FAQ

Our Solutions

Our air pollution control systems are designed and built to abate pollutants and emissions that are harmful to the earth’s atmosphere and public health. These include three types of pollutants: criteria air pollutants, air toxics and greenhouse gases. The most common emissions our solutions abate are particulate matter, Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs), Hazardous Air Pollutants (HAPs) and methane (CO4).

Our experienced team will help you choose the right equipment to meet your needs based on your emissions. Learn more about all of our solutions or contact our team to guide you through the process. We work across oil and gas, manufacturing, including automotive, construction materials, chemicals, food and beverage, industrial, municipal, such as water and wastewater treatment and waste management, to name a few. However, we help all sectors and companies whose industrial processes produce pollutants that are or can be harmful to the environment and are regulated by the EPA and state and municipal governments.

Conifer Systems provides design, manufacturing and installation and commissioning, from start-to-finish in-house. Learn more about our process.

Our service technicians are not only experienced in working on our equipment but can also provide services for any other manufacturers’ units or systems.

In case of an emergency, we can work under tight deadlines to limit your plant’s downtime and ensure the reliability of your equipment in the future. Please call our emergency service line 936-446-0020 for these services.

Conifer Systems operates throughout the continental U.S. as well as Alaska, Hawaii, Canada and Mexico. For international inquiries, please contact our sales team.

Our Systems

Thermal oxidation is a process that destroys hazardous gases at high temperatures and converts them into carbon dioxide, water vapor and heat before releasing them into the atmosphere.

To complete this process, an industrial process’ exhaust stream, laden with Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs), enters a heat exchange bed and passes through media to be preheated. Then the stream enters the combustion chamber and is heated more using burners until it reaches the optimal temperature for combustion to complete the oxidation process. Once complete, clean gas is exhausted through another packed media bed which cools the air and heats the media before the clean gas is released into the atmosphere.

Conifer Systems’ damper design has a lower initial cost, which helps lower pollutant emissions sooner. This technology is proven in multiple industry applications as a reliable option for decarbonization.

Waste heat recovery, or WHR, is the process of recovering and utilizing heat generated but not consumed by and during a pollution control process such as thermal oxidation. There are four types of WHR: air to air, air to water, oil and steam. By using WHR, the energy can be recaptured and reused to lower the facility’s operating costs and carbon footprint by minimizing fuel consumption.

Oxidizers use extremely high temperatures to break apart the chemical bonds of pollutants, but not all of the heat generated during the process is used for destroying the compounds. By extracting the excess heat from the stack or directly from the combustion chamber when the temperature rises above the minimum energy required for self-sustaining operation, the surplus heat is recycled as energy to power the system.
WHR can be directed back into the process as primary heat recovery, utilized by a related or connected process as secondary heat recovery, or provided to an unrelated process as tertiary heat recovery.
As part of our commitment to the environment, Conifer often has some stock of pre-owned equipment. We are also highly experienced in refurbishing, retrofitting and upgrading units. If you are interested in pre-owned equipment, please contact us for information about what’s available.

We are able to purchase pre-owned equipment. If you have a unit to sell, please contact us for more information.

Based on your project, plant specifics, and our inventory, we may offer rental units. Please contact us for more information.

Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs)
Volatile Organic Compounds are harmful, gaseous pollutants that are formed from products or processes in industrial or manufacturing applications and commonly contaminate groundwater. They have high vapor pressure and low water solubility. Most VOCs are carcinogenic and may react with other gases to form different air pollutants in the atmosphere. VOCs have an initial boiling point less than or equal to 250° C measured at a standard atmospheric pressure of 101.3 kPa.

Hazardous Air Pollutants (HAPs)
Hazardous Air Pollutants are contaminants that are known or suspected, to be carcinogenic or cause other serious health conditions. HAPs can cause reproductive effects or birth defects, neurological disorders, heritable gene mutations and other reversible chronic or acute health conditions, as well as adverse environmental effects.

Many VOCs are human-made chemicals that are used and produced in the manufacturing of paints, pharmaceuticals and refrigerants. VOCs are often industrial solvents or by-products of an application. VOCs are common components of petroleum fuels, hydraulic fluids, paint thinners and dry-cleaning agents.

Most HAPs come from human-made sources, factories, refineries and power plants, as well as building materials and cleaning solvents. Benzene, perchloroethylene, methylene chloride, dioxin, asbestos, toluene, as well as metals such as cadmium, mercury, chromium and lead compounds are some of the most common HAPs. These HAPs are used in everything from gasoline, to some dry cleaning facility processes, as well as industrial applications such as paint stripping.

See a list of common pollutants and equipment.

Our Services

Depending on the your location and average winter weather, installing a heater can help increase the uptime of the equipment.

Not taking proper precautions to prepare for low temperatures may cause instrumentation and equipment damage. Water freezing and expanding can clog process piping or break and rupture pipes. Delayed leaks may occur and can go unnoticed until the weather warms and the equipment defrosts. Alterations in chemical processes are another concern which may result from freezing or condensation exposure.

Our service team recommends that you develop and activate a winterization schedule and policy at least two months before the first expected freeze.

Our team can help you identify equipment or process piping that is exposed to the elements in order to determine what may need to be winterized and work with you to properly insulate or heat those parts to avoid freezing. We also recommend installing backup generators, putting in-place an emergency shut-down plan, and having our service team on-call in case an issue arises.

The best way to avoid freezing is to conduct routine Preventative Maintenance Evaluations (PME) to ensure that your equipment is ready to handle winter and freezing temperatures. To schedule a PME, please contact our service team.

We recommend that equipment less than five years old receive preventative maintenance every 12 months. Equipment older than five years should receive preventative maintenance every six months.

Having a preventative monitoring system is crucial to increasing performance, ensuring uptime, and reducing operating costs and we recommend it for all of our systems. Our preventative monitoring system, ConiferALERT, is a state-of-the-art controls and service capability which offers remote, real-time pollution control monitoring.

Preventative monitoring has many benefits including options to adjust settings and anticipate repairs before a complete system failure. Having 24/7, real-time access to control and monitor your equipment helps avoid system outages that impact employee productivity and loss of revenue from plant downtime, lost production, fines due to EPA non-compliance and expensive emergency repairs.

Over multiple years of operation, RTOs and RCOs will experience reduced air flow capacity, channeling or voids in the media bed, thermal imbalances in the chambers, non-efficient energy use and extended startup times. These are all signs that a unit should be evaluated for media replacement.

Conifer Systems’ service team recommends conducting regular burner tuning as part of routine burner management. This preventative maintenance helps ensure that your burners operate at, or close to, their capacity.

To further lower your fuel consumption and overall operating costs, your plant can consider retrofitting or upgrading your existing equipment to include a waste heat recovery system. Waste-heat recovery systems use excess heat that is produced through the treatment of your waste stream as an energy source for the system.

Whit Martin
Whit Martin

General Manager

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