September 20, 2021
BY Tom Bryan
When Jeff Smith's military career ended in 2007, he could not have foreseen the rewarding profession in ethanol he would embark on, much less that he would build a company known as one of the industry’s most trusted suppliers of HPLC lab supplies.
“I was fortunate to have entered ethanol during the height of its buildout,” says Smith, CEO of Enertech Solutions. “And through that experience, I became aware of an opportunity to better serve the everyday needs of ethanol plant labs. There were plenty of suppliers focused on the big items, but almost none that cared about the smaller consumables critical to performance—from pipettes and tubes to HPLC columns, moisture pans and syringes.”
Building Enertech’s reputation as a responsive, cost-conscious supplier, Smith continually expanded Enertech’s offerings, even custom manufacturing mobile phase products for its clients. The company’s years-long collaboration with reference standards maker o2si, for example, has resulted in the availability of tailored, industry-leading standards (i.e., solutions used to calibrate lab equipment). In fact, Enertech and o2si, working together, are the only companies in the industry manufacturing and supplying certified reference materials under ISO 17025 and ISO 17034.
“Customization is the bedrock of what we’re about,” Smith says, explaining that ethanol plants previously had to work with standards that were not precisely formulated for their needs.
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Dan Biggerstaff, Ph.D., of o2si says ethanol plants were largely confined to catalogue standards before his company began working with Enertech to bring the industry more tailored offerings. “There were a very small set of premade standards that all ethanol labs had to use, and they had to change the way they ran their labs to match those standards,” Biggerstaff explains. “Today, we are providing the standards they need, at the concentrations they need—which are dead-on accurate—to get the best data possible to optimize their process.”
More information about Enertech Solutions can be found at enertechonline.com.
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