The industry needs dependable partners, and new challenges demand innovative solutions. That is exactly what ENDEGS delivers. For over 10 years the company has accompanied customers large and small through the entire degassing process. ENDEGS knows their individual requirements, their processes and the necessary approval procedures. This saves time and money, and makes your combustion processes highly efficient.
Interview with David Wendel, Managing Director ENDEGS GmbH, Managing Director & CCO ETS Group GmbH.
Easy Engineering: Tell us about your ranges of products / solutions.
David Wendel: As part of the ETS Group – Environmental Technology Services – we are offering our customers a wide range of innovative green tech services for the reduction of industrial emissions. This way, our clients can lower their emissions of harmful substances that occur during many industrial processes and that are harmful to both people and environment. Still too often, those hazardous substances get into the air untreated. By applying our services, the emissions are treated and destroyed in an environmentally-friendly way. Reducing the emissions of hazardous gases and vapours enables industrial facilities to contribute significantly to environmental protection by reducing their carbon footprint and to fulfil ESG criteria.
E.E: Which are the most sold products / solutions?
D.W: We offer a wide range of services and technologies that help our customers to reduce their emissions: mobile vapor combustion units, mobile nitrogen vaporizers, mobile ATEX Zone 0 blowers for the transport of vapours and remote-controlled ATEX Zone 0 robots.
Our vapor combustion units (VCU) are perfectly suited for the degassing of all kinds of containments like tanks, containers, pipelines and vessels for maintenance, cleaning or loading/unloading processes. Furthermore, they are also capable of replacing stationary emissions treatment systems such as vapor recovery units (VRU). In case of downtimes due to maintenance or failure, our units can take over the task of treating and destroying the emissions – this way, the operations in the facility can keep going as usual and don’t need to be shut down.
Our fleet of mobile vaporizers with nitrogen tanks enables the work with components that contain liquified and highly flammable gases under pressure such as LNG, ammonia, Ethylen Oxide (EO) or hydrogen. With the use of nitrogen, components containing these substances can be purged and rendered inert. Due to their high flammability and risk of explosion, products like LNG or ammonia are more complex to work with. By combining a mobile nitrogen vaporizer with a mobile vapor combustion unit, they can be degassed as well in a closed system.
The ATEX Zone 0 blowers enable the safe extraction of vapours from plants, tanks, vessels, jettys and many other components. They are small, compact and easy to use and are available in different capacities, depending on the customer’s requirements. To connect the ATEX Zone 0 blower, components such as piping networks, valves, detonation arrestors, liquid separator and more are supplied as well.
Applying the remote-controlled ATEX Zone 0 robot makes tank cleaning a safe and easy task. Previously, workers performing tank cleaning tasks were exposed to high health and safety risks in the hazardous ATEX Zone 0. The robot can now be controlled from a safe distance via two joysticks. A monitor in the operation cabin shows every movement of the robot in real time. We offer the ATEX Zone 0 robot as a rental service.
E.E: What are clients looking for when they want to buy products / solutions from your range?
D.W: Most important to our clients are short deployment times as well as efficient, environmental-friendly and safe processes. To work together on such an important topic as environmental protection and sustainable processes, a lot of reliability and trust is necessary from the client towards the service provider. Another important factor for our customers I notice in the daily work is that the daily operations should be disturbed as little as possible during our emissions reduction processes. Many of our customer also value our worry-free and all-in-one service: we accompany our customers through the entire process.
E.E: On which aspects should clients focus when deciding to buy a product / solution?
D.W: Industrial emissions reduction is an important topic and part of sustainability, environmental protection and governance – in short called ESG criteria. Therefore, companies should pay close attention to what is the best solution for them and their individual application. That’s why we offer a detailed overview of our services and their benefits in the initial consultation and proposal. No industrial facility – whether it is from the oil and gas, chemical or petrochemical industry – is exactly the same; therefore, it is important to choose the service that exactly fits individual requirements.
E.E: Tell us a short buying guide for clients who want to purchase your products / solutions?
D.W: We offer our clients a full all-in-one service and accompany our customers during the entire process – from the initial consultation and proposal, project preparation, authority communication and support and execution to safety precautions and clean-up. Our operators carry out the entire work and, if it is desired, can also instruct the on-site staff, for example for working with the ATEX Zone 0 robot. Furthermore, our team also takes care of all relevant official approvals. This full-service package for emissions reduction is also an important factor for customers choosing our services.
E.E: What should clients know when they plan to upgrade their existing solutions?
D.W: First of all, our customers know that we can offer a broad range of solutions out of our own fleet. Therefore, it is of course not a problem at all to upgrade any service. For example, we offer the combination of mobile vapor combustion units with a mobile nitrogen vaporizer or with the ATEX Zone 0 robot for a holistic emissions reduction project. If a customer only applies one solution and decides to upgrade, arrangements can of course be made. Secondly, we have a broad network and extensive knowledge which can always help as we cooperate with partners that make our portfolio of possible solutions and services even broader.
E.E: Why do clients choose your products / solutions over other existing on the market?
D.W: Many of our clients are regular long-term customers that value our technologies and services. One thing that, in our experience, is a major reason for choosing our services, is our significant and valuable experience in the market. ENDEGS was founded in 2007 and just one year later, our founder Kai Sievers invented the first portable and autonomously operated vapor combustion unit world-wide, making mobile degassing possible for the very first time ever.
However, ongoing innovation is also an important topic for us. As nowadays, mobile degassing and emissions reduction have become a standard on the market, it is now important to continuously develop existing technologies and adapt them so they fulfil all requirements for different areas of application. Innovation is therefore an important topic for us that is also very important to our customers.
E.E: What sets your products / solutions apart? What innovative / special features do they have?
D.W: With our equipment park, we are the only company operating in Europe that is able to treat all vapours, gases and gas mixtures of the explosion groups IIA, IIB and IIC with an efficiency of more than 99.99 % and without any open flame. This makes the ETS Group the leading European specialist in the reduction and treatment of hydrocarbons, VOC and HAP emissions. Furthermore, we can offer our clients many different combustion capacities due to the scalability of our units. We offer mobile incinerators with capacities of 3 MW, 5 MW, 10 MW and 20 MW. The units with a lower combustion capacity are perfectly suited for short-term projects and emergency projects, the 10 MW and 20 MW unit are ideal for long-term deployments and projects involving more complex products that necessitate a higher combustion capacity to effectively treat the emissions. Our units are scalable and thus can be combined to reach a higher combustion capacity. For example, in a recent major project in the Port of Rotterdam, we have deployed four mobile vapor combustion units, reaching a total combustion capacity of 45 MW. With more than 50 mobile incinerators, we have one of the largest fleets in Europe at our disposal to offer our clients efficient and reliable emissions reduction services.
E.E: Tell us some tips & tricks that clients can use when searching to buy your products / solutions?
D.W: We have prepared a wide range of information materials on our website that interested customers can get more information from when deciding if our services are suitable for them. I also advise them to check out our LinkedIn page as well as to do research via a precise google search or by asking around in their own network. Informing on the portfolio of similar companies and comparing the different offerings may also help. What in my opinion is the most important thing when deciding for emissions reduction services is to collect detailed insights in the services and to get references. Therefore, showing reference projects and how our technologies can be applied in these projects is an important part of our strategy.
E.E: What products / solutions are you going to launch next year?
D.W: We are always aiming to optimize our services. Therefore, we are regularly adapting our technologies – because effective emissions reduction requires constant innovation. As the range of products that the different industries work with – whether it is oil and gas, chemical and petrochemical, marine and shipping or the fertilizer or food industry – is constantly changing, it often happens that products are used that the existing technologies are not applicable for. For example, we recently added the mobile nitrogen vaporizers to our portfolio to be able to also degas components that contain LNG or green ammonia – substances that are becoming increasingly important as new alternative and more sustainable energy sources. We will continue to do so also in the next year. Something that it of course getting more and more important overall and that we will also further include into our services is digitalization. Furthermore, solutions for the reduction of NOx emissions (nitrogen oxides) are also on the list of things we are working on.