Tenaris to reopen Conroe pipe plant
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.
Tenaris, based in Argentina, said Thursday it will restart much of its Conroe plant no later than September and hire more than 100 people to operate the facility, which will make and treat piping that goes into oil and gas wells. Tenaris, which makes its own steel, attributed the reopening to the rebound in the energy sector and the Trump administration’s recent tariffs placed on imported steel.
In an interview in March, Tenaris Chairman and CEO Paolo Rocca said he supported the steel tariffs and planned to grow in Texas. 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 com-
panies like Tenaris that manufacture steel and 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.
Tenaris recently opened a $1.8 billion pipe mill southwest of Houston in Bay City, a project that was begun during the oil bust. Rocca acknowledged the decision to push ahead with the new plant as oil prices plunged was a difficult and stressful, but the plant ultimately opened as oil prices recovered and drilling picked up.
Tenaris said Thursday it also will hire 150 more people to work at the Bay City plant and its smaller pipe threading facility in Houston.
“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.