So, starting at the beginning of the year I started working two days per week at a local petroleum refinery with one of my co-workers Mark. It has been exciting to see how an industrial site runs! Our main contact at the site used to work in the St Louis office so the conversations with him are fairly easy and natural (in regards to how we speak to each other within the firm). Mark has been working onsite at either the refinery or at a Coke facility (the coal, not the soft drink) since he joined Trinity, so the experience I've gained from watching him interact has been extremely valuable.
We have only been working on reporting so far. Mark has done some work for the GHG Mandatory Reporting Rule and I have been preparing a lot of calculations for their emissions inventory (AER in Illinois). The number of emission sources at the plant is astonishing, the potential to learn at a place like this is as vast as one can imagine. I am scheduled to spend six months there, so I'm interested to see what all I can learn in that amount of time.