MOUNT VERNON – In normal times, Mount Vernon-based Ariel Corp., manufacturer of natural gas compressors for the energy industry, brings in customers from all over the world for training.
But with COVID-19, the times have been anything but normal. In-person training has been cancelled both in Mount Vernon and in Texas, where instruction was provided pre-COVID in a mobile training lab; Kent Dubbe, Ariel’s vice president of Human Resources, told the Mount Vernon News.
In Mount Vernon alone, Ariel held one or two classes a week prior to the pandemic, with 12-14 students per class, Dubbe said.
The training is primarily on maintenance and repair of the compressors.
“Our training is very specialized,” Dubbe said. “You need to have a lot of hands-on activities, lab activities. That’s why we have the student-to-instructor ratio pretty low so that we can do all the specialized training we need to do.” It is the type of training that cannot be duplicated virtually.
The company sells compressors small and large.
“They go from some that are desk-sized all the way to compressors that wouldn’t fit in a large room,” he said.
Any time natural gas moves, there is a compressor behind it, Dubbe noted.
“The compressor is part of what we call a skid or package,” he said. “That skid or package is made up usually of an Ariel compressor and a Caterpillar motor. The package can be used to re-inject natural gas as it comes up from an oil well to put it back in the ground. It can be used to put the gas into a pipeline and move it to another location.”
Ariel, founded in 1967, sells to distributors who then sell or rent to customers in the industry, Dubbe said.
The training is provided for the employees of the distributors who work in engineering, servicing and support.
It is still uncertain when the in-person training can resume, Dubbe added.
“We’ve talked about what it will look like when we switch gears and how we can do it cautiously, professionally and in a way that people are as comfortable as they can be,” he said. “That’s very important to Ariel: to make sure our employees, the customers who would visit us here and the customers we would go and see have that mutual comfort.”
In the meantime, Ariel has used the down time to focus on increased training of its own employees.
“We have done tens of thousands of hours of employee training in our machining area, our maintenance area and our assembly area,” Dubbe said. “The down time in the COVID era has been used for that.”
