A contaminated product can cost any manufacturer — big time. Not only could it require extensive measures to try and salvage the material, but there’s also no guarantee how much you actually will salvage when all the work is said and done. And due to the unplanned nature of these issues, it can be just as inconvenient and costly to the chemical company helping them reprocess it all.

This all could have been the case for our client, Total Energies, when one of their rail cars, containing over 180,000 pounds of industrial solvent (Methylcyclohexane, or MCH), was contaminated with an unknown substance. But when they came to Monument with hopes of recovering as much as they could through a lengthy distillation at Bayport, our team came up with a much better idea — one that not only saved time and money, but also recovered 98% of their material. But it sure wasn’t easy.

“Total Energies originally came to us requesting a distillation of the contaminated rail car, which would have occupied one of our distillation columns for 7-10 days at a relatively high cost since it was an unplanned project,” Liam McMillan, Director, Custom Manufacturing, explained. “We met with them and did some investigating and discovered that the contamination was due to water content being far higher than it should have been, as well as containing a significant amount of rust. I provided all the information we had to Chris Reynolds, Logistics Manager, to determine where to go from there.”

From that moment on, Chris was on it. After initial inspection, he quickly learned the client had sampled it incorrectly, and therefore requested that the specific rail car be brought on site to take additional samples. Through this process, he uncovered just how much water content was there, which required draining to get the material to a soluble state.

“I told the client we could then transfer the material from the contaminated rail car to a new, empty one once the product was distilled, so they sent us a second one to use,” Chris shared. “Unfortunately, the car they sent was non-hazardous, which wouldn’t work. So they sent us another, which had the same spec product, so we could just load on top of it.”

But Chris trusted his instinct and decided to do some testing of his own before proceeding with the new car. Turns out, he was right — that car was also contaminated, which would have meant all the subsequent efforts would have been for nothing. At this point, cost-effective options were running thin. So Chris coordinated with Marcus Robinson, R&D Chemist at Bayport, who came up with another great idea — using a third party to conduct a filtration process instead of distilling it on site.

“While doing a lab study of the sample's composition, Marcus had the idea of decanting off the water and filtering it through molecular sieves to get it on spec,” Chris shared. “But that company couldn’t perform the filtration on site, so we had to figure out a means and a place to transfer the car to get it done. So we collaborated with the team at Deep Water, a car storage facility, to make it happen remotely. We worked with another third party to get the rail cars relocated to the storage site and got everything set up on the third party company’s skid filter units with the material railcar and the empty railcar ready. Despite a couple of days of heavy rain, we were able to make sure all the equipment was dry and ready to go, so the vendor could execute the filtration process. From there, the next challenge was figuring out how to get samples to send them to the client from an off-site location.”

But Chris found a way. Not once, twice, or three times — but four different samples all requested by the client of the filtered material from the new rail car. And he did so himself to ensure no added moisture caused any issues with the new spec.

“Chris took ownership from day one,” Liam shared. “He double checked everything throughout the process, despite the client never indicating a need to, and as a result, he identified multiple issues that could have led to much bigger problems had they been overlooked. He navigated the whole process throughout every uncontrollable setback and coordinated with the client and multiple vendors continuously to keep the process moving forward.”

While Chris’ management was worthy of high praise on its own, the alternative filtration process he and Marcus initiated and executed provided Monument with a very high margin – while opening the doors to new opportunities in the future.

“By sending the project off-site, we were not only able to minimize the amount of labor and fixed costs, but also ensure our distillation columns could be used for other, more high margin products,” Liam added. “Chris and our logistics team were the only people involved; it never touched our company from a processing perspective. This off-site solution gained Monument over $100,000 in unbudgeted revenue and proved that we can use third party filtration units in the future to successfully bring products back on spec. Now that we’ve proven the technology works, while also being relatively inexpensive, the solution Chris and the team used for this contaminated railcar could open doors for us in the future in terms of how we process out of spec products. Given how successful this project was, I expect Monument will be first in line for any similar future business with this customer.”

And of course the customer couldn’t have been happier with the results either — returning 98% of the material on-spec, pushing way beyond their expectations of just 85% recovery.

“They expressed how happy they were with the quality and the yield of the salvaged material,” Chris shared. “They didn’t have a lot of background in this area, and so our expertise, attention to detail, and communication made all the difference. It was a challenging process, but in the end, it turned out to be a big win for everyone.”