A steel pipe mill in Conroe is set to reopen after three years when it was shuttered during the recent oil bust amid a glut of pipe supplies from foreign imports.
Argentina-based Tenaris said Thursday it will restart much of its Conroe plant no later than September and that it’s hiring more than 100 people to operate the facility, which will make and treat piping that goes into oil and gas wells.
Tenaris credited both the rebound in the energy sector and the Trump administration’s recent tariffs places on much of the nation’s imported steel.
In an interview in March, Tenaris Chairman and CEO Paolo Rocca said he supported the steel tariffs and that he was planning more Texas growth. Tenaris was founded in Italy by Rocca’s grandfather and later moved its main operations to Argentina. It’s formally headquartered in Luxembourg for tax purposes. Tenaris’ North American headquarters is in Houston.
While oil and gas production companies bemoan the higher costs of steel the tariffs will trigger, they’re good news for companies like Tenaris that manufacture the steel piping domestically.
Tenaris eliminated 230 jobs when it closed the Conroe plant in April 2015, so it isn’t fully restaffing the plant right away. A small portion of the plant was kept open as a service center.
The timing of the recent collapse in oil prices combined with Tenaris’ prior decision to invest in a new $1.8 billion pipe mill southwest of Houston in Bay City meant an unusual circumstance where Tenaris was both building and shuttering plants in the Houston area simultaneously.
Rocca acknowledged the decision to push ahead with the new plant as oil prices plunged was a difficult and stressful.
But the Bay City plant opened in December with oil prices healthy again. Tenaris said Thursday it will also hire 150 more people to work at the Bay City plant and its smaller pipe threading facility in Houston to support the company’s ramp up in activity.
“Market conditions have been improving over the past year with a higher price of oil, increased drilling activity and actions by the U.S. administration to support domestic manufacturing,” said Luca Zanotti, president of Tenaris’ U.S. operations.
When Tenaris shuttered the Conroe plant in 2015, it blamed the oil bust and specifically a surge of cheap imports from South Korea. The Asian nation was exempted from the tariffs, but only because South Korea agreed to quotas to keep its steel export volumes to the U.S. at 70 percent of its previous average.
Tenaris was virtually unheard of in Texas until just over 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.
This article first appeared on the Houston Chronicle – an Energy Voice content partner. For more from the Houston Chronicle click here.