The Staff of Optimized Gas Treating, Inc.
Ralph H. Weiland
Ralph is OGT's President. He began working in the area of gas treating in 1965 and has been active in basic and applied research in this field ever since. He received B.A.Sc., M.A.Sc., and Ph.D. degrees in Chemical Engineering from the University of Toronto, then spent two years as a post-doctoral fellow in applied mathematics at the University of Western Australia. He taught Chemical Engineering for 30 years at universities in Canada, Australia, and the U.S.A. and directed graduate research in gas treating. Ralph led the development of an earlier version of a mass transfer rate-based model for amine columns and commercialized its concepts in the pre-Windows software package, GasPlant-Plus, now part of WinSim. In addition to the development of the Windows-based ProTreat process simulation package with OGT, Ralph spent ten years with Koch-Glitsch LP, Dallas, TX primarily in tray development.
Nathan A. Hatcher
Nate joined Optimized Gas Treating, Inc. as Vice-President, Technology Development in 2009. After graduating from the University of Kansas with a B.S. in Chemical Engineering, he spent 7 years with Black and Veatch Pritchard, Inc. where he was involved with the design, evaluation, training and start-up of H2S and CO2 removal and sulfur recovery technologies. Nate spent the next 7 years with ConocoPhillips, Inc as Treating and Sulfur Processing Best Practices Network Lead, where he became an expert ProTreat user providing technical support for refinery treating and sulfur recovery operations. He is currently a member of the Amine Best Practices Group. Nate has spent nearly his entire career in amine treating and sulfur recovery, most recently with Trimeric Corporation, and has extensive experience in the practical application of process simulation to operations, troubleshooting and training.
R. Scott Alvis
Scott joined Optimized Gas Treating, Inc. as Director, Business Development in 2011, bringing over 25 years experience providing commercial solutions to tough technical problems. He has focused exclusively on amine and caustic treating in the refining and gas processing industries. During this time, he served as Business Development Manager at Merichem and at CCR Technologies, each for five years. Scott's earlier experience includes 13 years with Calgon Carbon as Sales Manager for Latin America, with emphasis in the areas of catalyst support for mercaptan oxidation, amine purification and mercury removal. Prior to that, he was with Air Products, providing nitrogen services for refinery turnarounds and other gases such as oxygen for Claus enrichment. Scott holds a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from Texas A&M University, where he spent one term as a foreign exchange student at I.T.E.S.M. in Mexico.
Robin B. D'Ombrain
Robin has been developing ProTreat's GUI since 1992. Before migrating to chemical engineering, he spent 10 years in electrical engineering at a steel works in NSW, Australia. He has been involved in software development since 1970. Robin’s earliest work used punch cards on IBM mainframes but in the late 1970s he turned his attention to micro-computers, the first having an 8080 processor and 8-inch floppy disks. He has developed microcomputer applications ever since.
Robin has written software for such applications as collating results for the Australian Smallbore Rifle Championships, an entry management system for the Maitland International Photographic Exhibition, a retail inventory control system (all of which are still in use), as well as numerous laboratory data logging systems and process control simulators.
Sherri A. Jakobs
Sherri joined OGT in January, 2012 as an Administrative Assistant. She is a native English speaker with a Deutsch Zertifikat from the Goethe Institut. Sherri started her career with the West Penn AAA Motor Club, then moved to Europe where she was an English Instructor in the Play English Kindergarten, Milan, Italy and taught business English at the Concept Language School, Burscheid, Germany. Sherri is licensed in Property & Casualty, Liability, and Life Insurance. She has a B.S. in Psychology from the University of Pittsburgh.
