When you do business with MAKEEN Gas Equipment, you are not just gaining access to the knowledge and products of your local office. You are supported by a global team of gas experts, each with years of experience in the industry. As a result, there is always someone at your disposal who can find the right solutions for you – no matter what challenge you are facing.
In this series, we want to introduce you to the different parts of MAKEEN Gas Equipment’s global team and what they bring to the table. This time, we invite you on an island trip for a visit to MAKEEN Gas Equipment UK.
Possibly one of the finest embodiments of our “one-stop shop” approach can be found in the UK. Based out of Swansea and Birmingham, MAKEEN Gas Equipment UK (MGE UK) supplies all the products and services that the UK gas market needs – both reconditioning, sales, manufacturing, installation, and service.
History
In the beginning, MGE UK was not one company, but three: RMS Gas Engineering, Tankgas Equipment Ltd, and Combined Gas Systems. In 2014, all three of these companies were acquired by MAKEEN Energy – and three years later, they were joined together under the name MAKEEN Gas Equipment UK.
All three brought different skillsets to the table. RMS, based in Swansea, specialised in reconditioning of gas equipment. Tankgas Equipment were expert retailers of pumps and valves, as well as cryogenic gas equipment. And Combined Gas Systems did a lot of service and maintenance on Autogas and liquid gas facilities around the country. By putting the three together, a true one-stop shop was born.
Today, MGE UK consists of 32 people across its 2 locations in Swansea and Birmingham, as well as service engineers based out of their vans and a number of salespeople operating out of their homes.
Products and services
Today, a lot of the work done by MGE UK is reconditioning of equipment, with considerable cost savings for their customers. Older equipment, from pumps and equipment down to the smallest valves, get sent to the workshop in Swansea where our people take it apart and put it back together as good as new – at a much lower cost than if the customer had to buy a factory-new unit.
But if a new product is what the customer needs, MGE UK also supplies a complete range of equipment – primarily for LPG, but also for cryogenic gases and renewable dimethyl ether (rDME). Similar to some of its sister entities, MGE UK manufactures small skids. But they are unique in their capacity to also manufacture a range of special equipment, such as manual hand pumps that work well in areas with unreliable or non-existent power supply. Their ACME Wear Gauge Kit is popular all over the world as an efficient way to check the wear and tear of couplings. And their small diesel-driven compressor, the GEM, is a big hit in the UK.
We can sell it, we can install it, we can maintain it, we can recondition it. And when it comes to the end of its life, we can replace it. At any point in that cycle, we can slot in as needed. That means we are a true one-stop shop for our customers.
In addition to working in their own warehouse and workshop, MGE UK also has a fleet of 5 service cars driving around the UK as well as Ireland, Guernsey, and Jersey. In recent years, they have even made it as far as Denmark, where they perform servicing on Q8’s LNG refueling station in Padborg 4 times a year. MGE UK’s service people are skilled in the installation and maintenance of LNG facilities, of which more and more are emerging in the UK – a sign of the heavy goods vehicle industry’s demand for cost-effective and emission-reducing solutions.
Market
The future of the gas market in the United Kingdom has been a topic of public discussion for many years. The government has previously stated that all fossil fuels should be withdrawn by 2035, which sparked uncertainty in the LPG sector. But LPG has been included in the government’s biomass strategy, indicating that the government still regards it as a fuel that is too flexible to completely abandon – with a transition to the renewable bioLPG in the works.
Other gases, like liquefied natural gas (LNG) and rDME are also an increasing factor on the UK market, with more and more investment taking place. On the other hand, the market for Autogas, which used to be thriving, is diminishing fast.
Aside from the UK market, around 20% of MGE UK’s sales are exports – primarily to Australia, South Africa, New Zealand and the United Arab Emirates.
