Exporting Alberta environmental know-how is a route to growth in good years and durability in lean times. Sulphur Experts Inc. sets an example of thriving through all turns of the economic cycle by combining clean energy and international horizons.

The engineering and environmental consulting firm, with a Calgary operational hub and a Caribbean corporate headquarters, grew out of a former branch of the late Daryl (Doc) Seaman’s Bow Valley industrial conglomerate, Western Research & Development. From its birth in 1965 to the 1990s, Western stood out as a bellwether in marketing Alberta scientific smarts and innovation.

Much of Western’s success stemmed from made-in-Alberta solutions and equipment for testing and controlling sulphur emissions from processing plants for sour natural gas steeped in hazardous hydrogen sulphide. The firm’s long history as a clean energy enterprise counters the current myth, spread by hard-core critics of fossil fuels in general and the oil sands in particular, that the province is a breeding ground of dirty supplies.

Founding manager Joe Lukacs cut his professional teeth as an engineer by turning the lethal ingredient of sour gas into a valuable product and, in the process, reducing emissions and raising industry standards to comply with tightening provincial regulations. He went on to become president of Canadian Environmental Technology Advancement Corporation, a not-for-profit agency created by Environment Canada and its provincial counterparts with a mandate to help ecological entrepreneurs. He still serves on the Sulphur Experts board of directors.

The firm always had an international flavour. Lukacs arrived in Alberta as a refugee from the 1956 Hungarian uprising against the former U.S.S.R. The current president, John Sames, is a New Zealand-raised chemical engineer who was initially hired in 1980 to lead a process analytical engineering team.

Sames’ group soon moved beyond measurement to show gas plants how to increase sulphur recovery from sour gas. This knowledge was in high demand in the 1980s, when acid rain caused by venting the mineral into the atmosphere as industrial waste was a target of as much environmental concern as carbon emissions today.

Western sold gas analyzers and sulphur-recovery consulting services internationally, and for five years in the 1990s Sames served as European general manager, leading a 25-member expert team from a base in Germany. With partners Bruce Klint, Gerald Bohme and Peter Dale, Sames bought his arm of the firm and turned it into Sulphur Experts as an independent environmental specialty shop. To carry out the employee buyout, Sames remortgaged his home. He has no regrets. He calls the deal “a gift.”

Sulphur Experts retains many of its predecessor firm’s approaches such as five-day sulphur recovery seminars that give the inside scoop on its methods for testing and improving gas plants and refineries. To conventional entrepreneurs, spilling trade secrets this way may seem like a recipe for business disaster. But it worked for Lukacs, who not only insisted on sharing sulphur-recovery facts but also on steering clear of overt sales pitches.

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