This year, LSPI was named a premier employer by two leading publications. The Houston Business Journal ranked LSPI as a Top Ten Best Place to Work, and the Houston Chronicle named us as a Top 20 Workplace. Houston is the fourth-largest city in the U.S., and we are honored by these distinctions.
We are proud to attract and hire the best personnel,
so our customers and business partners experience best-in-class service.
In 2018, LSPI presented technical papers and exhibited in leading industry events around the globe, including:
LSPI was featured in a World Pipelines article about DRA technology and its impact on heavy crude. In this article, LSPI’s Chief Technology Engineer, Tim Burden, highlights the history of drag reducers, their introduction into heavy crude applications and their increased adoption in the last decade.
A full copy of this article is available online, with print copies available by request.
LSPI believes in giving back to our communities. We host various donation drives and volunteer opportunities throughout the year and encourage our employees to be actively involved. Through our corporate charitable contributions program, employees have the opportunity to nominate qualifying organizations for funding.
This fall, LSPI participated in the Energy Day Festival. The event was a family-friendly program that focused on science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education. LSPI hosted a booth with interactive demonstrations and explanations of drag reduction, viscosity and part per million (PPM).
This public event drew over 25,000 attendees visiting over 60 exhibitors. 184 students and teachers were recognized through the Energy Day Academic Program, granting nearly $24,000 in scholarships.
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LSPI helped sponsor Habitat for Humanity of Bryan/College Station. As part of this commitment, LSPI volunteers actively participated in construction efforts and build-related activities. LSPI’s Director of Manufacturing Operations serves on the organization’s Board of Directors.
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The City of Ponca City hosts a bi-annual Household Hazardous Waste Collection Day (HHWCD). This event offers the community a safe and responsible way to dispose of household hazardous waste, including used oils, car batteries, pool and household chemicals, fertilizers, electronics and medications.
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LSPI hosted a men’s clothing and professional accessory drive benefitting Career Gear Houston. Donations were hand delivered and LSPI volunteers helped sort, tag and hang incoming donations. The organization serves disadvantaged men who seek to gain employment and become role models for their families and communities.
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LSPI hosted a donation drive to support Houston Food Bank and organized a company volunteer shift packing food for Backpack Buddy. This program ensures that children have nourishing meals when they are away from school.
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For the third year, LSPI participated in the Westchase Corporate Challenge. This event benefits The Community Fund, supporting scholarships and other educational programs.
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LSPI supported Dress for Success of Houston by hosting a women’s clothing and accessory donation drive. Donated wardrobes are used as part of the organization’s economic empowerment program.
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Situation: During the planning phase to place a 40-foot skid, our customer indicated that their desired placement of the skid would be outside of their station for easy delivery access. This location required the injection point to be underground, which would require a long nozzle to inject for their proposed connection.
Solution: Understanding that a traditional approach would not work in this particular scenario, LSPI worked to adapt our traditional 2” nozzle. Elongating the billet length, the nozzle would be flush with the pipeline walls. However, the challenge of this design was in the nozzle weight limitation by the equipment needed to install the nozzle.
Our Approach: The first idea was to have the customer install their TOR connection underground, which would allow for a traditional 2-inch injection nozzle. This was not a good solution, as the client’s company policy dictated that the TOR connection must be above ground, as part of safety protocol.
By opting to change the nozzle’s material to aluminum rather than brass, the nozzle was lightened without compromising the integrity of the equipment. To further reduce the weight, the ID of the billet was increased until the last 2 inches of the billet (1/8”). Overall, the weight was reduced by 8.7 lbs through the modification of material and dimension, making it compliant with installation needs. The nozzle was installed and the skid was commissioned successfully.
Value Provided: LSPI’s technical support and equipment team facilitated the resolution of the issue to enable the customer to lay out their site as desired.
As the business has grown, LSPI determined that an improved and expanded distribution and delivery service plan was necessary to best serve Canadian customers. In late 2016, LSPI established a new transportation relationship with a Canadian partner to meet this need. This partner’s main business is to provide logistics services, typically for oilfield chemicals companies. They operate an extensive fleet of transport trucks based out of a large drive-in, heated warehouse in the Edmonton, Alberta area. Dedicated specific warehouse space, equipment, and drivers have been allocated for LSPI customer support. This dedicated fleet ensures that Canadian DRA customers are serviced reliably to full LSPI operating standards. All drivers must comply with local government and industry regulation and meet LSPI’s comprehensive training and service requirements.
This Canadian transportation partnership has also enabled the adoption of rail transport of DRA to Canada. Railcars of DRA are delivered to an unloading yard, only a few miles from the warehouse. Future plans will allow rail deliveries to move directly from LSPI’s Bryan manufacturing campus to our Canadian partner’s warehouse for unloading and storage.
LSPI is the largest manufacturer of pipeline DRA, under strict quality standards. As LSPI continues to grow and invest in our business, we are pleased to announce that we are building a new manufacturing plant which will produce crude and refined product DRA. With the addition of the new plant, LSPI will have manufacturing capacity in excess of global demand for drag reducing agents.
This new plant will be located next to our existing facility in Bryan, Texas, and is expected to be fully operational by the end of 2017. Each plant will operate independently and while leveraging administration and management, will have its own day to day operational staff. As a result of this added capability, customers will experience increased supply reliability through production capacity redundancy for current and future DRA needs. LSPI will also have more flexibility to develop, test and commercialize industry-leading technologies to offer to our customers.
LSPI’s Bryan, Texas, facilities are part of a 36-acre, world-class manufacturing campus capable of producing and shipping product to customers 24 hours a day, seven days a week. LSPI is certified to ISO 9001:2015 quality standards.
LSPI’s management team has committed to proactively enhancing safety procedures by forming an Emergency Response Team (ERT). Bryan, Texas, is fortunate to have great local fire and emergency responders, but these crews lack the knowledge that LSPI manufacturing employees possess in regards to plant operations.
The team is Pro-board Certified (certification for fire service personnel to national firefighting standards) in industrial exterior firefighting and training on incipient interior fire response. Training is conducted annually at the TEEX Fire Training School (College Station, Texas) to ensure that the latest firefighting techniques and safety precautions are utilized.
The LSPI Manufacturing ERT team is working with the Bryan Fire Department to help supplement their ranks by completing electrical isolations, valving out lines and knowing which chemicals are the ones of concern during an emergency. Training is conducted regularly, and procedures are reviewed thoroughly for safety standards, compliance and best practices.
Establishment of the ERT on LSPI’s Bryan manufacturing campus ensures that on-site personnel are prepared to counter emergencies that may include personal safety situations, as well as facility-threatening events requiring active firefighting capabilities. The ERT works in full collaboration with local authorities for all training and procedure development.
