24 MAY 2016 | FUEL OIL NEWS | www.fueloilnews.com
impairment insurance and warranty insurance. They see our quality
program as being very important so we look at a lot of tanks.
FON: What would you say is the state of the steel tank industry
relative to petroleum today? I imagine your members were get-
ting a lot of work with the fracking explosion, and that's probably
slowed a bit.
GEYER: That has slowed down considerably. Some of our members
in North Dakota changed their shops over to building nothing but oil
field tanks and they've reverted back to doing UL type aboveground
or underground tanks. Industries like mining and things like that —
they've slowed down, too. Then I'm hearing some of the big engineering
firms are laying people off because there isn't that [much] work for the
oil and gas industry or the mining industry. It's kind of a domino effect.
Amongst our members are the people who make the big, heavy-wall
pressurized vessels. Some of these go into refineries. In 2014 they were
nine months out with their orders. They couldn't keep up. They were
building new shops and—boom! I mean, it just fell off the table in 2015
and they've had to scale back. It's not been real pretty.
FON: What about the industry more broadly?
GEYER: Some of the guys who build the smaller shop-fabricated tanks
are still doing pretty well. I mean, they're keeping busy. I've asked a mix
of people. Some have been hit a little bit harder than others, so it's kind
of hard to understand why there's that differentiation.
FON: I've heard talk of a new AST market—high storage capacity
generator fueling. Data centers and hospitals etc.—enough fuel
to run for weeks at a time.
GEYER: They're big tanks—50,000 gallons. They might put in four
or five aboveground tanks. A 50,000 gallon tank used to be the biggest
tank that would fit on a truck and that's like a 12' diameter by 60' long.
It's a pretty big monster.
100,000th STi P3 tank.