How Fluid System Expertise and Vendor-Managed Inventory Improved Productivity
LanzaTech is transforming industrial waste and pollution streams into valuable products while helping reduce greenhouse gas emissions. At its research and development pilot plant in Soperton, Georgia, reliable operations, safety, and efficiency are critical to supporting innovation and scaling new technologies. In this customer success story, learn how Swagelok provides fluid system expertise, training, high-quality products, and ongoing support to help LanzaTech maintain dependable performance. Discover how vendor-managed inventory (VMI) helps streamline procurement, reduce costs, improve responsiveness, and ensure critical components are readily available, allowing teams to focus on advancing sustainable solutions and driving operational productivity.
Video Transcript
We have an economically viable process that is basically taking a waste stream that produces pollution. You can take that pollution from a customer and feed it into the LanzaTech process. Instead of a pollution stream, it turns into a product stream, which can be sold on the open market. And those products have value.
One big benefit of LanzaTech’s process is the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. The plants—the feedstock that is going into the LanzaTech process—would otherwise be flared or used in other streams. That gas is ultimately burned and turned into CO2, which is harmful to the environment. Here at Freedom Pines, we do a lot of scale-up work that is done in the lab. They come up with something, or something they want to try, in the lab, and if it is promising, they will bring it down to Freedom Pines. The engineers here will work with the operators to run a larger-size unit just to demonstrate the technology.
When we really started to look at the shipping charges and the overages from expediting or overnight charges, we felt that they would be a good fit for consignment inventory. I think the first year we did the consignment with them, there was over $15,000 in savings just in shipping alone, not including what plant downtime, plant outages, or any kind of unplanned outages would be.
We do one PO for consignment, so that eliminated the four, maybe five, POs a week we were doing. The manpower to do POs costs money, the shipping costs money, and waiting on inventory costs money. So it eliminated all of that with the consignment.
On a day-to-day basis, we are collecting sample data. Over a long period of time, over a run, that requires reliability, and we cannot have failures or leak points that cannot be easily fixed on the reactor. Otherwise, you have lost an entire run. You have months of manpower invested into these runs, so being able to trust in the equipment—trust that you are not going to have critical failures or insurmountable obstacles to overcome in the middle of a run—is very important to us. If you go down because of a pump failure or tubing leak, these kinds of things are inexcusable and incredibly expensive if they happen. So we really rely on Swagelok and cherish that relationship because it does not fail.
Some products LanzaTech is currently using in their plants or labs are Swagelok 60 series ball valves, Swagelok tube fitting products, Swagelok hose products, RHPS regulators, KPR regulators, Swagelok custom solutions, and custom valves, face gauges.
We run our gases in Swagelok. We run our chemicals in Swagelok. And that gives us comfort that we will not have leaks, we will not have blowouts, and our personnel will not be exposed to anything that would hurt them.
Over the years, working with Swagelok, Dayton makes a weekly visit to the site. During that time, he checks on inventory, checks in with engineers, and checks in with our maintenance staff. We discuss what is working, what is not working, and what kind of needs we may see in the future.
Making sure we have the right tools and the right instruments on hand to get the job done is important. Being an R&D facility, those needs change. We may be telling him something one week, and then it is a different story the next week. Dayton and Swagelok have always been very flexible, ready to meet our needs, and delivered within a timely manner.
The reason we trust Swagelok is because of the availability, the reliability, the usability, and the support that we get.
We are a small company at the moment, and as we grow, we are hoping we can take Swagelok right along with us. Every unique problem that we run into, they are there to help us.
I think one of the biggest things that we always want to get across to our customer—and even more so with LanzaTech—is that we have as much skin in the game on the success of their systems as they do. If something does not work right, we feel that weight too. We feel that burden. And when there is success, we are going to be the first ones there to celebrate with them.
