Where Our Engineers Built Their Careers
The organizations where the WES leadership built their engineering careers — decades inside some of the world’s most demanding industrial companies.
The engineers who founded WES have led engineering on major capital projects for some of the most demanding petrochemical, pharmaceutical and defense organizations in the world — the kind of complex, highly regulated facilities where the assumptions on paper have to survive contact with the equipment in the field.
That is the experience WES brings to a major capital decision: not a product to sell, but the judgment to evaluate one before the money is committed.
Chief Executive Officer
& Co-Founder
Forty years leading owner's engineering and capital projects for Exxon, Mobil, Merck, Pfizer and Amgen.
Chief Technology Officer
& Co-Founder
Former Director of Engineering at General Dynamics Electric Boat and named inventor on 21 U.S. patents.
Director, Environmental Infrastructure
Nearly thirteen years with EPM followed by decades delivering municipal water, wastewater and solid waste infrastructure across Colombia.
Director, Civil & Process Engineering
Licensed Professional Engineer with more than forty years delivering pharmaceutical, industrial and municipal infrastructure projects.
This is an established team, not one assembled for a pitch: Nelson Franco and Edgardo Santiago worked together as consulting engineers on Puerto Rico pharmaceutical capital projects — including work for Merck, Pfizer, Pharmacia and Amgen — for years before founding the firm.
Exxon Chemical — Nelson Franco held a project and field engineering role at the Bayway Refinery. Mobil (Paulsboro Refinery) — refinery capital-project engineering, from conceptual engineering through start-up.
Validated, highly regulated pharmaceutical manufacturing in Puerto Rico, where every system must be qualified before it can run — delivered as independent consulting engineers for Merck, Pfizer, Pharmacia and Amgen.
General Dynamics Electric Boat — Alberto Franco spent thirty-seven years engineering U.S. Navy submarine propulsion, rising to Director of Engineering for R&D Electro Magnetics and Electric Drive. Reliability engineering where failure is not an option.
More than three decades engineering municipal water, sanitation and integrated solid-waste systems for communities across Colombia and Latin America — the environmental-infrastructure experience of Director Freddy Uribe.
Independent evaluation, selection and integration of waste-to-energy technology — gasification, digestion, RDF and energy recovery — engineered on the owner’s side, not sold. WES’s approach is described below.
Most consultants have never been past the drawings. WES’s founders have taken operating petrochemical and pharmaceutical facilities from mechanical completion through start-up, commissioning, validation and qualified operation — the stages where projects are actually proven, and where feasibility assumptions meet the equipment in the field.
That is the difference on a capital project: an engineer who has stood in front of a running plant and knows what fails, what the commissioning sequence really costs, and what “operational readiness” means in practice.
A measured, seasonal characterization of the waste stream, then an objective screening of candidate technologies — gasification, anaerobic digestion, refuse-derived fuel, mass burn and energy recovery — against the project’s real requirements.
Each candidate weighed on engineering criteria rather than vendor claims, with the trade-offs documented so the owner can decide with evidence. Because WES sells no plant, the recommendation follows the project, not a product line.
Mass and energy balances, emissions and gas-cleaning considerations, and energy-recovery design — integrating the selected technology into a facility that fits the site and meets the regulatory context.
Specification, bid evaluation and design review, then holding the contractor to specification through construction, commissioning and start-up — the owner’s engineer on the owner’s side.
This is owner’s engineering applied to waste-to-energy: independent technology evaluation and feasibility first, then engineering the right answer for the project.
WES knows the technology suppliers and introduces clients to the right ones for a project — but no technology supplier pays WES. Our only obligation is to the client's outcome.
That distinction is the core of how the firm works: objective engineering judgment, on the client's side of the table, from the first feasibility question through start-up.
Drawn from the leadership team’s professional records. Full bios on About WES.
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