Interesting discussion about an ethical dilemma

A couple of weeks ago I had in interesting discussion with some of my colleagues, managers and even the CCO Roland Garber and Regional Manager Mar van Sluijs.

After an interesting visit to a chemical plant in Rayong, the CCO, Regional Manager and some colleagues of mine were invited to go to a restaurant at the beach to have a nice dinner. During this dinner I sat down next to the CCO and the Regional Manager. We talked about business, family, holidays and my internship. The CCO and the Regional Manager were both very interested in how I came up with doing an internship for 6 months in Thailand. I told them that I really wanted to meet new people in a new culture with a totally different atmosphere.

A couple of drinks, dishes and hours later I asked them both a question which they did not expect. I asked them a question about their insulation. First of all, I want to give you guys some explanation. KAEFER is providing companies with their insulation services and products. These companies are mainly the ones that produce the gasoline for the cars and machines. This production process of gasoline, as you would know, is very unsustainable and creates a lot of waste. So, I was wondering, why is KAEFER dealing and working together with companies that are so bad for our environment? These days we have electric cars, why don’t support this market.

The CCO as well as the RM gave me a decent answer and eventually a short discussion followed. The discussion went like this.

The mission of KAEFER is that we want to eliminate energy waste. Energy waste is something that can be reduced very easy and eventually can be eliminate too. To reduce the waste of energy it is really important to keep the hot things hot and the cold things cold. The companies that are producing energy, electrical, chemical or gasoline, are all based on gas turbines, steam turbines and generators. These machines run in a specific cycle to produce the end product for the plant. The machines are, most of the time, very hot and the products that they produce too. The product needs to be transported and this transportation is done with the help of pipelines. These pipelines can be more than 500meter long. As you can understand, if you start with a fluid with a temperature of 300 degrees Celsius and transport it for 500meter, with an ambient temperature of 30 degrees Celsius, it will lose a lot of heat. This heath will go through the pipelines into the air, the air will be heated and eventually damage the atmosphere. Besides the heat of the pipelines, the machines also produce a lot of heat which will be emitted into the atmosphere. And our mission is to reduce this heat because of the help of insulation. If we insulate the machines and the pipelines, the fluid will not lose its heat to the atmosphere but it will stay at the right temperature, for example 300 degrees Celsius. When the fluid is arriving at the next machine, it can be used immediately instead of heating it again. With the insulation of the turbines, they can work far more efficiently with less heat loss. So in some way, we are working with the companies that are unsustainable and bad for the environment, but without us they will be far more unsustainable. That is the main reason we want to work with them, to make sure that the environment is not getting worse, and therefore we need to stop and help the guys who are producing something that do this.

When they both answered it like this I was surprised. I did not think about it in that way. Still I had a lot of questions, but I saw that they did not want to talk much longer about this topic. I just wanted to know one more thing: there is still a lot heat being produced, where does this heat from the machines go to? They answered, instead of just emitting the heat into the environment they use it to boil water. The heat that is used for the gas turbine and the generator will be transported to a steam turbine. This steam turbine will make steam, which eventually creates boiling water and this water can be used again for other purposes somewhere else on the plant. For example, they use the water to clean some specific equipment.

After this discussion of 20 minutes they cleared up my mind about the company. I was happy and glad that they are doing business in this market. They asked me if these answers were what I expected and they told me that they found it interesting and brave of me that I dared to ask these questions. At that moment we looked at each other, raised our glasses and had a zip of our HEINEKEN beer.

Next week: interviews with potential customers.