Tenaris adds 140 staff as Conroe, Texas plant ramps up activity
HOUSTON - Tenaris is scaling up industrial activity at its Conroe, Texas plant, adding about 140 employees onboard to support the facility’s ramp up, which includes a $600,000 investment in IT and automation infrastructure.
Tenaris is adding crews to operate the heat treatment and finishing areas of the facility. Pipes undergo heat treatment to obtain defined metallurgical properties and are then finished, which is the last part of the manufacturing process, consisting of threading, stenciling, inspections and final rounds of testing.
“In a world with constrained supply chains, it is important that we stay close to our customers and manage shorter, streamlined logistics with local supply. Increasing our industrial activity at Conroe is an initial step in ramping up our operations across the US,” said Luca Zanotti, Tenaris US President.
Tenaris will be bringing its Bay City, TX, seamless mill to full capacity, and Conroe will support processing loads. For the ramp up, Tenaris has been onboarding its teams with comprehensive training, a combination of virtual, in-person classroom and on-the-job, depending on the area of focus.
A $600,000 investment is also underway to equip the Conroe plant with tracking and traceability capabilities which form part of Tenaris’s direct mill-to-rig commercial model, Rig Direct.
With the technology implemented, Conroe will have the capability to offer RunReady services, part of Tenaris’s Rig Direct offer. RunReady includes the full preparation of pipes at Tenaris mills, delivered ready to be run downhole with Tenaris managing the application of running compound, performing inspections and generating digital tallies via its proprietary PipeTracer technology. The latter is Tenaris’s tracking and traceability application that provides customers the complete manufacturing history of each pipe, technical specs, running guidelines and digital tallies accessible via a mobile device. Tenaris is working to ensure its manufacturing facilities in the States have the infrastructure to offer RunReady.
“Through this unique service, we can deliver pipe to our customers ready to be run into the well. Quality starts at our mills and extends through our distribution network all the way to our customer well sites. By Tenaris managing all the prep work of our products before it is dispatched, this is an additional opportunity to mitigate risks with less pipe handling, reducing time and boosting efficiency for running operations,” added Zanotti.
Activity at the Conroe mill had scaled down in 2019 due to reduced drilling activity, subsequent low demand for tubular products and continued high level of imports of OCTG.
