Alex Flournoy with Baseline Energy Services

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

Industrial Talk, energy as a service, baseline energy, power generation, natural gas, portable generators, monthly service fee, remote monitoring, telemetry data, electric motors, power optimization, oil and gas, power grid, manufacturing expansion, contact information

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Welcome to the Industrial Talk podcast with Scott. MacKenzie. Scott is a passionate industry professional dedicated to transferring cutting edge industry focused innovations and trends while highlighting the men and women who keep the world moving. So put on your hard hat, grab your work boots, and let's go all right once again. Thank you

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very much for joining Industrial Talk, and thank you for your continued support of this wonderful platform that celebrates you industry professionals. You are. You are the story. You are bold, brave, you dare greatly, you innovate, you collaborate, you solve today's problems, and you are at the tip of the sword at making things better. Yeah, that's what you are. We have a great conversation energy as a service, which is it's just it never. Every time I have conversations, I am always dazzled by the the creativity, the innovation that exists energy as a service. We're talking to Alex Flournoy, and it's with baseline energy services. They're out of Denver, Colorado, and it's a great conversation. Let's get cracking. Let's stop delaying. Let's get a rolling. Yeah. Again, if you're in industry, you're listening to this, you're thinking about getting an industry definitely, it is an exciting time. It's a renaissance. I think we're just, we're just scratching the surface of just fabulous innovations that are happening today. And I mean, if there's one sector, one industry, that's getting impacted quite a bit, that's energy, creative ways of being able to deliver energy. It's happening all over the place. By the way, I'm going to be at distribute tech as well as power Gen. So if you are in planning to go to those events, distribute tech, and they're both in Dallas and power Gen, look me up. We'll be broadcasting on site, tell your story, amplify your message. That's what I'm talking about. Do it. Do it, all right? A bit of business that we're going to cover right now, and I'm serious about this, industry is so important, is important to me. I think it's a it's absolutely vital to to the world. And when I say industry, I you know, it's it's macro, but it does in manufacturing, oil and gas, mining and so on and so forth. But I just say industry, it's so important that Industrial Talk is a platform for you. It is like the Spotify of industry, to be able to amplify your message, to get that message out if you're not doing podcasting, if you're not actively engaged in doing that, I think you're missing out. I think you're missing out on opportunities to be able to tell your story, to be able to help your your client base tell their story as well. But the reality is, is that you need to do that and, and I'm and, and it's easier than it's ever been. I mean, there's some things that you got to do and all that good stuff, and then, yeah, there's some demands that are being placed on you that you got to be able to but it's a content creating machine, and you, I, my position has always been, there's marketing, then there's attention. I'm always going to lean toward the attention and and people, and it's sort of, it's subtle, but if they know that you exist, there's the attention, there it is. I mean, they feel more comfortable. They they can re they can find you out there on the worldwide web. So I'm very bullish on being able to get your message out. Back to the Spotify analogy. So here's Industrial Talk. If I go out to these podcast type of players, I have a hard time finding industrial related conversations, content insights, just because it's busy out there. It's very noisy. There's a lot going on. Industrial Talk is specific to industry. You have a podcast, you have technology, you just want to tell your. Story. That's what Industrial Talk is. Here for you. It's for you to be able to do that, to amplify, to to create opportunities where maybe there, if nobody has seen you, don't know that you exist. So this is what Industrial Talk is. It's a platform for industrial juggernauts such as yourself. So, you know, go out to Industrial Talk, you have a podcast, you have technology. You want to amplify your message. Just reach out to me, have a conversation and definitely, let's, let's chirp about ways of being able to help you succeed. That is important. That's number one, numero uno. So it's, it's easy, Industrial Talk.com and make it happen. Onto the conversation baseline energy services. Alex, Florida. This is, once again, Florina. Sorry I didn't finish up this last name because I was excited about energy as a service. Incredible solution. Must listen to him, by the way. Last but not least, you're in this you're at distribute tech. Look me up if you're planning to go to Power Gen, look me up. You can find all the information that you need out on Industrial Talk, because it's there. Because I want to, I want to meet you all right. On with the conversation. Here's Alex. Alex, welcome to Industrial Talk. How are you doing today?

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Doing very well. Thanks for having me. Scott, snowing

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in Denver, snowing all around Colorado. It

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is big snow. Kind of set your clock by it on Halloween. But now we're getting a foot or two today. So here's our real, real introduction to

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winter. Yeah, listen, as I was commiserating because my air conditioner is running here, right outside of New Orleans, and I'm ready for something other than summer. I'm ready and I'm ready to get a break in my electric bill too. That's what I want more than anything. All right, before we get going, for the listeners out there, Alex, give us a little background, a little 411 on who Alex is. Yeah.

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for just the listener out there, you spoke on compression natural what did that entail? Just sort of in general,

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from the first part, I was doing more well optimization, lowering the pressure of the well to help it flow more oil and gas to help older wells. I then transitioned to larger compression, where we were doing gas lift. We were injecting a high pressure gas down the well to help increase the production, kind of artificial lift method. And then I moved more into larger compression from there on the midstream side, with gas processing plants and midstream, pushing gas around the country through pipelines and to the gas processing facility. So those are the three facets of the compression business that I was involved in.

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It's an interesting observation or a change, but now you're in power generation, but you're using natural gas, right?

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Yeah, it was a pretty, pretty easy transition. The engines that run compressors and engines that run generators on natural gas are very similar. We just spin the crankshaft now to spin a large alternator to generate electricity, as opposed to moving pistons to compress gas. So the same folks in the rotating equipment side of the oil and gas business are both on the compressor and the generator side. So most of my contacts carried over pretty similarly in the same people making decisions on where they needed to go and when they need them, how to size them. It was a pretty natural shift over just had to learn the electrical side of the business, yeah, from the compressing gas.

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Take us through that looking at your form you indicated specifically about power as a service, or generation. What does that mean? Explain to us a little bit about

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it's incentivized for them, if it's a flat rate, a monthly flat rate, and I don't have to my core business is optimizing the production of oil, all I have to do is just try to get the most out of that, that power as a service, right? That would be my motivation to try to keep cranking it. It just makes sense, right?

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Yeah, that for them, you know, they sometimes will oversize the generators a little bit more than they need, just to ensure that they have enough the cost of the generator is very minimal compared to the value of the product that they're creating. And so we want to size it as properly as possible, so they're not having excess power that they that they could be using, it they're not and paying for. So we'll monitor that, you know, with our telemetry, and be able to look at at the end of the month where their max loads and their average loads were. And if we need to bring something bigger, something smaller in, there's no charge for changing out that equipment for a bigger or smaller so we can continuously optimize, if they add equipment, remove equipment, slow things down. Speed things up, that kind of thing. Take

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us through a use case. Explain to the listener just a little bit about what this all, what this looks like. Yeah, predominantly

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I have a well outside. It's standalone. I am meeting your definition of why I need your solution, but because it's remote, I don't have people out there. I don't have I just, I have a well, right? How does the the your solution meet the demand? How does that work? How do you keep that in sync so

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our customers? You know, we typically, we have service locations throughout most of the major oil and gas basin, through Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Colorado, Wyoming and Utah, and whenever in New Mexico, we're not really going to take on a project that's too far away from where our hubs are, as it is rotating equipment, and it will need to be maintained every 30 to 45 days through preventative maintenance, just kind of changing the oil on your car, and then there can't be breakdowns on the unit just from the consistent use and needing to have somebody close to fix it. But there doesn't need to be anybody there to be able to function properly. Once we're there, we've hooked up, everything is set properly, just like a power plant doesn't necessarily need to have somebody watching it all the time to make sure you've got what you need. Once we've set it up, we can remotely monitor our operations, our temperatures, our pressures, our voltages, and if we notice something getting out of whack, we can. We can go ahead and proactively get out there, or if something happens that we weren't able to catch, we still can. Can get out there. We've got somebody on call 24 hours a day, every day of the year. Uh, to try to be at every location that needs our assistance in less than two hours from the time that it's going to go down. And therefore you don't really need to have anybody out there. And most of our stuff is remote. The closer you are to civilization, the more likelihood you're going to have access to a power grid. And the farther out you are, the less likely you are. So our business thrives in areas that are very remote and do not have a lot of development near them.

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How do you deal with the telemetry? If you're saying I'm monitoring this asset as real time as possible, how you how are you dealing with that?

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How do you cycle that asset? How do you know that it I have, in my mind, a base load type of it's spinning, it's delivering power there, and then you're pulling off the telemetry. How do you How does that system cycle and deal with peak, you know, base, whatever you how do they do that?

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Well, the the generator itself is going to give up as much power as needed, as demanded, from the electric motors on site. And so whether it's commanding 30 kilowatts, whether it's commanding two megawatts from the system, the generator will give up what it needs to give up. There's also set points. If it's going to exceed what's the working limit, it will shut down on a high shutdown. But when we're looking at peak loads versus average loads, when you start up a motor for the first time, depending on if you have a VFD, a variable frequency drive, or a soft start, as opposed to a traditional, old school kind of hard start, you can require more amps and more power to get that engine spinning at the start. And if that's the case, you may need to oversize your generators for that peak load to get it started, and then your generators are running at a lower load. Traditionally, most everything has gone to a variable frequency drive, variable speed drive, or a soft start, so that we're not having a bunch of excess power just to get the motor spinning before we, you know, kind of transition into the actual function of the of the project. But peak loads versus average loads. If we can't handle the peak load, then we can't get it started and we can't do it when they really need it. So most of our sizing is we based on the peak load, and then the average load is just another good talking point for us in the customer to say, hey, you know, here's where your average is. You may only be averaging 50, but you need 120 kilowatts at certain points throughout the day, if it's a if it's a pump that gets fed up and slowed down, the faster you run your pumps, the more power they draw, and the slower you run, and the less and so everything has a reason behind it, and it's all a cause and effect, and we can just use the data to make sure that what they're doing in their operations is is syncing up with with what our telemetry is telling us, and if it's not, then at least we have a place to look and It's not just based on opinion, it's based on fact.

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When you start to receive the telemetry, and you're starting to look at these assets, and you're finding that maybe some of the assets are, are, you know, having some challenges, whatever it might be, your technician always out in the field, always roaming around. How do you coordinate your technician to be able to go search that? Yeah,

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so usually what we do is we have roughly 20 to 25 generators per technician as they're assigned area as their assigned business unit, and then they'll typically work during the day for more like 7am to 7pm over that 12 hour shift where they're available. And then we'll have a technician on call or a specified night technician that takes over after the day shift. And then we also have telemetry on the trucks of our technicians that are out there. We've got a field service manager and an operations manager and operations director over each region, and. Who, when they get that telemetry coming in, the control room, knows whose set of units that may be, if it's during the day, and they simply call that technician and say, Hey, this alert came in. I need you to go over to this site for this customer. If it's in the evening, they look and see who's on call or who the night technician is, and do the same process. And if somebody's busy, they can also look at where the trucks are on the map and find the next best guy who's closest, and then dispatch them to that location. So we don't want people driving from, you know, two hours across the field when there's somebody 20 minutes next door. And so we use the telemetry of our trucks just same way we use the telemetry of our generators all thinking, how can we be more efficient, more effective, and respond quicker? Yeah,

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the proximities is, is pretty interesting. Where do you see it going? I mean, it, I mean, is it expanding, what, what, and what's, what's on the the horizon for baseline energy services, what, what's, what's being discussed? Yeah,

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but it is, it's it's going up. Like you said, the demand is there, and it's going to continue to grow. It appeared you don't, you don't manufacture your your generation solutions. Do you

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that's a good strategy. I like that. Yeah. So if somebody's listening to this podcast right now and they're saying, I want to talk to Alex, what would be the best way for me to get a contact with Alex?

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from there. Love it. Alex, you were wonderful. Thank you. Thank you, Scott. I appreciate it. Yeah. Thank you for being on Industrial Talk. All right, listeners, we're gonna have all the contact information for Alex, So fear not reach out to him. Great conversation to have. All right, we're gonna wrap it up on the other side. Stay tuned. We will be right back.

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You're listening to the Industrial Talk Podcast Network. Cool

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conversation. I can always geek out on anything that's power, utilities, energy. I love it all because it's such an important component to what we do in industry. You gotta reach out to Alex, yep, baseline energy services, as he said, as he was closing out, there's many avenues to be able to get a hold of this gent, because he's worth it, and he's got some great insights, and they're doing some wonderful things at baseline so that that that's it. That's everything. All right. I'm gonna be at distribute tech. I'm gonna be at power Gen. You need to be putting that on your calendar. If you're not there, well, I'm sorry, but if you are there, look me up. I've got a booth. I'll share it later. I think it's out on Industrial Talk. But nonetheless, we want to hear your story. We want to meet you. It is a important event, so put that on your calendar if you have not look into it. It's all out there on Industrial Talk. Be bold, be brave. There greatly. I say it all the time. Hang out with Alex. Change the world. We're gonna have another great conversation shortly. So stay tuned.