Benjamin Levie Email & Phone Number

Menlo Park, CA, US

San Francisco Bay Area

Driving campus towards a low carbon, efficient, and sustainable future. Leading a team to procure clean energy, retrofit old buildings with the latest energy saving technology, build new all electric buildings across campus. Focused on district energy systems, heat pumps, thermal storage, and demand response.

Greater Seattle Area

• Making manufacturing and power plants more efficient through energy tracking, modeling, benchmarking, data driven analysis, and collaboration with plant staff and alliance partners. Steam and water balances, modeling.
• Assessment and optimization of pulp dryer. Assessed pulp dryer for energy and capacity improvements with partner and designed innovative new system. Project includes Measurement and Validation (M&V) on fan and steam.
• Dust and smoke collection optimization of a steel foundry for Energy Trust of Oregon. Partnered with air engineering company. Measured, identified and designed/specified new fans, drives, automatic gates and controls.
• EPA Boiler MACT Energy Assessment of a dissolving cellulose pulp mill. Identified and designed solutions/projects which will save $6 million/yr. in natural gas with just over one year payback from heat recovery and.

Greater Seattle Area

Managed a team of energy management professionals who review, analyze, structure projects and and pay utility energy efficiency incentives for industrial and commercial energy customers. Focus is on hospitals, labs, data centers, large office buildings, multifamily new construction, and deep energy retrofits.

Washington DC

Contracting work on energy efficiency programs and energy projects for DOE and national labs. Currently working on quantifying the thermodynamic minimum energy requirements of large scale manufacturing processes.

Teaching online seminar "Energy Assessments for Manufacturing" Four day short course dedicated to the specific needs of manufacturing plants which include all aspects of energy efficiency, energy tracking and monitoring, distributed energy generation, and demand response.

Federal Way, WA

• Reduced overall energy intensity and increased use of renewable fuel vs fossil fuels via novel process engineering changes, cost effective capital projects, operational changes (non-capital), and automated energy.
• Projects identified by my team and in various stages of implementation will save over $12 million/yr.
• Developed and implemented automatic energy tracking platform for all 7 pulp mills using Aspen IP21, OSI PI, and MYSQL software with Microsoft Sharepoint in a data-cube. The results allow for daily tracking and.
• Directed 16 energy assessments at manufacturing facilities to both satisfy EPA Boiler MACT requirements and identify/estimate/preliminary design cost effective energy reducing capital projects. Identified 50 projects.
• Initiator and chair of mill energy reduction team consisting of utility and production leads at each mill. The mission of the team is to communicate the most current and practical energy projects and energy reduction.
• Program manager for Department of Energy Better Plants program. Goal of 25% energy intensity reduction for Wood Products Business (representing over 25 plants) met in 2015, five years earlier than pledged. Energy lead.

• Catchlight Energy LLC was a JV between Chevron and Weyerhaeuser with the express goal of commercializing biofuel technology using available and emerging technology.
• Directed engineering process development on both biochemical biomass conversion and chemical/catalytic technology. Leveraged staff and services including engineers, engineering cost estimators, and financial analysts.
• Managed novel pilot scale pretreatment technology. Directed work on pilot and lab scale process. Developed new pilot plant and demonstration plant plans including hazardous operation plan. Used JMP type design of.
• Developed mass and energy balances, piping and instrumentation diagrams (P&IDs), process flow diagrams (PFDs), cost estimates, and techno-economic analyses (TEA) for pilot, demonstration, and commercial scale.
• Wrote technical sections of successful grant application ($3.5MM DOE grant) for CLE thermochemical conversion process.

• Feedstock technology was a team of 12 research engineers, scientists and technicians to develop biofuels. It originated as a technical service and research team to work with Weyerhaeuser pulp mills, timberlands, and.
• Managed a 12 person multi-discipline team to produce ethanol from waste materials via an economically viable enzymatic hydrolysis and fermentation process. Team consisted of chemical, biochemical and mechanical.
• Project manager of 2 year project to economically convert municipal solid waste streams into ethanol. Designed and built a state of the art enzymatic hydrolysis and fermentation, high-throughput, biofuels laboratory..
• Initiated and maintained key technical and business relationships with partners from major companies, universities, government labs and consortia.
• Developed a techno-economic analysis model to compare biochemical and thermochemical pathways using various feedstocks (switchgrass, wastepaper, wood wastes) and various products (ethanol, sugars, plastics, pulp.
• Managed R&D engineers and technicians to support traditional pulp, paper, and sawmill operations and capital project improvements.

Federal Way, Washington

• Saved the company over $10 million/yr. by developing a novel wood-yard processing system, convincing corporate senior management, mill managers, and mill engineering to fund and implement.
• Developed innovative life cycle analysis for use in equipment selection, preventative maintenance strategy, and equipment monitoring.
• Developed through-the-system fiber value models to determine the optimum supply chain sourcing of fiber for the mill.
• Invented and patented an instrument to analyze effectiveness of wood chip screening and pretreatment.
• Directed a number of pulp mill trials and audits to prove out pilot work at commercial scale.

Denver, Colorado

• Managed a number of independent engineering reviews (due diligence for investment banks including Credit Suisse and Goldman Sachs) of alternative energy, solid waste, and recycling commercial plants.
• Managed studies funded by EPA on plastic lumber environmental impacts, ash use in roads, solid waste leaching in landfills.
• Designed, monitored, and reviewed initial and annual plant performance tests.
• Expert witness on waste to energy plant litigation.

Golden, Colorado

• Primarily involved in design, operation and modeling of gasification, pyrolysis and combustion of biomass and refuse derived fuel.
• Supervised research, designed, and built bench-scale to pilot equipment.
• Implemented pilot scale data acquisition and control hardware and software system (Labview).