Episode #9 of the Oil & Gas Measurement Podcast episode features chromatography expert Jamie Marsden of Emerson Process Management discussing the evolution of Gas Chromatography in the field, and the challenges of using gas chromatography with renewable natural gas (RNG).

Gas Chromatography Challenges: Show Notes, Links, and Insider Terms

• Jamie Marsden is a dedicated technical professional with extensive experience in the analytical instrumentation industry. He is currently a Senior Sales Representative for the Rosemount Gas Analysis & Detection, a division of Emerson Automation Solutions. Connect with Jamie on LinkedIn.
  • Emerson helps manufacturers achieve top quartile business performance through the industry’s broadest portfolio of technologies to measure, control, optimize and power their operations – and the experience and expertise to solve their toughest problems. From reliable, easy-to-use, and innovative products and software to responsive, expert services, Emerson combines advanced technologies, industry-leading expertise, and an insatiable curiosity about the world around us to create sustainable solutions for the essential customers we serve.
• ISHM (The International School of Hydrocarbon Measurement) is held annually in Oklahoma City. ISHM provides a number of  1–2 hour training classes on various topics of interest to those in oil and gas measurement. 
• GC (Gas Chromatography) is an analytical technique used to separate the chemical components of a gas mixture and then qualify the individual components. GCs are frequently used in natural gas measurement to determine the quality and heating value of natural gas for process control and custody transfer purposes.
  • Process GC is a Gas Chromatograph designed and used outside of the laboratory environment. Process GCs may be installed in the plant process area or at a pipeline measurement station, with the output tied directly into process control and/or measurement equipment.
  • Chromatography Column: in gas chromatography, the individual compounds are separated by forcing the gas mixture through a long, thin tube, called a column, that has been tightly packed with a precisely engineered media. Smaller molecules pass through more quickly, while larger molecules take longer.
• C1 –  C6: A shorthand used to refer to individual hydrocarbon compounds by the number of hydrocarbon atoms. C1 represents Methane. C6 represents hexane.
  • A C6 analysis refers to a GC analysis that stops separating the sample components at C6, grouping all hydrocarbons C6 and larger into a single value.
• Geo Gas, Geo-Sourced Gas (Geologically Sourced Natural Gas) is natural gas produced from oil and gas wells.
• H2S (Hydrogen Sulfide) is an extremely toxic contaminate that naturally occurs in some oil and gas wells, as well as most RNG sources. In the presence of water, it forms highly corrosive sulfuric acid. H2S, regardless of its source, must be removed before natural gas can be used or shipped through pipelines. 
• Peaks are the output signal from the detector in a gas chromatograph when plotted against time. Each peak can be correlated to a specific compound – based upon the amount of time since the sample was injected. The area under each “Peak” can be correlated to the concentration of the compound.
• British Thermal Unit (BTU) is the amount of energy needed to raise 1 pound of water by 1 degree Fahrenheit while at sea level.
• Inerts are a generic term that refers to compounds in natural gas that do not burn, therefore do not contribute to the heating value. Carbon Dioxide and Nitrogen are the most common inerts found in natural gas. The quality specifications for “pipeline quality” natural gas will typically limit total inerts to 5% – 10% by volume.
• Renewable Natural Gas (RNG) is natural gas that is produced by capturing and processing the gasses produced from a variety of renewable processes. The RNG must be processed and filtered to achieve pipeline-quality standards, so it becomes “interchangeable” with geo-sourced natural gas. The methane content must be concentrated to approximately 90%, inserts reduced to acceptable limits, and toxic and\or damaging contaminants removed. 
  • RGN Feedstocks: The biomass that is the raw product used in the production of RNG. Common sources are:
    • Landfill Gas – The natural deterioration of the garbage in landfills releases a variety of gasses that must be collected to prevent them from reaching the atmosphere. While large amounts of methane are present, undesirable and/or toxic gasses may also be produced. 
    • Digester Gas – Anaerobic (without oxygen) Digesters that produce methane gas from various biomass sources, such as human sewage, cattle, and swine feedlot waste, and non-woody plant material
• Siloxanes are a class of compounds having a short repeating unit of silicon and oxygen atoms (either in a chain or a ring) with organic side chains.  They are not found in geologically sourced natural gas, but they are a common contaminate pervasive in RNG sourced from landfills. 
  • Siloxanes are non-toxic and are frequently used in food processing and preparation. They also appear in cleaning agents, cosmetics, personal care products, lubricants, car wax, and many other consumer and industrial products.  When burned, they create silicon dioxide, which is basically sand as a hot gas. As it cools, it is deposited on the interior surfaces of engines, burners, and turbines, reducing efficiency, and eventually damaging the equipment.  Even small amounts of siloxanes in the natural gas stream are damaging, since the effects are cumulative over time.

Gas Chromatography Challenges: Full Episode Transcript

Weldon Wright:  Welcome to Episode 9 of the Oil & Gas Measurement Podcast, sponsored by Gas Certification Institute (GCI), providing training, measurement standard operating procedures, measurement consultant services, and field operation software to the oil and gas industry for over 20 years.

[background music]

Announcer:  Welcome to the Oil & Gas Measurement Podcast, where measurement professionals, Bubba geeks, and gurus share their knowledge, experience, and likely a tall tale or two on measurement topics for the oil and gas industry. Now your host, Weldon Wright.

Weldon:  Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Oil & Gas Measurement Podcast. I have Jamie Marsden with me today from Emerson Automation Solutions.

I ran into Jamie about two weeks ago at ISHM, where Jamie was teaching a class or two on chromatography. Before we dig into chromatography and chromatographs, Jamie, tell us a little bit about yourself, what you do with Emerson, and how you got there.

Jamie Marsden:  Hi. Thanks for having me on. I’ve had a couple of roles with Emerson. I used to be the business development manager for the Gas Chromatographs for North America.

I’ve recently just switched roles, and I’m now doing analytical sales in the Gulf area. I cover basically from Conroe all the way down to Baytown. I do technical sales of more than just the gas chromatograph.

I also do a little bit of the other products. We have some flame and gas in the portfolio. We have some pH connectivity. We also have some sims and obviously the gas chromatograph as well. There’s a number of products now that I have under my wing and not just the gas chromatographs.

Again, it was just a bit of an evolving career for me within the company just trying to get my wings further out and then looking to see what was out there just because I have changed companies a couple of times. I’ve lived in different countries. The change is good for me, I suppose.

Weldon:  You said you worked for a number of different companies. One of those was ThermoFisher along the way. Tell us a bit about that background.

Jamie:  I was actually with ThermoFisher for 20 years. We had the analytical show last week, which used to be the ISA show – it was down in Galveston – bumped into a lot of people that I know, because of all these companies that I’ve been with. The analytical world is actually a very small world. You tend to know the same people.

I started off with ThermoFisher back in 1994, basically as an intern. I was just a graduated engineer at that time. That was in South Africa, working for them. A lot of our applications in South Africa were precious metals, gold, and platinum. Very interesting stories at all of those places.

If you ever put analyzers into those types of places, they never, ever come out, because it’s a sure way to hide the gold, hide the platinum, is in an analyzer. Same with tools. Any tools go in, no tools ever come out, because of the cost of these precious metals.

I worked for ThermoFisher, and then I got a call to action from ThermoFisher in the USA, because they had some applications that were unique to the USA, and they asked who would be able to come help them. This was in the early 2000s. I said, yeah, I’ll come over and have a look.

We spent three months working in the US. I suppose it’s the old story, you’re working, then they say, “Hey, would you like to have a full-time position? We’ll basically give you a Green Card,” and so on and so on.

I said, “Well, I have to speak to my wife.” My wife said no. They persisted and said, “No, we’ll bring you over, have a look.” Long story short, we ended up here and we never left.

I worked for ThermoFisher for 20 years and I actually left ThermoFisher because I got offered a really good position with SpectraSensors, who are part of E+H, as an engineering application-cum-inside sales manager. It’s a couple of different, varied roles.

I had an interest in that technology that SpectraSensors had, and the position was enticing. I spent four years there and then from there, I joined Emerson, where I am now.

Weldon:  That’s quite a varied background. I started in gas and then ventured into the liquid part sometime later. In gas, we like to say we have a high-value product. The crude folks laugh at that and go on and say it doesn’t compare to their product.

Gold and platinum, that puts a whole nother shine to the story of a high-value product. That’s really interesting. What we’re here today to talk about, of course, is chromatography and chromatographs in general.

Chromatographs, that’s some fancy lab-grade equipment. You go back 30 years now, maybe 35 years now, we were just first pushing lab-grade equipment into the labs in a box, saying we didn’t need a full-time tech to run. We still needed a tech to babysit it, but probably not a full- time tech.

Maybe 20 years ago, we started pushing those out into the field. Right now, we got chromatographs riding around in the backseat of trucks with portable chromatographs for guys that really are not chromatograph technicians.

The science behind how they work may not have changed a tremendous amount. The way we package the systems, the software that helps run them, that has really changed dramatically. 

We have a varied listener audience. At least, I hope I have an audience. If I do, they’re probably varied. At any rate, a varied audience. Some of them have probably heard the phrase GC or chromatograph but do not really know what they do. Can you give us a five-minute overview of the theory behind and what the data is used for, Jamie?

Jamie:  Yeah, the elevator speech, so to say.

Weldon:  Exactly.

Jamie:  [laughs] To your point, I think it was ’54 was the first ever lab GC. You still get lab GCs to this day. Processed GCs came around purely because they needed to have quick results in the process as opposed to a lab GC, which takes quite a long time to actually analyze the samples.

Just quickly, what does a GC do? I like to always say that a gas chromatograph is a cash register. Often that’s how it’s viewed in the industry, specifically in custody transfer because that is what’s telling customers how much the gas that they are moving along the pipe is worth. I often joke that you thought you got rid of the British, but the British still exist. You still have BTU, British thermal units, as a measurement, so you didn’t totally get rid of the British. Chromatograph is basically measuring the BTU of the gas, which is the energy of the gas.

How it works, coming back to that analogy of a cash register, it’s quite an easy one if you think of this analogy, how does a GC work? What you do is, when you go grocery shopping, you pack your grocery cart full of groceries. Think of this as being the sample. 

Your sample that’s being analyzed by any analyzer is full of hydrocarbons, specific, obviously, in oil and gas and natural gas. You have a lot of hydrocarbons all the way from C1, all the way up, methane, ethane, propane. They’re all chemically bonded to each other. They exist in this, what we call, the sample. This is your shopping cart. When you get your shopping cart and you go to pay for your groceries, I don’t know of any – and if you do – I don’t know of any grocery that you can just straight walk out with all those groceries in the basket.

They have to know what is in the basket. This is what your gas chromatograph is going to do. You physically unpack each item, and then there’s somebody that reads it on the register. It comes up with a price, a total, or how much is that one item.

At the end, you get all the items totaled up to give you the cost of all your groceries. This is exactly what a GC does. First of all, the unpacking is done inside the unit via columns and valves. We have some columns, separation columns.

These are like you unpacking the groceries, they’re separating out the components. They do this by very thin tubes, normally a sixteenth inch. They have a certain length. They’re packed with a certain recipe of material that interacts, chemically bonds, or interferes with those hydrocarbons, allowing some to go and some to be stuck behind.

We are actually separating out the individual hydrocarbons one, by one, by one, by one, and they actually then go to a detector that counts them. Then it gives us a signal, which the cash register, obviously, has a price, and the hydrocarbon is basically just a signal on the detector.

Then we count all those signal strands up, which is the intensity of that signal, and that gives us the BTU. Each individual component has a certain energy associated with it. The ones that don’t are your inerts. Your nitrogen, your CO2, and these. That’s why you have tariff limits on those. You don’t want too much of them in the pipe.

Basically, that’s what it does. It just unpacks all of those hydrocarbons, totals them up, and gives you a nice little output reading on a display, but it’s all basically electronic signals changing.

Weldon:  The shopping cart analogy is really great. I don’t know that I’ve heard that one used anywhere except for you, Jamie. Kind of like it. I might borrow it going forward.

[laughter]

Weldon:  As you mentioned, the need for speed is what really dragged the chromatograph out of the lab into the plant process. Then, of course, we’re dragging it out into the field on the side of the pipeline,  in the back of that technician’s truck where they’re doing calibrations. 

Of course, in that case, that online GC is being used as a replacement for a lab.They’re still probably only doing one sample a month or one sample every couple of months with that portable GC, but the online GC in the plant, on the side of the pipeline, how quickly are we getting updated analysis with that kind of equipment today, Jamie? On the order of three or four minutes now? Depends on the type of analysis I’m sure.

Jamie:  If we talk in a typical C1 to, say, C6, so that would be up to hexane, you’re looking at about four minutes. You can actually do it in three minutes. The thing that happens is as you reduce the time, you also lose the resolution.

Weldon:  That makes sense.

Jamie:  Yeah, you got to be careful because when you lose resolution, you start to get the peaks closer together, and then you do sacrifice something. You’re looking at about three to four minutes on average.

Which I always like to say this is the reason that GCs aren’t the only technology out there being used for measurements, because there are other technologies that are quicker, but they’re not as advantageous as a GC from a point of view that the GC is separating everything out so you can physically see the components.

Other technologies, obviously, you cannot. They have overlaps and they have other problems, but you do have to marry up certain technologies for an accurate and a timely measurement.

Weldon:  Sometimes, you may need two different technologies looking at the same thing. You may need the GC for the accuracy of the resolution, but you may find yourself in a situation where you actually need a faster device just to respond to contaminants or problems with the process.

The concept of a new complete analysis broken down by component with a new gravity and heating value calculated every three to four minutes, that’s a dramatic change from the old world where we caught a sample in a bottle, we drove it around in the truck for a couple of days, we sent it to a lab, the lab got around to sending it back, and maybe two weeks later we got updated information from it.

That’s quite a difference. I guess the main reason we had you on here was to talk a little bit about some of the newer challenges. Chromatographs and chromatographs on pipelines are nothing new about that these days. There are, of course, advances in technology, but the technology itself has been around for a while.

20 years ago, folks dealing with landfill gas were pretty far between. There weren’t many places doing it. Where they were doing it, it was mostly being put into a midstream gathering system, where the folks know how to deal with off spec or oddities in the gas. They know how to process and finish gas.

Wasn’t that common, but today, we relabeled it. Landfill gas doesn’t sound very nice, but RNG, renewable natural gas, sounds cool, so we’ve relabeled it. RNG is, in many cases, being delivered today directly into distribution systems. Sometimes right there in the middle of all the customers.

I know that there are lots of new challenges associated with that. Can you talk to us about some of the things you’re seeing with analyzing that gas and providing good data back to that cash register?

Jamie:  Yeah. You are 100 percent right. I mean, things have changed. Irrespective of governmental changes and government bodies changing, everybody realizes that we are moving to a greener way. That doesn’t mean hydrocarbon fuel is going away, but RNG is a very good way for us to be able to use something that is renewable.

Like you say, landfill has been around for a long time, and now we’ve got the new fancy word, RNG. The other one, of course, is hydrogen injection. This is another one that people are talking about where you’re measuring hydrogen being injected pipelines. Then, obviously, another one is carbon capture.

A lot of people are talking about carbon capture. With RNG, you have a couple of issues. You can have different feedstocks, and some of these feeds, they varied. You can have from what they call hog farms all the way to corn, to fuels that they basically want to, not recertify, but run through some digesters again or trying to clean it up, or do something different with it.

At the end of the day, you have a digester basically. What you’re trying to do is basically get this to, as you were alluding to, some form of getting it back into the pipe. This is done through different ways. They have what they call biogas upgraders, and things once they get the raw product, but you are dealing with a lot of issues that you do not have with traditional gas.

The biggest issue being a lot of water, a lot of CO2, H2S as well. These components are something I’ve seen in some customers, talking to them, that what they’re seeing sometimes is up to 20 percent CO2. Basically, you have to get rid of that CO2 because you cannot have that in the pipe.

You limit it to a certain amount of inerts, typically below five percent. You’re then forced to do some of this biogas upgrading. They can also do combined heat and power units that can basically convert this to electricity. There’s different ways of doing this.

You’re correct. Big one is CO2. Big one is moisture. Another big one is the sulfides that some people are not talking about. What happens specifically with these RNGs is when you start washing down these hog farms, you’re now introducing all these sulfurs that didn’t exist, that are now coming out of these cleaning products.

You now have issues with these contaminating. You’re getting other measurements that are now needing to be done. These are siloxanes, they’re called, but basically just sulfurs. Now, as you say, there are some challenges, of course.

Weldon: Jamie, a couple of things you said there really stick in the mind of an old-school measurement guy. I know I’ve heard it before, but I’m not sure a lot of our listeners recognize that RNG is a big label hung on a lot of different things.

As you mentioned, it could be waste from hog farms, cattle feedlots, municipal landfills, recovering gas landfills. Even the digesters in municipal wastewater treatment plants, as well as biomass from corn harvest, or different agricultural harvests. All of those things I’m sure produce very different gasses and potentially very different waste and contaminants in them.

You know, back to what scares measurement guys, we used to think it was important to have that GC on the pipeline, because we were worried that BTUs might swing 10 or 20 BTUs over the course of an entire month.

When you’re talking about introducing a gas that, when everything is running properly, might be 2, or 3, or 4 percent inerts, to something that could, in a matter of minutes, swing up to 20 percent plus inerts when they’re process doesn’t work right, that can equal huge swings in BTU value, not to mention contaminants that might actually be dangerous.

That really underscores how important it is to have these online systems that are monitoring and providing rapid results and reliable results also, Jamie.

Jamie:  Yeah, of course.

Weldon:  I know that when we talk about some of these concepts, you mentioned earlier a whole bunch of different things that I would love to unpack, but it would probably be two or three more episodes.

One of the things that strikes in my mind, of course, is how do you get representative samples of some of these things, especially when we start talking about the siloxanes. Did I pronounce that right? I’m not even sure.

Jamie:  Mm.

Weldon:  I understand there’s a lot of sampling issues with that. That may be a whole nother episode. One of the things that I’m not sure all of our listeners will understand about GCs is the thing they used to say about the guys that ran the GCs, the techs that worked the GCs, was it was just as much art as it was science to be able to configure, to operate, and to calibrate a GC.

Now, the advanced software that we have today has done so much for that. We’ve taken a lot of the art out of it. One thing that’s important to understand is a GC can’t analyze for anything that we haven’t told it about us. It’s my summary.

Being sure that we have a representative calibration gas and a representative calibration is important, could you talk a few minutes about what a GC is good at and what it’s not good at when it comes to in terms with analyzers?

Jamie:  Yeah, sure. If we’re looking at the typical measurement, for instance, let’s just say it’s a clean gas. Let’s just say there’s nothing really in it except for it’s a nice, well, let’s just give it 89 percent methane. Anything that’s 89 percent methane is almost getting up to LNG quality, which is beautiful.

If you look at that, for instance, we often have customers saying, “I had an issue with my oxygen analyzer,” because they often will put oxygen onto a separate analyzer because it’s a scavenger gas. You need to know very quickly if oxygen is present. I was trying to find the oxygen on the GC, and what people don’t realize, for instance, on a C6+ measurement is oxygen and nitrogen elude together. Therefore, you could almost call your N2 peak in all C6 GCs. It doesn’t matter which flavor of the month it is, who made it, you’re always going to have O2 and N2 together.

People didn’t realize that. They just thought that O2 was its own peak. The reason we do that is it’s designed that way so that we don’t separately measure O2. The analysis takes a lot longer with O2. O2 is not a huge issue on a GC, but of course, it does affect the column. There’s a very basic example.

The other one would be H2S and H2O. You cannot actually calibrate for H2O on a GC, because you have to have liquid and it’s a liquid. You can get what we call a response factor. You could see a peak for it. The problem with that is you cannot think of that as being an actual identifiable result, and you cannot put your money on that. You could have it showing this moisture, but really, you put that on the other analyzer.

These are two very basic examples. Another one is siloxanes. Siloxanes cannot be analyzed by any GC technology. There’s only one or two companies in the world that can do siloxanes. These are what they call high-end GC. I think it’s called an EDM. Please don’t ask me what the EDM part means. It’s a very high-end gas chromatograph that is coupled to another infrared device that the gas chromatograph separates it out and then it gets measured through the infrared spectrum. Very, very challenging to do that.

Fluorine exists. Chlorine exists. Ammonia exists in bio gasses. All of these are not being measured on the GC and typically would never even be thought of being measured. You are correct, there are certain challenges. Even hydrogen, which is now becoming more prevalent to measure, customers will say, “Oh, I have this GC. I just want to measure hydrogen.” Unfortunately, it’s not that simple, because adding hydrogen is the same as adding another GC, so you might as well see if you can retrofit it or buy an upgraded GC to replace the existing.

A lot of misconception of how you can simply add analysis. Unfortunately, because of the way the GC is designed, that’s not always possible.

Weldon:  I’ve done a little bit of – I shouldn’t say research – a little casual googling, would be the answer to it, on hydrogen. You read some almost crazy stuff about folks that want to analyze hydrogen with their current GCs or some modified GC like a carrier gas – it’s a blend of hydrogen and helium – to measure hydrogen.

That just seems weird to me. Or argon or all those things that have been out there for a while.

You’re right. It’s important to know what it’s good at and what it’s not. Not only what it’s good at and what it’s not. The other thing that comes up in my mind is, I was starting to ask you to talk to us for a minute about what could go wrong with GC analysis, but it’s almost better to ask what are all the things that have to go right?

In today’s world, a lot of folks, especially younger generations, if it came from electronics or a computer, they believe it, but when it comes to certain technologies – GC being one of them – a whole lot of things have got to line up properly for the results there to be accurate and representative of the sample.

Jamie:  Yeah, yeah, you’re 100 percent correct. It’s not part of this conversation, but sample conditioning is extremely, extremely important. Sample conditioning is much better.

Weldon:  Is a whole other field almost.

Jamie:  It is a minefield of its own.

Weldon:  A minefield. OK.

Jamie:  [laughs] Just because it’s very misunderstood, because people just don’t realize the complexity of that. Again, sample conditioning, very important.

The next part that is important is that you’re getting a representative sample. This means that the sample is representative of what is in the process. The GC is taking a sample that is being derated to a certain pressure and a certain temperature to keep it in a phase. A phase, sometimes people are like, what’s the phase? The phase is basically, what phase was it in the pipe?

Sometimes it can be in mixed phases, but it being a gas chromatograph – key word being gas – we need to have a gas sample. That doesn’t mean that people don’t take liquid samples to gas chromatographs. That is possible. Very commonly undone, or a better word would be, [laughs] say, very commonly not done.

What happens with liquids is they’re going to become a gas, so you convert them into a gas. That’s, again, another topic because it is very difficult to do liquid analysis converting it to gas because of the volumes. Volumes are very different between a liquid to a gas. You have to be very careful when you do those measurements.

What could go wrong? Obviously, a lot of things. These things have compressors that are pushing the gas along. Very common to see compressor oil getting inside of GCs. A means getting in for the treatment. That they’re treating H2S, if there is H2S, all of these chemicals and additives they have to add to get rid of certain components.

Unwanted inerts can also make their way into the GC and then cause an issue inside of your GC. Exactly, a lot of things can go wrong. You hit the nail on the head. Unfortunately, what’s happened is a lot of the workforce has changed. A lot of the guys now are having to take care of a lot of equipment.

You’ve moved away from the specialists. The reason for that is they’ve made GCs easy. I’ll put that in inverted columns…

[laughter]

Jamie:  …because I would say you have to have a basic understanding, or at least have some training on all products, but have an understanding. Because a lot of these guys get grandfathered in and they’re just told, “Oh, if that’s the problem, just do this.” Meanwhile, they have no understanding of what is actually happening inside the device.

Of course, there is a huge issue with the skill set out there now. That can further cause problems. Unintended problems because there may be nothing wrong with the GC, but the guy was always told it should read this, it doesn’t read that. He tries to make a correction in the software and completely has a reverse effect on the analysis, and then they have a problem.

[crosstalk]

Jamie:  Yeah, a lot of little pieces and some of them very critical. [laughs]

Weldon:  I guess I would date myself if I said that I’ve once sat at the top of an eight-foot step ladder and tapped that little tube on the concrete below as I tried to pack that little powder into it. That would kind of date me, wouldn’t it?

Jamie:  [laughs] Yeah.

Weldon:  It’s been few years since I did that. Today, there is no concept of anybody repacking a column, or even exchanging a column in the field. It’s replace the whole guts of the instrument, swap it out, send it back in, and the factory sends you a new one in a few days, or weeks, or months, whatever the schedules are. Don’t answer that from an Emerson standpoint today. 

Jamie, I appreciate all this. You said a number of things that I would love to unpack and get into. Sample conditioning, which we mentioned earlier, is one of those. That’s a very wide topic there we could dig into.

You mentioned another topic that’s on my list of, what’s the difference in gas quality that is expected with the LNG liquefaction plants and stuff. We don’t have a lot more time for that today. I want to thank you for being on the podcast today, with sharing some of your expertise and knowledge. Is there anything you want to leave us with before we close?

Jamie:  No. Thanks for having me on. I always enjoy talking about the measurements. I work for Emerson but I firmly believe that, specifically with gas chromatographs, I’ve always said that anybody that made a bad gas chromatograph wouldn’t be in business anymore. I will never badmouth the competition because I believe everybody makes a good product.

Personally, I’m just interested in technology. Obviously, I’m very customer focused, so I like to make sure the customers are getting what they need. There is an old saying that I always try to live by, is, treat somebody like you’d like to be treated. If I had an issue, I’d love somebody to be able to fix my stuff, and of course, customers are the same way.

Sometimes it’s just an ear that they want to talk into, or bounce something off. If we’re all in it in the field, or the technical field, or management themselves, we just have that ear and listen to the people. It’s just one of those things that I always find sometimes you can’t solve everything. Nothing’s always solvable the first go around, but you’ll get to answer in the end.

[background music]

Weldon:  I agree wholeheartedly, Jamie. Thanks so much for your time. Appreciate you being on the podcast today.

Jamie:  All right. Thank you.

Weldon:  Thanks for listening. I hope you enjoyed our podcast episode. If you did, please take a moment to leave us a review on iTunes, Google, or wherever you get your podcast fixes from.

A full transcript of this episode, which also includes definitions of any geeky terms we used and a bio from Jamie, can be found on our website at pipelinepodcastnetwork.com.

You can leave us comments and suggestions for new episodes, suggestions for topics, or volunteer yourself up to the podcast microphone by sending me a message on LinkedIn or by using the contacts page on pipelinepodcastnetwork.com. Thanks again for listening.

[music]

Transcription by CastingWords