With longstanding industry experience, a backlog of work, a dedicated group of employees and a strong safety record, H.C. Price Co. says it is well-positioned to serve the booming pipeline market.

H.C. Price Co. is celebrating its 85th anniversary. The company has evolved from a small tank-welding maintenance business serving the oil and gas industry into a major general contractor specializing in the construction of energy transmission infrastructure. Harold Charles Price Sr. founded H.C. Price Co. in 1921 and developed many of the techniques still used in the industry. Today, the company continues to grow and innovate, says Vice President Robert Bell.

The company credits H. C. Price Sr. for developing “the use of electrical welding of pipelines, removable back-up rings for use during welding, the stovepipe and pipe-gang firing line methods of pipeline assembly,” as well as pioneering “the use of pipe coatings for protection against corrosion and for buoyancy control.”

“Mr. Price was an innovator,” Bell explains. “He liked to develop improved techniques to maintain tanks and more productive methods to weld pipe together. He's directly responsible for many of the techniques still used today in the pipeline industry.”

The company constructed the first Arctic pipeline in North America during World War II in the Canadian Northwest Territories. In the '60s and '70s, its international division performed work in North Africa, the Middle East and Iran while its domestic company participated in a huge volume of domestic business. Price owned pipe-coating plants across the globe, including the Middle East, Europe and Southeast Asia. Today, the company is concentrated on the domestic market. Price's grandson, Charles Price III, is the chairman of the company and J.T. (Tom) White Jr. is president.

The company is headquartered in Dallas and has division offices in Anchorage, Alaska, and Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Bell says a “lot of business” is still generated in Alaska and the company has continued to thrive despite a reduced North Slope oil company client market compared to the '80s and early '90s.

“Our industry's business is cyclical,” he notes. “We have weathered numerous downturns. Right now, we're in a tremendous upturn with a lot of work forecasted.”

He estimates Price is among the top five or six pipeline contractors in the country. “We work all over the country and will occasionally bid a project overseas, but we are predominately a domestic company,” he explains.

The company also has a strong presence in Canada. In 1998, Price purchased OJ Pipelines, a pipeline construction general contractor based in Nisku, Alberta. “OJ is a very good company serving the Canadian-based pipeline transmission companies,” Bell states. H.C. Price Co. offers a variety of services, including pipeline and facility maintenance; construction of power generation and substation facilities, oil/gas facilities, gas compressor stations, meter and valve stations, and cross-country pipelines.

H. C. Price Co. owns a Canadian based company called RMS Welding Systems. RMS provides mechanized welding equipment and services to the pipeline industry, Bell notes. “One strength of the company is that we have been stable,” he states. “Most of our top-level management started at the field-engineering level and have been with Price for 20-plus years. The company is stable and financially sound. We are a good company, very productive. Price manages safety as a core value. We are a real flat company in terms of management. We don't have a lot of overhead. The low overhead is a function of trying to be efficient so we can be competitive and offer our clients low-cost services.”

H.C. Price Co.'s safety program has improved during the last five to six years, he states. “About five years ago, we instituted an upgrade in our safety program - a top-to-bottom review of safety policies and procedures - and changed a lot of things,” he says. “The results have been fantastic. We are running less than a 1.0 in lost-time incident rate and under a 4.0 in OSHA recordable incident rate, considerably less than the industry average, and [our] workman's comp modifier is a 0.8, a reflection that our frequency of injury is less than the industry average.”

A Strong Industry
The industry has evolved drastically since the 1999 to 2001 timeframe, when fall-out from Enron and general financial instability plagued its main clients, Bell says. Since then, new companies have purchased assets, formed new businesses and begun developing projects. “We are working for newly formed companies, some of them for the first time,” Bell says. “It's a constant process of introducing our company to these newly organized client-companies who are planning future projects.

“We are right now in the middle of a tremendous upturn,” he continues. “There is more work forecast by our clients than there are contracting resources available to build them. This is frustrating and will continue to frustrate our clients in their need to build new projects.

“Contractors are also frustrated by our need to find adequate, skilled labor. This upturn in work planned has put tremendous pressure on contracting resources. Work is forecast into 2009 and beyond. While it's nice that the workload forecast has increased, it's somewhat frustrating that there aren't the necessary resources available to pursue the opportunities.

“Contractors must take care that we don't get overloaded. We are bidding work out to 2009 right now. Price's plans are no different now with the exception that we are booking work further into the future than has been the case in the past. We have work forecast and booked into 2008. Price is constantly upgrading our equipment.”