Quentin Moore has always been fascinated by the way electrical things worked. This fascination started as a young child when he helped his dad wire the basement of their home. From then on, he wanted to work with electricity and electronics when he grew up.
Fast forward many years, Quentin is responsible for the reliability of the Koch Fertilizer Enid plant’s electrical systems as the electrical reliability leader. He got his start working as a power production technician in the Air Force for eight years. Afterward, he pursued an engineering degree through DeVry University’s online engineering program and worked for 4 more years as a union electrician.
When he began his career search, Quentin applied to Koch Fertilizer, where he’s been for the past 5 years. Quentin — who grew up outside of Wichita, Kansas — was familiar with Koch Industries. In fact, his stepmother worked for Flint Hills Resources, a subsidiary of Koch Industries, as their first female pipeline dispatcher.
Today, Quentin works with many groups across the site — from maintenance to operations and projects teams — and no two days look alike. He is involved in improvement projects and preventative maintenance on equipment to ensure it runs properly. He says his career has evolved as the plant’s reliability has progressed.
“The plants used to have parts break overnight, which resulted in people being called out to fix it,” Quentin said. “As our reliability has improved and our maintenance team has grown, my role has changed to focus more on how we can make things here the best in class.”
For Quentin, the most exciting part of his job is the problem-solving aspect.
“Knowing a problem is preventing the plant from running to its full potential and being able to solve the problem and see the end result, that is the best part,” he said.
One of Quentin’s greatest accomplishments was transitioning the UAN and urea units to a new electric switch gear while the plants were operating, and it did not require any downtime for the units.
Recently, Quentin took his passion for problem-solving in a new direction — inspiring future electrical technicians and engineers.
Quentin learned his electrical group colleagues were participating in a career event for local high school seniors. In the past, the team had a hard time attracting students to stop at their booth. After some brainstorming, they decided to build an interactive display replicating areas of the plant and highlighting the electrical elements to hopefully draw more attention.
Quentin jumped on the project and volunteered to help. During his free time, he developed the code for each piece and created each element with his personal 3D printer over the course of a couple of weeks. He felt this event was important to help connect local students to the business as well as show them career opportunities that are available.
“The display was a success,” Quentin said. “We had a lot of students stop by, and the interactive display was a great conversation starter for the kids to learn more about what we do here at the plant.”