Mr. Kemp is a chemical engineer (B.S Ch. E and M.S. Ch. E.) with 42 years’ experience providing engineering and technical services to domestic and international refining, petrochemical and oil production companies. His career covers the full range of activities in engineering development, design and project execution, starting with UOP where his developmental work on fluid cat crackers (FCC) led to two patents that are the basis for UOP’s VSS reactor internals.
After working in Technical Services at UOP and earning an M.S. degree in chemical engineering, he moved to Houston where applying his technical service and unit operating experience to his engineering design work resulted in safe, robust and reliable units. He has studied, revamped or designed many of the units found in a refinery or petrochemical plant, from crude/vacuum distillation on the front-end, hydrotreating, hydrocracking and gasoline and aromatics production in the middle, to sulfur processing, utilities and off sites on the back. (After all, a refinery is just feed-prep for the SRU.) Petrochemical unit experience includes BTX, PETE and linear alpha olefins production and purification, and ethylene oxide production using both air and oxygen. Working on one chlor-alkali plant design for chlorine production was enough to convince him to stick to hydrocarbons. He has worked in refineries North and South America, Africa and the Middle East, Indonesia and Europe.
His process engineering experience and creative mind-set, combined with innovative project management and construction execution, made returning two fire damaged refineries to production in record time both more fun and less expensive than the traditional approach. He has learned that it is possible to reduce the time and cost of building a process unit without sacrificing safety, reliability or quality.
