KENNETH KONVICKA
Garland TX 75040
972 495 0939
[email protected]
[email protected]
KEY WORDS: damage assessment, insurance loss, business interruption, property damage, cause and origin investigation, c&o investigation, transportation, vehicles, buildings, structures, construction, electrical fires, chemical process industry, CPI, chemistry, petroleum refinery, tank fires, salt dome propane storage, wax refinery, desalter, emulsion, demulsifier, coalescer, coalescing, liquid filtration, unit operations, vapor liquid separation, gas liquid separators, demister, heavy crude, natural gas plant problems, hydrocarbon pipelines, flammable gas mixtures, dust cloud explosions, personal injury, burns, toxic exposure, toxic gases, poison gases, chlorine, sodium hydroxide, caustic exposure, lye, caustic handling, sulfuric acid, hydrogen, hydrogen sulfide, ammonia process, sulfur dioxide, benzene, ethylene glycol, thermodynamics, gas cloud explosions, heavy metals, radiation safety officer, hazardous waste operation and emergency response, hazwoper trainer, safety training, American Petroleum Institute, wastewater treatment treating waste water treatment, chemical reactions, environmental coordinator, co-generation, hydrocarbon vapor recovery, soda ash, sodium carbonate, Taiwan vinyl chloride monomer, vcm, reactor failures, standards of care, litigation, mergers, historical pollution, groundwater contamination, bioremediation, boiler feedwater, steam generation, steam thermodynamics, greenhouse gases, atmospheric warming, scrubber blowdown, electrical fertilizer production, lightening, NOx, nitric oxide, ammonium nitrate, odors, hydrogen plant, reformer tube failures.
JOB TITLES: Chief Chemical Engineer, Environmental Engineer, Environmental Coordinator, Process Engineer, Senior Consultant, Radiation Safety Officer, Production Engineer, Cell Supervisor, R&D Engineer, trainer.
CREDENTIALS: B.S., BS, Bachelor of Science, Chemical Engineering, HAZWOPER trainer, Radiation Safety Officer.
KEY STRENGTHS: Strong chemical background, experienced with chemical processes, unit operations, imaginative chemistry, novel product applications. Willing to travel. Road warrior.
EDUCATION: Pre-engineering, Southwest Texas State University, 1968-1970. B.S., Chemical Engineering, University of Texas at Austin, December 1972.
EXPERIENCE:
Private Consultant, 2001-Present
Muse, Stancil & Co., Jan. 2001- Nov. 2001
Position: Consultant
Greene & Associates, Inc., 1994 - 2001
Position: Senior Consultant
Oryx Energy Company, 1978 - 1994
Positions: Environmental Coordinator, Chief Chemical Engineer,
Senior Engineer
Dow Chemical Company 1973 - 1978
Positions: Production Engineer,
Research & Development Engineer
PROFESSIONAL AFFILIATIONS AND CONTINUING EDUCATION:
American Institute of Chemical Engineers, Dallas Section - Former Director, Chairman, Vice-Chairman. Currently serving as Treasurer. Outstanding Achievement Awards, AIChE, Dallas Section, 1990 and 1995.
American Petroleum Institute, former member of Hydrogen Sulfide Committee, Naturally Occurring Radioactive Material Ad Hoc Committee, and Benzene Emissions from Glycol Dehydrators, Ad Hoc Committee.
Radiation Safety Officer certification, University of Texas Health Science Center.
Former Certified Trainer in Hazardous Waste Operations and Emergency Response, HAZWOPER.
PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE:
MUSE, STANCIL & CO., Dallas, Texas. Ken joined Muse as a consultant, and brought experience gained from more than 25 years of working in the chemical processing and petroleum industries. His assignments included assisting with an offshore pipeline economic evaluation, environmental due diligence involving a refinery acquisition, product development of an irrigation water quality control system for a pump manufacturer, and the continuing investigation into the causes of transportation-related fire incidents.
GREENE & ASSOCIATES, INC., Dallas, Texas. As a senior consultant, Ken performed damage assessments of process equipment involved in explosions in: a non-woven fiberglass mat process in a roof shingle manufacturing facility; a Vitamin E production plant; a nitrile rubber dryer baghouse; and an ammonium nitrate plant involving four fatalities. He has also performed damage assessment of rail cars that required coordination of inspections with plant personnel and the local representative of the American Association of Railroads, Bureau of Explosives. He reviewed detailed descriptions from railcar repair facilities to correlate their repairs with damages actually incurred.
He also investigated several vehicle fires. He was also the appointed investigator in two modular building fires for a major building manufacturer. He assisted with the investigation at a coal railcar unloading facility near St. Louis, where an oversized refrigeration unit cold box was damaged by the rail crew during switching operations. Other investigations where he was the primary investigator, or assisted, include: determining the origin of carbon monoxide vapors that resulted in the non-fatal poisoning of an occupant at a rental residence; a catastrophic failure of a deaerator supplying boiler feedwater to a salt production and processing facility in Kansas; a well blow-out fire at an east Texas salt dome cavern used for liquefied propane storage; an 80,000 barrel naphtha storage tank fire at a California refinery; the failure of a process centrifuge in a used lube oil recycling facility in Ohio; the rapid corrosion and failure of a vinyl chloride reactor in Taiwan; damage evaluation of 32 storage tanks at a wax refinery in Pennsylvania; the failure of a hot water boiler supplying water to two five-story apartment buildings at a retirement community in Texas; failure of a water backflow preventer valve assembly that water-damaged a 20-story office building; and damage assessment and replacement costs of two tire recycling facilities involved in fires. He has also assisted with injury cases involving exposure to benzene and methanol. He was deposed as an expert witness in litigation involving a fire at an apartment under construction.
Ken conducted a study for a foreign manufacturer of soda ash. New amine process technology was recommended to improve efficiency and reduce costs by using carbon dioxide from boiler flue gas and applying improved crystallization techniques.
Ken researched the industry standards of care, from 1909 to 1995, for a California petroleum company in defense against historical pollution allegations from pipeline leaks. Ken was a member of the technical team defending an equipment manufacturing company in arbitration involving the delayed delivery of offshore gas/oil production vessels. He assisted the U.S. Federal Trade Commission in determining restrictive trade impacts on West Coast refineries from a planned merger of two major oil companies.
ORYX ENERGY COMPANY, formerly Sun Exploration and Production Company, Dallas, Texas. Ken is very experienced in production facility problems encountered in the oil patch, both onshore and offshore. As a troubleshooting expert for Oryx, he designed processes involving investigation and removal or mitigation of contaminants from production fluids and natural gas pipelines. These contaminants included hydrocarbons, salts, heavy metals, arsenic, barium, nickel, vanadium, chromium, mercury, lead, chlorinated hydrocarbons and solvents, radioactive elements, radium, radon, as well as several waste compounds - acids, bases, used lubricants, paraffin, treating chemicals. He identified the failure cause of more than 100 butane fuel vaporizing regulator valves on fleets of fruit-hauling trucks in South Texas. Ken has experience with complying with the Department of Transportation rules and regulations for pipeline safety, and has trained hundreds of company employees on HAZWOPER, Hazardous Waste Operations and Emergency Response, First Responder Operations Level.
As environmental coordinator for the Michigan area, he reduced environmental cleanup costs from $1.50 per barrel of produced oil, to $0.15 per barrel, saving $150,000 per month. He designed and installed an inexpensive in situ bio-remediation process for crude oil impacted soil in Michigan. He personally directed the cleanup of approximately 30,000 cubic yards of contaminated soil at numerous locations in the state. He also designed a technique to rigorously quantify benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, xylene, BTEX emissions from natural gas glycol dehydration units and worked with various states' regulatory agencies to define the extent of problems associated with petroleum operations.
As Chief Chemical Engineer – title, at the Production Service Laboratory, PSL, he investigated a wide variety of problems involving the treatment, handling, and disposal of petroleum, brines and hydrocarbon-containing waters encountered in oil and gas production. He reviewed an estimated 20,000 oil and water analyses, making recommendations to field, district and headquarter personnel on a variety of technical aspects involved in monitoring, cleanup, remediation and settlement. His recommendations included applying unit operations such as: clarification, filtration, ion exchange, leaching, chemical fixation, reverse osmosis, deaeration, stripping, flotation, and chemical treatment processes, which were incorporated at both primary and enhanced oil recovery facilities, as well as natural gas plants' water supplies for boiler and amine systems. On several assignments he directed or worked with chemical service companies to implement various chemical programs to control costs, Petrolite, Ondeo Nalco, Hercules, He has investigated claims of historical brine contamination at numerous oil field locations in Texas, Oklahoma, Michigan and other states. His duties also involved: selection of analytical laboratories to perform mineralogical and organic analyses according to USEPA and American Petroleum Institute guidelines, sample collection and chain of custody transfer, reviewed analysis reports, directed soil scientists and hydrologists in the evaluation of damaged soils and aquifers, recommended procedures for remediation, and reported to government agencies, land owners and company personnel.
During his tenure as Senior Engineer, he designed wastewater treatment systems for large natural gas plants, and designed a treatment method for converting sulfur dioxide scrubber blowdown liquid to a non-hazardous form. He researched and recommended a method for arsenic removal from natural gas in New Mexico. He also designed a chemical process for bulk removal of hydrogen sulfide from a natural gas stream using sodium hydroxide solution that produced by-product sodium hydrosulfide solution used in the kraft paper industry, allowing an additional 600 barrels of oil per day to be produced from the field.
He is familiar with the various types of corrosion - hydrogen sulfide, carbon dioxide and electrochemical, and mineral scales, plugging and microbiological problems occurring in crude oil and natural gas production. He is also experienced in preventing erosion resulting from two-phase flow regimes in gas/crude oil pipelines.
Ken developed a procedure for eliminating odors emitted from sour produced fluids in a large barge from a California offshore exploratory well, allowing the barge to be unloaded thus saving a significant demurrage charge of $8,000/day; investigated several incidents of odor complaints at field offices and a rural community; assisted with start up and trouble shooting of a catalytically treated engine exhaust gas injection unit for an enhanced oil recovery application, a $2.7 million installation; provided technical assistance for the design and start up of casing vapor recovery units in heavy crude fields, which reduced atmospheric emissions and increased hydrocarbon recovery; and he developed a procedure and trained personnel to determine the radioactivity levels of material from subsurface production.
He assisted with the investigation of several incidents while a staff member of the PSL. These included fatalities involving an explosion of an electrical breaker enclosure at an oil production facility, and at a drilling location where hydrogen sulfide exposure resulted in the death of a contract employee. He was deposed as a fact witness while at Oryx.
Ken coordinated asbestos evaluation in California workplaces for Oryx. He designed a caustic neutralization and lead Pb removal process for an engine rebuilder to reduce $6,000 per month disposal expenses. Additionally, he developed a method for rendering heavy metal contaminated soil non-hazardous by chemical fixation. Per drum disposal costs were reduced from $1,000 to $85.
He has specified heat transfer equipment, primarily those condensing two-phase steam, which contained significant concentrations of non-condensible gaseous contaminants, heavy metals and silica. He has also specified plate-and-frame type heat exchangers for the soda ash industry.
Also, while with Oryx, he also developed a passive method for separating emulsions of oil and water at the heavy steamed crude fields in California. The process consumes considerably less energy than other methods, which use centrifuges, heat and chemicals. This technology is being promoted for cleaning up oily wastewater discharges, recycling used lubrication oil, and in separating oil-water emulsions in refinery desalters and slop oil recovery systems. Presentations on this subject were made to Society of Petroleum Engineers and energy industry corporations.
DOW CHEMICAL COMPANY, Freeport, Texas. As Production Engineer at the Brine Treating plant he had responsibility for assuring the continuous treatment of salt dome brine provided to two chlor-alkali plants and organic production plants, which included the disposal of sludge generated from the treating process. He assisted with the implementation of new filtration technology for in situ brine treating and installed a chlorinated wastewater reduction process to maintain compliance with state regulatory requirements. He was also on-call during the loading of liquefied chlorine railcars, which occasionally experienced leaks from safety valves, connections and transfer lines.
As a Production Engineer at a chlorine plant, he had responsibility for the production of chlorine, hydrogen and sodium hydroxide in an electrolytic process. He also coordinated the delivery and unloading of railcars of concentrated sulfuric acid used in the drying of chlorine gas. During the electrolytic generation of chlorine, occasional electrical fires occurred in DC disconnects and switchgear. Here he gained experience investigating the causes of electrical fires. His hands-on involvement with production operations revealed a previously unknown accumulation of explosive hydrogen vapor in the headspace of the railcars. This led to changes in the work procedure for unloading this acid, including the use of spark-resistant tools and allowing time for the explosive vapors to disperse before transferring the acid. Ken also coordinated the loading and shipment of spent, chlorinated sulfuric acid from the facility.
As a Research & Development Engineer, he evaluated the recycling of spent, chlorine-laden, tarry, chlorinated hydrocarbons with traces of dioxin and hexachlorobutadiene sulfuric acid by performing pilot studies for chemically extracting the chlorinated compounds and concentrating the acid for reuse.
He is knowledgeable about a variety of flammable, toxic and hazardous materials including: hydrocarbons, hydrogen sulfide, chlorine, hydrogen, mercaptans, carbon monoxide, benzene, radon, arsenic, mercury and ammonia. He has applied a variety of techniques for identification, neutralization and separation of these chemicals. He has also trained fire department personnel, chemical plant operators, oil company employees and others in the hazards of toxic and dangerous chemicals.