Industrial Talk is onsite at PowerGen 2025 and talking to Tom Poteet, Sr. Vice President at Mesa Natural Gas Solutions about "Modular power solutions for a hungry energy market".
Scott MacKenzie interviews Tom Poteet, Senior VP of Corporate Development at Mesa Solutions, at Power Gen in Dallas, Texas. Mesa Solutions, celebrating its 11-year anniversary, specializes in natural gas generators for oil and gas sites, capable of running on unrefined gas and switching to propane without power interruption. Their generators can handle a wide BTU range, ensuring steady power output. Poteet discusses their expansion into commercial and industrial applications, including data centers, and their new venture with Modern Hydrogen to develop hydrogen-powered generators. Mesa Solutions is vertically integrated, with manufacturing facilities in Colorado and Wyoming.
Action Items
[ ] Explore Mesa Solutions' natural gas and hydrogen-powered generator offerings for potential applications in the power generation industry.
[ ] Reach out to Thomas Poteet, Senior VP of Corporate Development at Mesa Solutions, on LinkedIn.
Outline
Introduction and Welcome to Industrial Talk Podcast
Scott MacKenzie introduces the Industrial Talk Podcast, emphasizing its focus on industry professionals and their innovations.
Scott highlights the importance of industry professionals in solving problems and collaborating.
The podcast is broadcasting from Power Gen in Dallas, Texas, showcasing a collection of problem solvers and solutions.
Scott introduces Tom Poteet, Senior VP of Corporate Development at Mesa Solutions, as the guest for the episode.
Tom Poteet's Background and Company Overview
Tom Poteet shares that his company, Mesa Solutions, celebrated its 10-year anniversary last spring and is coming up on 11 years.
Mesa Solutions specializes in making generators that run off natural gas, primarily for production oil and gas sites.
The company's generators can run on prime power using unrefined gas, making them unique in the market.
Tom explains the innovation of their generators, which can switch from natural gas to propane without dropping the load, avoiding power interruptions.
Technical Details and Market Applications
Scott inquires about the business reasons behind using both natural gas and propane.
Tom explains that their engine can run on a wide BTU range, making it suitable for varying fuel qualities.
The engine's control system rapidly reads the fuel composition, ensuring steady power output and preventing mechanical damage.
Tom discusses the reliability and high service levels required in the oil field, which has led to their success in other industrial and commercial applications.
Expansion into Commercial and Industrial Applications
Tom mentions that their generators are now used in commercial and industrial sites, including retail markets and data centers.
Scott and Tom discuss the growing demand for power in data centers and the potential for large-scale energy solutions.
Tom explains the concept of "swarm resilience," where multiple generators can be paralleled to maintain power even if one fails.
The conversation touches on the scalability of their generators, which can be used in projects involving hundreds of generators.
Manufacturing and Supply Chain
Tom provides details about Mesa Solutions' manufacturing facilities in Loveland, Colorado, and Casper, Wyoming.
The company has recently opened a new 200,000 square foot assembly center in San Antonio and plans to expand further.
Mesa Solutions sources long engine blocks from Doosan Corporation in South Korea, which they then assemble and market.
The company's ability to handle a wide range of fuels and their innovative control systems have positioned them well in the market.
Future Innovations and Market Trends
Tom announces a new relationship with Modern Hydrogen, which has developed an engine that runs on 100% hydrogen.
The company plans to integrate this engine into their generators, expanding their fuel options.
Tom discusses the potential for using hydrogen as a dispatchable, carbon-free power source for data centers and other applications.
The conversation highlights the challenges and opportunities in handling and utilizing hydrogen as a fuel source.
Conclusion and Contact Information
Scott thanks Tom for the insightful discussion and encourages listeners to reach out to him for further conversations.
Scott emphasizes the importance of companies like Mesa Solutions in addressing the increasing demand for power.
The podcast concludes with a reminder to check out next year's Power Gen event and to stay tuned for more episodes.
Scott provides contact information for Tom Poteet and encourages listeners to visit the Industrial Talk website for more resources.
If interested in being on the Industrial Talk show, simply contact us and let's have a quick conversation.
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Power generation, natural gas, industrial applications, dual fuel, reliability, data centers, hydrogen engines, Mesa Solutions, prime power, fuel flexibility, manufacturing capacity, demand response, renewable energy, commercial generators, power demand.
00:00
Scott. 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
00:21
once again. Welcome to Industrial Talk, the number one industrial related podcast in the universe that celebrates you. You right there industry professionals all around the world, you are bold, you are brave, you dare greatly, you innovate, you collaborate, you solve problems. That's why we here at Industrial Talk celebrate you. We thank you very much for your continued support of this, because you are these the year, the heroes in this story, absolutely we are broadcasting, once again, from power Gen Dallas, Texas is the location, and it is a collection of problem solvers. It's a collection of solutions and I and if there is a topic of conversation that has to happen that is way above my pay grade. It is anything that's dealing with power generation and demand for power generation. As we continue to go forward in this brave new world, we have a great time in a very he's in the hot seat, Thomas or Tom. Tom's on. Tom's good, right? Poteet, Poteet. Poteet, Poteet. He is a Sr. VP Corporate Development Mesa Solution. Let's get a car wrecking. Yeah. Have a good conference. Yeah,
01:35
really good. We're getting a lot of traffic in the booth and lot see a lot of old friends at this conference.
01:41
It is weird, isn't it? Yeah, it's like, I know you want to, you want new people, but it's always great to sort of circle up and and sign, you know, find your
01:53
friends, especially the people who were had somewhat of a mentoring role to me, you know, over the last 10 or 15 years, that really helped me understand certain aspects of the business, or certain aspects of sales and equipment and things like that. It's really good to see them and have another opportunity to say, Hey, thanks for back then.
02:14
How long you been in the business? Why don't I just go right to the cut to the chase, give us a little background, and then I can ask the question, instead of just jumping forward and just saying how long you've been in it, give us background there. Tom so
02:28
our I'll go ahead and answer that question. Our company had our 10 year anniversary last spring, so coming up on 11 years, and we make generators that run off natural gas and our bread and butter most of these years has been production oil and gas sites that produce their own natural gas out of the ground, and we have a special architecture in our generator that will run prime power on unrefined gas. And so we've enjoyed quite a bit of success in that area. All those sites have a lot of electric load, electric motors and pumps and things like that that that need power. And we, I like to think that, I mean, I tell people that our success is because in that was we had a very clever innovation in a market that already existed, there were already people taking generators like diesel generators out to out the well sides. They're here, yeah. But you know, you think about that process, if you get oil out of the ground, send it to a refinery, turn it into diesel, and then truck it back to the well, not a good model. It doesn't make a lot of sense when you can take gas right out of the ground and make electricity right there. So we also have our devices will also run on propane, and our fuel system will switch from, if you have both present, it'll switch from one to the other without dropping the load. And that's that's an innovation that has distinguished us a little bit amongst other people who can also run off natural gas or propane, but we really made a big distinction in that ability to switch from one field to the other without dropping the load.
04:11
So why would I want to do that? Is it just well?
04:15
So you think about the imagine how many relays and computerized equipment there is at any industrial site, and the least little drop in power you don't like it is going to either damage, yeah, at a minimum reset, yeah, everything. But at worst, damage things. So you don't want to, you don't want to drop the drop the supply, if you don't have to,
04:38
yeah, nobody likes it. No, no, those components. Hate it, but, but why would I need if I, if I'm pulling natural gas, if I'm, if that's the fuel that I'm using at that particular remote site, yeah, and I'm pulling natural gas, but then I decide that I want to slap a propane tank in that area. What was the business reason behind
04:57
that? So that's one of my favorite questions to get. So no, there
05:00
you go, because I don't know, yeah.
05:03
BTU up to:
06:26
Because yeah, what's fascinating to me is, when I knew that there's a there's a fuel quality that warrants that particular decision, you can Southern, you can manage the propane. You can say, okay, that's consistent in that tank. That's not going to bury, but, yeah, but that stuff coming out of the ground definitely has some right question. And
06:49
so the reason you might have both out there is, suppose you need to run the generator before there's actually gas available, yeah, at the site. Or if the if the site operator knows that the gas quality or the just the gas volume out of at a particular location varies a lot, and if they want to make sure they don't have a power shutdown, then for reliability purposes, they'll go ahead and have some propane standing by. And so won't use the term dual fuel, because that means something else. In the industry, we have two places for fuel to come in, one for natural gas and one for profane
07:29
and honestly, I again, that's way above my pay grade. I can only imagine the engineering that goes into those particular units to be able to handle a dual fuel I hate, don't, don't email me just I'm gonna, it's the only way I can to be able to to seamlessly handle natural gas versus propane and not have any interruption.
07:55
And that, you know, getting getting good at that has really led us into other industrial and commercial applications, and I'll burden you with one of the things I say most often burden, if you haven't heard it already, but anybody who's been at a large company who had to prepare a specification to order or buy generators, you know you can have a document that thick with about every standard quoted. But in the oil field, there's only one spec, and that is, is your thing running right now or not? Because if it's not, we need you to come move it so that your competitor can have that spot. So that drives you spirally to very high reliability, very high levels of service. And you know, it's a complex device, if we didn't have our own highly trained technicians involved, it'd be a different story. You're doing services? Yeah, yeah. So as time has gone by, most of our most of our business right now has been around units on lease with our own technicians doing the maintenance, and it's all included. But as we've as we've been able to mature this device, still using the prime power architecture, but we've put it into other form factors that make it more suitable for commercial or industrial sites. We have form factors where you can put them closer together, and, you know, it looked fine in the parking lot of a big box store, if they want to have have backup, or we have a lot of our units now that are in use in places, in in utilities that have retail markets where, if you want to put your generator, enroll it in a demand response program from that utility that comes to the grid.
09:45
In essence, you're on the demand side, yeah, on that demand side of the meter, where you're, you're, you're, you're providing those solutions to the marketplace, yes,
09:54
sir. And so. And another thing that's come along is now we're getting into. In the data center world and utilities, and, yeah, it's huge. And there's, you know, even if the hype for how much power data centers are going to need is off by 50% it's still a lot of power. And
10:15
it's not I, I that train has left the station, and it is rolling down the track, and it is only getting greater and greater, not just from, from, say, North America, but globally, yeah, you know, everybody's I think, I think the continent of Australia will be just one big data farm, because they have a lot of land, and it's just like, make it a data farm, yep,
10:43
big mainframe computer. It's:
11:57
so in this but in that scenario, you're, you're saying, okay, I can I got a package here, a package here, package here. I'm putting them in in parallel. And can I lose one and still maintain some sort of generation capability? So it's sort of like the LED lights of the world. So together, you can lose one and it doesn't do anything. Yeah, you still are bright and shiny, it'd
12:21
be like losing one pixel on a TV screen. There you go. And while, while that pixels out, we can go in and repair it, and not thick, you know, not affect the rest of the screen. So,
12:33
how, how? What's, what's the largest unit you have out there, the
12:39
largest unit that we have now, depending on how you rate them, whether it's a standby rating or prime powers between four and 500 KW, but we're paralleling those into multiple megawatts. Yeah, where we've, you know, 10 and 20 megawatts at a time is nothing for us now, and oh, we've got proposals that would involve hundreds of generators. No
13:03
kidding, yeah, let me ask you this, are you? Are you vertically integrated? I mean, you probably buy the engines from someplace and yet, but you, you manufacture, you pull it all together, and you put your, your whatever solution, and all of the stuff inside, we
13:21
our headquarters now is in Loveland, Colorado, historically, our manufacturing centers has been in Casper Wyoming, and just within the last few months, we opened up a new 200,000 square foot assembly center in San Antonio, and last week, we just broke ground On another one just like that size up in Casper. So we're really, we're really building a lot of manufacturing and assembly capacity. The we get the long engine block from a supplier, and then we do what's called dressing out the engine, where we put the engine control module, which is a computer about the size of a Raspberry Pi computer. And we put that on there, we put the fuel system, we get the EPA rating, and then we either market the engine itself or we put them into our units.
14:17
Are they all local? Or do you are you an international sort of the supply chain and
14:22
the engine the long blocks come from Doosan Corporation. That's HDI Hyundai, Doosan now in South Korea. Yeah. So those come straight to us. We used to get those through a third party, but they came to us about two years ago and said, Hey, we've got some upgrades coming to these engine blocks are going to be able to get more power out of it for basically the same engine block. And we want you guys to be the ones to finish them out and market them and utilize them. What
14:51
do you see it going I mean, I mean, you've got to admit this, this market today, compared to the conference. Conversations I was having, Yes, last year, here has changed and and there's a there's a speed of velocity that exists within the power markets.
15:13
Where do you see it? Yeah, so interestingly, that for us, though, the really big new thing is yesterday. Just yesterday here at the show, we announced a relationship with a company called Modern hydrogen, and the company that makes our engines has recently developed an engine that is runs on 100% hydrogen. So we're going to take that engine and craft a generator around it, and modern hydrogen, isn't they, they have a process that you put on site. You can put natural gas in it, and solid carbon falls out of a pyrolytic process, yeah, I was just gonna say it has to be that, yeah, pyrolysis. Solid carbon falls out. Hydrogen comes out one end. And interestingly, the solid carbon actually has a direct use in the asphalt market, but they can wherever you have natural gas. In a couple of years, we'll be able to park their device next to our device and run off pure height will run off their pure
16:17
hydrogen. You'll have trade fuel, propane, hydrogen and natural gas. Yeah, could be Yeah. And then, then you, you're going to challenge your engineers to be able to, all right? Yeah, here's another fuel. Here's another input.
16:32
A lot of the data center folks that we're talking to, some some only care about the, you know, what's the going to the cost of electricity going to be? Some of them are really concerned. They want certain percentage, maybe half, or something like that. If they can reach that, to have half of their power come from something either renewable or decarbonized, right, right? So they might put as many of our generators as they need out there for their full load. But then they've also got a really large array of solar panels in it by capacity rating, and even larger array of batteries to use that as much as they can. But obviously the problem with that is it's not dispatchable. So in the future, you know, where I think the future could go with, with the hydrogen aspect is you could have carbon free, dispatchable power for the whole thing. So I,
17:23
I heard that the hydrogen. Let's just put it this way, hydrogen, it's it's great. It makes sense. There it is. I get it. I understand. It's not as easy to be able to sort of spit that hydrogen out. Yeah.
17:37
The the less you have to handle it, the better off you are. And so it's going to be a whole new learning process for us, you know, of how to handle that fuel. But looking forward to it, looking forward to getting our engineers involved in it. Are they all amped up as a result of that? I think so
17:56
they should be. Tom, how did they get a hold of you? Just
18:01
look at Thomas Poteet on LinkedIn, the Thomas petite that works for Mesa solutions. There it
18:07
is. There's other Thomas Susan, yeah, there might be that's pretty, right?
18:16
French, Italian. I've heard several stories.
18:20
Well done. You didn't You didn't improve my position at all. Sort of punted on that one. You are absolutely wonderful. Thank you. Tom, appreciate it. Enjoy it. All right, we're going to have all the contact information for Tom out on Industrial Talk for your not reach out to him. They're doing some great stuff at Mesa solutions. I i highly recommend that if you're in the power industry, have conversations with Sherpas like Tom to help you along with that journey. All right, we're broadcasting from power Gen here in Dallas, Texas. And again, if you're in the power generation business, or you need power generation, this is the show for you. So check it out next year. If you're not here, make sure that it's on your to do list for next year. All right, we're gonna wrap it up on the other side. Stay tuned. We will be right back.
19:08
You're listening to the Industrial Talk Podcast Network.
19:17
There he is. There's a stat card. Tom Poteet, right there Mesa natural gas solutions, that was power Gen. Yes, that was power Gen. And what is just so fascinating about this, this market, is that you get companies like Mesa Natural Gas Solutions coming up with real solutions to address this increased demand for power. It's happening, and they're doing it the right way. They're fantastic. You got to contact all the contact information will be out on Industrial Talk, so reach out to Tom. You will not be disappointed. Industrial Talk again is here for you. We are a full. Service, marketing and media company for you to get your message out. I believe in this world today that it's a tension that will help you solve a lot of problems. Been there, done that. So look us. Go out to industrialtalk.com. Be bold, be brave. Dare greatly. Hang out with Tom. Change the world. We're going to have another great conversation shortly, so stay tuned. You.
