About us
Two founders. One practice. Nobody handed off.
Cryo Brothers Consulting, LLC is an advisory practice for the people who operate cryogenic and industrial gas plants: liquefaction, separation, purification, recovery, and the storage and loading at the end of them. Whatever the molecule.
You probably came here to find out whether we have done the work you would be hiring us for. Fair question. Here is the answer.
We built this firm from the seats we still know best.
What we have run
Between us, from the panel to the site office, we have owned operational accountability at every level of industrial gas production.
We grew up on the floor in air separation, taking ASUs from basic shift ops all the way through to full plant management. We have managed high-tonnage merchant facilities and run dedicated nitrogen, oxygen, and argon liquefiers. We have operated specialized helium recovery and purification plants, pushed ultra-high-purity nitrogen into electronics gas networks, and managed hydrogen purification units alongside the cogeneration plants and utility systems powering them.
We both come directly from the operating side. We built our careers from the bottom up, starting in foundational plant operations and panel-floor work, logging years on shift, surviving long nights on the board, and working into multi-plant management and site leadership. We have stood on-site during hurricane and winter storm ride-outs, managed emergency preparations, and brought facilities back online when the stakes were highest.
Beyond individual sites, we have stepped back to build and manage the big picture — overseeing multi-plant complexes and controlling a nationwide fleet of operating assets from a single room.
Combining a chemical-engineering degree and process-technology schooling with years of front-line execution, our experience prior to founding Cryo Brothers includes directing fleet-wide optimization, recovery work, troubleshooting, and building a remote operations control room from the ground up.
Different plants, the same cold
Hydrogen, helium, CO2, biogas, LNG, high-purity nitrogen, air separation: different businesses, different molecules, but once you are in the cold, the operating patterns are recognizable from one plant to the next.
Warm-end approach creeps between derimes while adsorbers break through on cycle times nobody has revisited since commissioning. Moisture and carbon dioxide find the coldest surface and stay there. A compressor or expander drifts away from its baseline performance so slowly that no alarm ever trips, while boil-off and vent losses go unclaimed because production, storage, and loading each assume somebody else is keeping score. Meanwhile, your power consumption per unit of product steadily climbs while the basic production numbers still look fine on paper.
The chemistry, the hazards, and the operating limits stay specific to each process. The patterns of drift do not, and neither does the work it takes to read them.
What we have done
Started it, held it, brought it back. We have started plants, shut them down, ramped them, and stood at the panel when an upset would not clear. We have run turnarounds and derimes from the first blind to the restart that held. When an off-site event took the unit down, we wrote the recovery plan that did not exist, worked through the clearances that had to be obtained, and ran unplanned turnarounds to get capacity back.
Control systems and alarms. We have operated several control platforms, commissioned replacements at operating sites, and written the training for the crew running them the next morning. We have run control-valve and positioner diagnostics, tuned regulatory loops, built advanced control schemes, and gotten loops out of manual. We have rationalized alarm floods down to a load a shift can work, and chased spurious trips back to the instruments causing them. Today we tune in partnership with Techmation Inc., on their Protuner loop analyzer.
Your plant's own record. We look at plant data through the lens of people who have had to answer for the numbers. Between us, we have built the control room screens a nationwide fleet is monitored on, traced root-cause failures on unplanned trips, and modeled output against shifting forecast demands. Drift shows up in a historian long before it reaches a monthly report or trips a breaker — and silent degradation looks the same in a helium recycle loop as it does in a main exchanger. We know how to pull the real story out of your trends and logs because we have spent years using that data to keep plants running.
The paper the plant runs on. Procedures are only as good as the shift running them. We have overhauled SOP libraries, derime protocols, isolation plans, and startup/shutdown sequences across facilities of every scale — always checking site drawings against what is physically installed in the field. We write documentation for the operator sitting in the chair at 3:00 AM, not for an auditor's binder. We have built qualification programs from scratch and trained crews to safely execute emergency shutdowns, navigate hot and cold restarts, swing production splits on the fly, and handle everything in between.
Compliance, audits, and accountability. We have sat in the hot seat across from regulatory, corporate, and customer auditors to answer for production performance, site budgets, maintenance integrity, product quality, and process safety. We have managed full Management of Change (MOC) workflows, held environmental permits, and led Pre-Startup Safety Reviews (PSSRs) to clear units before anyone was allowed to push a button. We have sat on the other side of that table too: one of us has audited other sites' process and hydrocarbon safety management, which is a different view of a plant than answering for your own. Having managed facilities producing medical-grade molecules under FDA-regulated quality systems, we bring that same discipline to how we read a plant's record — including how much oxygen service asks of you, because a smear of oil in the wrong place is an ignition source and every cleanliness rule exists for that reason.
Plants nobody can walk into. We built a remote operations control room from a blank sheet of paper and then ran it: facilities nationwide, operated around the clock by a team we recruited, trained, and qualified on standards we wrote and screens we built. One of us carried the operating budget for that room, so a recommendation that costs more than it returns is not an abstract problem to us. Operating a plant remotely means you do not have the luxury of sending someone into the yard to listen for a valve hiss or feel a bearing vibrate. It depends on tight control loops, a workable alarm load, and telemetry the shift can trust. We learned how to spot subtle thermohydraulic shifts and process anomalies through a monitor long before they could cause an uncrewed facility to trip.
The seat we share
We have run the facility, not only advised it.
We know what an upset that will not come back looks like, and a restart that will not hold. We have watched argon come back once somebody named the real constraint. We came up through the bottom ranks of the plant and the panel, putting in the long nights, double shifts, and years of panel time that shape how a plant is actually run. Between us we can work the heat and mass balance, read what the plant was designed for, and tell you whether a machine is doing what it was bought to do. When a supplier brings you performance numbers, we can take them apart. That combined history is what we bring to your historian.
How we take the job
Both of us work every engagement, and both of us are on triage when a facility is upset. We start in the trends and the logs, coming on site when the answer requires boots on the ground. We establish clear targets in your plant data before anything is touched.
Recommendations go through the plant's management of change. We do not operate the plant or move setpoints.
When a finding needs equipment or process changes beyond operating practice, it goes to your engineers, your licensor, or your contractor. There are no junior hand-offs and no hidden agendas behind what we advise. The decision stays with your people.
What we hand back
A written record of what we found and where — every finding pointed at the trend or the log it came from, so your own people can check it. A ranked list, not a laundry list: what to address first, what to watch, and what to leave alone. Recommendations written so your team can carry them through management of change and into the field, because operating authority stays with your people and every change is made by them.
The reasoning comes with it. If your operators cannot explain a finding after we leave, we are not finished. And nothing we hand back needs us in the room to be useful: plain files, your units, your tags.
You keep the findings. You keep the reasoning. You keep the plant.
Email the founders. Tell us what the plant is doing.
What we will not do
How it runs
A free call. Then a scoped engagement.
The introductory call is thirty minutes, no charge. Anything deeper — historian review, a written target, or time on site — starts after you hire us.
Call
Thirty minutes on a call. You describe the facility; we tell you whether we can help and what a scoped engagement would look like. Nothing beyond that call is owed until you hire us.
After you hire us
Trends, logs, and loop history. The target gets written down before any work starts. On-site time is scoped in that engagement, not in the introductory call.
Write it down, then hand it over
Findings written for the control room — owners, dates, and a plan your team can actually run.
Now, or maybe
Training builds next year's bench. It doesn't fix this week's upset.
Every plant works out its own problems eventually. The only real question is what the tuition costs — and whether the facility can carry the semester.
Read the manual again, send two operators to a course, try the change that looks right, wait a week to see if the trend moved. It works. It also means every attempt is another week of the facility running exactly the way it runs now.
Someone who has already watched this failure gives you a short list to check instead of an open-ended hunt. If it turns out to be none of them, you have eliminated them before the next shift plan is written. What you are buying is not secret knowledge. It is the weeks you don't spend finding out.
inquiries@cryobrothers.com. Thirty minutes, no charge. You leave knowing whether we can help and what a scoped engagement would look like.
Your operators are on the call while we work, and the findings are written for the control room with owners and dates. The goal is that the second time this shows up, nobody needs to call us.
We sell training too — and we will tell you when that is the right buy. It is not the right buy at 3 a.m. with the facility off spec.