2021 - Mike Setzer
GC Chemist
Coastal Gulf & International, Inc.
Mike is a natural scientist who was originally a business growth operator in financial services, supported his university education giving chemistry lessons to medical students, then became a continuous-improvement quality control chemist before starting his commercial laboratory career rapidly building & operating research contracting laboratories at a startup during an oil boom.
Wrote first crude oil simulated distillation software in 1980 to exceed the newly-proposed ASTM D2887 test method, as well as compositional analysis of reservoir gases & liquids. Advanced multidimensional GC method development and automation including machine learning up to the limits of hardware capability. Designed & built research instrumentation for enhanced oil recovery experiments, also for determination of porosity & permeability of subsurface core samples, requested the first digital Heise gauge to allow early automated data collection. Also some re-engineering of specialized high-pressure vessel design for enhanced safety & reliability.
When today's BV Inspectorate was still an American-based multinational surveyor, Mike was hired straight in to their first executive program by the President of the company, displacing the outstanding candidate who had already been carefully selected.
After extensive measurement training by legendary veterans of WWII Merchant Marine and wartime terminal operations, long before the company became European, Mike launched business operations at their aspirational lab in Nederland TX and became the first cargo-testing chemist in the Beaumont/Port Arthur area.
Then over the last 40 years as an industry leader in cargo surveying, Mike is the measurement & testing pioneer in computerized chromatography, capillary GC of high-purity petrochemicals, digital densitometry, NIST traceable reference materials, portable shipboard cargo computing, etc. all before the IBM PC was in use and laptops were yet to be invented. He was writing the software on Commodore and TRS-80 computers plus proprietary laboratory data systems, started out with Fortran on mainframes as a teenager.
After building the Commodity Control lab in Pasadena TX, Mike was able to accomplish initial capillary method development for most of the major petrochemicals encountered during marine transportation along the Gulf Coast, and with samples coming in from around the world. Many years earlier than alternative laboratories or even the chemical plants themselves and their research centers. International visitors were often coming for chemistry lessons on how to adapt to the novel computer/capillary approach. It became more popular and Comtrol grew like mad. Outperforming others in petro-chemicals while working to build executive committment to fuels & LPG testing. Mike was the first one to offer determination of thiophene content by sulfur-specific GC, years before the method was standardized by ASTM.
Mike also earned the first Zero Defects award instituted by Air Products & Chemicals without even knowing of its existence beforehand or making any specific efforts toward that type of recognition. It was just a result of more focused everyday quality assurance approaches. Exxon was one of the suppliers and their direct quote after one of their lab visits is they "have never seen anybody run a tighter ship", and the word was spread.
One day the Inspectorate group appeared, shortly after they had formed. Nobody knew what they were going to be up to, but it turned out to be acquisition. Comtrol happened to be their first choice where Mike had built the lab from the ground up and there was still only a small but highly-productive staff in a few ports. After the President of Comtrol failed to sell them the 51% they were bargaining for, the next day they purchased Mike's former leading employer and became multinational overnight.
Eventually Comtrol was folded into Amspec to build a stronger New Jersey company by combining the two. Years before that when Amspec had first committed to a Houston lab, Mike was their contractor single-handedly testing their petro-chemical cargoes while they were still building the first lab of their own on the Gulf Coast. This got them launched with extreme consistency compared to alternative labs.
Other than Setzer, there may not be anyone else with more leading experience & lengthy dedication handling the big quantities of things like aromatics, ketones, monomers, solvents, alcohols and specialty chemicals. High-purity Methanol is just a single product where Mike was first to develop some current lab procedures (decades ago) specifically to solve costly problems, leaving clients absolutely delighted. Always striving to give clients their money's worth as reliably as possible for more than 4 decades, Mike's Methanol leadership is only one area that has been unmatched. Started out ahead and always working to stay that way. Mike has now been familiar with the major products of the Gulf Coast chemical plants & refineries longer than almost all of the people working in them or their research centers any more.
First active in ASTM decades ago, MTBE testing is an example where other labs could not do an acceptable job because there were no publications. So Mike developed the referee method for cargoes of MTBE when it emerged as a new commodity, certified billions of dollars worth of product, then eventually the method was standardized with Committee D2, round-robined and approved as D5441. The first GC method in D2 to address compositional analysis of the product with what amounts to Effective Carbon Number (ECN) calculation. ARCO Chemical was the biggest MTBE producer and everything they shipped was handled, plus other producers came along in addition to imports so Mike ended up certifying more billions of dollars worth of cargo than the biggest producer.
Also introduced the ECN concept to Committee D16 and with the arrival of D7504 in the 21st century the widespread analysis of aromatic cargoes is now consistent with the NIST-traceable performance Mike has been making available since the 1980's, when the first GC column he found theoretically useful for D7504 finally could be invented.
As far as the instrumentation and procedures or the client-focused approach on these petro-chemical commodities, it's good to be more dedicated otherwise too many challenges would remain out-of-reach.
For gasoline analysis in the 1990's (after major updates for the Clean Air Act), on ASTM D4815 Quality Analytical was the only round-robin participant accepted other than oil-company research labs. This was accomplished with Mike's all-capillary multi-use D4815/D5580 instrumentation that has not been exceeded. Today that still stands as international leadership in oxygenate method development & testing. Reference instrument then remained reliable without adjustment for over 20 years.
Pressurized cargoes should not be without mention especially the chemical gases like butylenes, propylene, ethylene, butadienes & raffinates, as well as fuels like propane, butanes, and mixed LPGs. Working closely with clients to meet challenging international needs has been one of the strongest successes.
At Coastal Gulf & International one area where advances are ongoing is the simulated distillation of fuels and crude, with mathematical recombination of the light ends DHA with the heavier portion of the crude. Great strides have been made in reliability and instrument performance & utilization for petro-chemcials too, plus continuous improvent for fuel-related products such as Pyrolysis Gasoline where standard methods alone are not adequate to meet client needs.
Over the last 7 years at CGI Mike could have gotten a PhD in chemistry and an MBA but instead there were still clients who continued to need the strongest performance regardless.
With consistently more dedication over the decades he has what amounts to at least 80 years of leading cargo experience in only 40 years. There were notable accomplishments in research & business before that and in parallel ever since.
Mike has always been most enthusiastic about building shareholder value for clients and employers for over 50 years now, rather than seeking eminence.
Presentation(s):
Oxygenates in Hydrocarbon Cargoes by Multidimensional GC
28 Years Later and This Time it's Lowox in Pygas
Abstract Number: 232
Tuesday, October 12th
1:10 PM - 1:50 PM
