What we talked about
John Hooker: In this episode, John Hooker, Director of Engineering at Statistics & Control, shares how his lifelong fascination with gas turbines led him from aerospace engineering at Iowa State into turbomachinery control and, eventually, advanced process control and large-scale simulation. He explains how controlling a turbine in an airplane isn’t that different from controlling one on the ground:an insight that helped him land in oil & gas consulting at a small company that grew into a global team with offices across multiple countries.
Show notes
John Hooker joined a six-person company that had never said no to a problem, and two decades later that philosophy turned a turbomachinery control shop into a global simulation firm operating in eight countries. The through-line: every client project revealed some physical reality the model hadn’t accounted for yet, from Siberian temperatures dropping to -54°C to a 30-year-old leaking steam valve that couldn’t be replaced.
What we covered
- John’s entry into oil and gas consulting happened because a gas turbine is the same whether it’s on an airplane or on the ground. His aerospace background at Iowa State translated directly, and the company that hired him, the sixth person they brought on, offered a job within two weeks of the first interview.
- The company started in turbomachinery control working with Honeywell, Allen Bradley, and Siemens PLCs, then kept expanding into simulation because clients liked their work and kept asking for more: first gas turbines, then pipelines, then electrical systems, then steam, then oil wells. The boss, John says, has never said no to a problem.
- A geothermal steam project in the mountains caused two weeks of head-against-the-desk frustration because the simulation was consistently five megawatts off. The culprit turned out to be relative humidity, which nobody had factored in for a turbine sitting at 2,500–3,000 meters altitude. Two weeks of work resolved by one variable.
- The simulation hit a boundary condition of -50°C in Siberia, and the ambient temperature outside was -54°C. The client called to report the simulation had stopped. John had to expand the temperature range on the fly, a reminder that you cannot anticipate every physical parameter before you deploy.
- A predictive maintenance project on remote reciprocating compressors cut site visits from 18–20 per month down to 2–3 per month by putting a computer on site to relay data to the cloud. The shift wasn’t about knowing what was wrong in real time, it was about knowing whether something could wait a week or needed someone to drive out immediately.
- On AI in engineering, John tests every new large language model by asking it to write a PID controller in C++. They always start well, then fail when he asks how the model handles dividing by zero in the time domain. It takes four or five iterations to get a correct answer, and he says his bigger concern is not the model itself, but people who don’t know enough to catch when it’s wrong.
About John
John Hooker is the Director of Engineering at Statistics & Control, a global engineering and simulation firm with offices in eight countries. He specializes in advanced process control, turbomachinery control, and predictive maintenance across oil and gas and power generation industries.
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johndhooker
- Website: http://www.stctrl.com
Episode 91 of the PreVetted Podcast.