Tenaris' new Bay City mill starts rolling pipe for oil wells
Jordan Blum, Houston Chronicle Updated 10:31 am, Thursday, November 16, 2017
Global steel pipe giant Tenaris commenced full operations Wednesday at its new $1.8 billion mill southwest of Houston in Bay City to start churning out piping for shale oil and gas wells in Texas, Oklahoma and beyond.
The state-of-the-art mill is designed to bring pipe manufacturing close to the oil and gas wells and compete with Asian imports. Tenaris, an Argentinian company with its roots in Italy, opted to build its most modern and robotically automated mill in Texas to serve the ongoing shale boom in West Texas' Permian Basin and other regions.
Despite the automation that moves the steel from station to station to manufacturing the finished piping, the mill employs about 600 people in Bay City.
"Tenaris is the architect of a new business model in the steel pipe sector – and the heart of this transformation is in Bay City with the most advanced pipe manufacturing facility in the world," said Germán Curá, Tenaris' president for North America.
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Tenaris touts its "Rig Direct" system of supplying pipe to match the exact needs of its customers just when the products are required in the field. That lowers storage, maintenance and inspection costs.
The 1.2-million-square-foot mill will produce 600,000 tons of steel pipe a year. The specialized piping includes drill pipe used for drilling and creating wells; casing pipe that's cemented into place to line the walls of the well and give it structural stability; and tubing pipe inserted into the well through which the oil and gas travels.
Tenaris began building the mill near Houston when oil prices were booming and then opted to press ahead during the bust. Although Tenaris would have loved to open the mill early this year, the delayed November opening still coincides with a resurgence in onshore oil and gas drilling in Texas and Oklahoma, although drilling activity has slowed in recent weeks.
Domestic piping manufacturers are now hoping the U.S. government increases customer duties on Asian steel imports, arguing that some Asian countries are unfairly dumping their steel in the U.S. and uneconomically low prices just to gain market share.
Tenaris was virtually unheard of in Texas until a decade ago when it bought St. Louis-based Maverick Tube Corp. and Houston-based Hydril Co. for a combined $5 billion. In short order, Tenaris grew from about 50 Houston employees to more than 2,000.
http://www.chron.com/business/energy/ar ... o-12851780
, ayer esta no participo del rebote, parece q el dia q volo, con la publicacion del balance, con volumen record, fue un empome.....???? 
