John G. Pendergast | AIChE

John G. Pendergast

John is a Research Fellow in Dow Chemical's Oil and Gas, a part of the Consumer and Industrial Solutions business portfolio.  John has over 35 years of broad research and engineering experience in hydrocarbons processing, BTX processing, LPG fractionation , ethylene / propylene oxide and ethylene / propylene glycol, ethylene oxide derivatives, ethanolamines, polyethylene, polypropylene, EPDM, and others. 

After joining research in the area of  ethylene oxide process and catalysis research, John joined the manufacturing and engineering organization,  where he was responsible for operations in a diversity of chemical processing areas, before being named  Project Manager for the Oxygen Conversion Project at the Ethylene Oxide facility. Prior to rejoining Research,  John served as the Lead Process Engineer for the Louisiana Operations EPDM facility,  then as the Lead Process  Engineer for the Freeport, Texas Polypropylene facility. During this time, John successfully led a number of multi-million dollar world scale facilities through successful design, construction, and start-up for Dow. John rejoined research and was named a Fellow in the Process Separations discipline of Engineering Sciences, and then Research Fellow in Advanced Materials.

John’s areas of interest and expertise include distillation synthesis and optimization, (including dividing wall columns), rate based mass transfer, hybrid unit operations, reactive distillation, and membrane separations. He is the author or co-author of more than 150 internal reports and a number of peer reviewed journal publications and articles. These articles are on subjects ranging from separation with ionic liquids to the implementation of Dividing Wall  Columns. John is the author and co-author of ten Dow pro-cess patents and numerous others moving through the patent process.

Externally, John serves as vice-president of Fractionation Research Inc., an 80 member consortium of petroleum, chemical, and engineering firms collaborating on joint research projects in the area of distillation.