Turblex wraps up multimillion-dollar Singapore, Jordan jobs

Engineers employed at the Turblex Inc. manufacturing facility, 1635 W. Walnut St., drew up the plans for 20 heavy-duty aeration blowers built into large-scale wastewater treatment plants recently constructed in Singapore and Amman. The two projects combined brought in $14 million in revenue for Turblex, said Guy Mace, the company’s president and CEO.

Last September, Mace sold his 49 percent ownership in Turblex – a company he established in 1989 with Denmark-based compressor company HV-Turbo – to Germany-based Siemens AG, a global engineering behemoth with 2007 revenues of $106 billion.

Siemens acquired majority ownership of Turblex in November 2006 with the acquisition of Germany-based AG Kuhnle, Kopp & Kausch, the parent company of HV-Turbo.

After 19 years of running the company he co-founded, Mace is preparing to retire from Turblex and live year-round in Incline Village, Nev., on the north shore of Lake Tahoe. He’s been commuting to Springfield for a week or two at a time, but his contract is set to expire Sept. 28.

“I’m a hired gun like everybody else,” Mace said, adding that he expects Siemens to name his replacement later this month.

Mace will be leaving Turblex on a high note. Under his guidance, the company recently completed two of its largest and most complex jobs in conjunction with the treatment plants in Singapore and Jordan.

Wastewater to drinking water

Singapore was the bigger of the two jobs, due to the sheer magnitude of the wastewater reclamation plant built to serve the country’s Changi region. Mace said the plant is capable of treating 500 million gallons of wastewater daily, which puts it on par with plants in Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles. But in one way, the Singapore plant is quite different.

“This is a country that is water poor, and it’s one of the few countries in the world that is reclaiming the wastewater,” Mace said. “They are running it through reverse osmosis and ultra-filtration and making a product called Newater. They’re bottling it for drinking water.”

Oregon-based engineering firm CH2M Hill designed the plant, which includes 10 3,000-horsepower turbo blowers designed by Turblex to aerate wastewater stored in basins.

Turblex Project Manager Philip Wong coordinated the design, fabrication, assembly and testing of the blowers. Wong said the blowers were engineered here and then made by HV-Turbo in Denmark, with about 70 percent of the components being shipped overseas from the United States.

“The whole project was complicated, and we had never done anything like this before,” said Wong, who made numerous business trips to Singapore, Denmark and Taiwan for the job. “There were a lot of logistical challenges.”

There were also cultural challenges, Wong said, adding that each part of the world does business a little bit differently. Communication, negotiation and, at times, compromise were key to keeping the project on track.

“Here, we have everything in black and white,” he said. “We go by the contract.”

Wong supervised the two-year installation and testing of the Turblex blowers at the Singapore plant – a process that concluded earlier this summer.

Turblex Electrical Engineering Manager Ed Munsell also was instrumental in the Changi plant. He designed the sophisticated computer control panels on the blowers and spent several months in Singapore.

“Dealing in foreign countries is always a knowledge-builder in itself,” Munsell said. “Naturally, from a company’s perspective, any time we’re involved in projects of that magnitude, it’s a company-builder as well as an ego-builder.”

‘A terrible installation’

Munsell also led the engineering of the 10 900-horsepower blowers Turblex provided for the Amman, Jordan, plant, which also recently came online. Mace said Jordan’s previous wastewater setup – hundreds of acres of open lagoons – was untenable.

“It was a terrible installation,” he said. “When you have something like that where your wastewater is 8 or 10 feet in the middle of the desert, it becomes septic and just smells terrible.”

Mace said Turblex partnered with TECO-Westinghouse to build 13,000-volt motors – each the size of a treatment bay in an ambulance – for the blowers used in the Jordan plant, which was designed and built by French firm Degremont.

For now, the construction of wastewater treatment plants has slowed, Mace said.

“The worldwide economy has resulted in a slowdown of capital projects,” he said. “The growth right now is in the petroleum/petrochemical area, and we have a number of large projects working on sulfur recovery.”

Turblex is now shipping millions of dollars of equipment to power plants in the Atlantic states for systems that remove sulfur from accumulated gas. The end result is a reduction of acid rain.

“That’s been the surge of business in the last three to four years,” Mace said, “and that’s coming to a close with all of the major polluters having purchased equipment. The next wave is going to be in the industrial process market … of which the petrochemical is one of several areas of activity.”

Turblex is targeting South America and the Middle East for the petroleum systems, Mace said.[[In-content Ad]]