts, filling jobs and implementing IT systems at many locations.

A year later she moved back to the U.S. and became general manager for the oil and chemical plant in Deer Park. She oversaw 800 people and several hundred contractors at the site and worked on improving reliability in environmental performance. “It was exciting to go back to where I started, this time in a management role,” she says.

A year ago she took on her current job as SVP of LNG for the Americas. “My work in supply and strategy leadership prepared me well for this position,” she says. “I am leveraging my experience.”

She’s learned the value of networking, she says, and still mentors some fourteen people. “My days are pretty busy, but I always have an open door policy.”

ChE Aaron Walker is an engineer at American Electric Power
Aaron Walker is an engineer III at Midwestern power company American Electric Power (AEP, Columbus, OH). He started his career with an interest in ChE, and received his BSChE from Ohio State University in 2005.

“In school I didn’t see myself in power,” he says. “I actually pictured myself in the petrochemical industry.” But when he met up with AEP at a career day, he was intrigued by a project engineering position at the company.

So he started at AEP as an engineer IV, doing project engineering for environmental retrofit in West Virginia. He was working with flue gas desulfurization wastewater treatment, “to send the water back cleaner than we take it in,” he explains.

He was part of a $90 million addition to facilities at the Mitchell Plant in Moundsville, WV and the Mountaineer Plant in New Haven, WV, ensuring that the projects met quality needs and stayed on schedule and within budget.

A year later Walker transitioned into a field engineering slot, still at Mitchell and Mountaineer. He provided support in the field, lined up contractors and oversaw their work. Then he moved into environmental retrofit startup support at the two plants, supervising system checkouts, equipment calibration and process optimization. He worked on both plants at once and saw them become operational in 2006 and 2007.

Since then Walker has been responsible for operating procedures for the new generation of scrubbers and other environmental control equipment. Now the company is looking at environmental retrofits at other plants, and Walker assists with choosing vendors, managing the design phase and “figuring out how best to lay out equipment for each retrofit.”

Although each plant has its own culture, “The constant is dealing with the communication part of it,” Walker says. He takes each plant as a unique challenge, listening to management’s concerns and needs and considering the recommendations of operating staff at each facility.

“Looking back at the group projects we worked on in college, I can really see the value in them,” he notes with a smile. “You need to be able to dive in, work with others and not be afraid to try new things.”

When advising his people, he says, “Don’t pigeonhole yourself or what you do. Be willing to take on new projects.

“I like to think I’m training for project management,” he says. “This is the best time ever to go into environmental retrofitting. There’s a lot of need for R&D in alternative energy and a lot of new generation work.”

ME James Hall manages outages for Alstom Power
Alstom Power Systems (Midlothian, VA) outage execution manager James Hall earned his 1994 BSMET at Virginia State University. He’s currently working on an MBA at Virginia Commonwealth University.

When he completed his BS, Hall began at Perigon Engineering (Colonial Heights, VA), a small architectural and engineering company. He was doing drafting and design work for HVAC and other systems for industrial projects. “It was a real eye-opening experience and very stressful,” he says. “Because they were small and didn’t have the time to train their personnel, I was expected to hit the ground running.”

In 1999 he moved to ABB, now Alstom Power. He was hired as a CAD designer/engineer. He did drafting work similar to what he’d done before, but now he was with a much larger company and part of the energy production industry.

“I told Alstom as soon as I arrived that I was interested in engineering work and they listened to me,” he says. Within eight months he was promoted to mechanical support engineer, and shortly after that he became lead mechanical engineer for elements of a new power plant going up in Texas. He oversaw construction plans for piping systems, drainage, instrumentation and other plant functions. “The time I spent as a junior engineer was good training,” he says.

When new plant construction slowed in the early 2000s, Hall became a product engineer, overseeing service and maintenance of existing power plants across the U.S. In 2005 management asked Hall to take Six Sigma black belt training. He was sent to a four-month program at Motorola University (Chicago, IL) to learn the methodology for using metrics to improve process performance. He spent two years as a Six Sigma black belt for the company.

In 2007 he returned to a job with the project management group, making sure that parts, people and infrastructure were in place for maintenance contract execution during planned outages, when a power plant is taken offline for service and parts maintenance.

Late last year Hall moved up to manager of outage execution. Now he oversees a staff of five or more who report to him about cost forecasts, trends and requisitions for outage contracts. “I am developing my line manager skill sets to deal with direct reports,” he says.

For the near term, Hall predicts that natural gas- and coal-fired power plants will continue to be “the tried and true methods of power generation.” Skills in EE, ME and, of course, project management will be in demand across the industry, he says.

Petroleum engineer Susan Howes manages Horizons for Chevron
Susan Howes is Chevron’s Horizons program manager. Horizons matches
new hires with mentors, and gets them access to technical training and developmental assignments that help them grow at the company.

Howes is helping to expand the existing Horizons program, first offered to employees in North America, onto a global stage. She visits Chevron employees in places like Scotland, Angola, Indonesia and Thailand.

“My role is to make sure that no matter where Horizons is implemented, the participants will receive comparable development,” she says. Because the work involves technical training, her engineering skills continue to be important. Howes earned her BS in petroleum engineering at the University of Texas-Austin in 1982, benefiting from scholarships offered to students who went into petroleum engineering.

In school she spent two summers interning at Amoco, now part of BP. The third summer she worked at Anadarko Petroleum Corp (Denver, CO), and after graduation she was hired on there as a petroleum engineer.

She worked in Anadarko’s Denver office for several years, overseeing field studies of oil and gas reservoirs in the Rocky Mountains and the mid-continental area to determine where drilling would be financially feasible.

In the early 1990s Howes moved to the Houston office to work as a reservoir engineer. She evaluated the economics of drilling in offshore reservoirs, and modeled the recovery of wells drilled into the “unconventional reservoirs” of coal beds to capture methane gas.

She transitioned, still as an engineer, into business development, analyzing oil and gas fields and negotiating buying and selling of fields. This drew on her business skills, requiring constant interaction with attorneys, accountants and financial experts. “It could be unpredictable at times,” she says, “but I learned about portfolio management and strategic planning.”

In 2001 she became a corporate engineer for Anadarko, recruiting other engineers and developing an engineering training program.

In 2006 she went into HR as manager of employment, then took on the oversight of learning and organizational development.

A year later Howes moved to Chevron. “It was an opportunity to take some of the skills I’d learned into a bigger arena,” she says.

A great asset, she notes, has been her membership in groups like the Society of Petroleum Engineers, where she’s currently on the international board of directors. She’s also VP of Chevron’s 5,000-member women’s network.

Energy production jobs are as vital today as they have been in the past, Howes believes. “When you think about how important energy is to this society, I would say this is a critical job,” she says. “Finding oil will be more and more challenging and we need people with the technical skills to help with that.”

“The Chevron way”
Carole Young, Chevron’s manager of global offices of diversity, affirms that diversity and inclusion are essential to the company. “With operations around the globe, it is imperative to tap into the skills, talents and varied perspectives of all our employees and be sure that everyone respects all cultural differences.”

She notes that Chevron has eleven employee networks, involving more than 14,000 people.

ChE Rebecca Brayboy: Six Sigma at Dominion
Rebecca Brayboy, part of a Six Sigma program, supervises technical support
at power stations for Dominion (Richmond, VA). She completed her BSChE at the University of South Carolina in 1993 and earned an MBA in 2005 at the University of Mary Washington (Fredericksburg, VA).

In college she worked for Union Carbide in Institute, WV, and when she graduated she became a ChE/process engineer there, beginning in the environmental group.

In 1995 Brayboy moved up to process/production engineer, making sure raw materials came in on time and to spec. She provided engineering support and process knowledge for manufacturing, and ensured that products left the unit in a timely fashion.

In 2001 she moved to Virginia to work for Dominion. Transitioning to the utility industry “was one of my better choices,” she says. “The electrical world is so varied; there are so many business units and so many different avenues you can take.” She didn’t know a lot about the power industry, she says, but she started learning right away.

She began as a process engineer at Dominion’s Possum Point power station in northern Virginia, working to make processes more energy efficient.

In 2007 Brayboy moved to the main offices in Richmond, VA to take on her Six Sigma role, working on various process improvement projects. “I look at it as an honor to do this work,” she says.

“Dominion has been a good choice for me,” Brayboy reflects. “Within the company the opportunities have been vast.” Her MBA, she notes, opened further opportunities in management.

A good time for power
“This is a good time to go into the power industry,” declares Drexel Harris, senior HR generalist at Dominion. “As we add capacity and look for ways to
get more capacity out of what we have, we continue moving toward green technologies. We’re going to be building to keep up with demand at the
same time.

“The country hasn’t done a lot of large building projects for a while. We are going to have to find new ways to attract engineers if we want to keep up with the coming demand,” he says. “The industry is going to need EEs, MEs, ChEs, nuclear engineers, industrial and environmental folks.

“The biggest potential will be in building infrastructure. We will need people who can lead some of these major projects.”

Emmi Sanchez Vargas: techie to recruiter at Schlumberger
Emmi Sanchez Vargas earned her BS in engineering physics at the Tec de Monterrey (Monterrey, Mexico) in 2002. “I loved physics,” she says, “but I wanted something I could apply in industry.”

Engineering physics “was a great choice,” although some prospective employers were unfamiliar with the degree. But oilfield services company Schlumberger (Sugar Land, TX) knew all about her degree, liked it, and
hired her in 2003.

She began as a junior seismic engineer in data processing at WesternGeco, Schlumberger’s geophysics business unit. Her job was to process acquired raw data to make a final seismic image for interpretation and use in other imaging processes. She worked at an office in Poza Rica, Mexico for nearly three years.

In 2006 Sanchez Vargas was transferred to Schlumberger’s Houston office, still in data processing. In 2007 she finished a geophysics training program at WesternGeco and moved into a new area. Now she is recruiting for petrotechnical positions for three Schlumberger groups: WesternGeco, Data & Consulting Services (DCS) and Schlumberger Information Solutions (SIS). Her duties include visits to about eighteen universities seeking CS specialists, petroleum engineers, physicists, geologists and geophysicists.

She’s enjoying the transition from technical work to recruiting. “I like these changes,” she says. “I appreciate the different opportunities that Schlumberger offers.

“In the oil industry we are surrounded by men, but I don’t feel like a minority and it has never made me uncomfortable. We are a diverse company of people from all over the world, and that is an advantage,” she says.

“People need energy and today oil is our primary source; it’s going to be around for quite
some time.”

Sustainability at Exelon
Energy services provider Exelon operates electric and gas utilities and is a major nuclear energy source in the U.S. Its engineers focus on sustainability as well as power production.

The work ranges from operations, transmission and maintenance to new business, IT and trading, says recruiting manager Beata Weiss. “With our diversified portfolio, an individual can have a number of different careers all within the same company.

“Exelon strives to be the best in class in all aspects of its business, including diversity and inclusion,” Weiss concludes. “Diversity is a core company value.”

D/C

Claire Swedberg is a freelance writer who lives in La Conner, WA.

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