Firm wins contract in India

A hot oil heater unit built in Red Deer will be used by a state-owned petroleum company in India in a deal expected to put a local manufacturer on the map.

General Hot Oilers Inc. was recently awarded a $600,000- contract to supply a hot oil circulation unit to the Oil and Natural Gas Company of India.

“It’s the biggest single contract we’ve had yet,” said company president and owner Garett Cupples.

General Hot Oilers Inc, designs and manufactures hot oil and pressure units in a 7,500-sqaure-foot shop on five acres in Red Deer it shares with its sister company, General Hot Oil and Pressure Service Ltd.- the servicing end of the business.

The units can be used to clean out well bores and oil and gas processing equipment, pumping fluids at high pressure, removing paraffin from oil and well tubing pipelines, and heating water, oil or frac fluids. It’s believed to be the only company in Canada that can design and fabricate a unit and provide on-site training- a feature which Cupples said may have been the clincher for the deal.

“So many companies manufacture them but don’t know how to run them,” said Cupples.

He traveled to Kazakhstan in January to provide training on two hot oil units sold to a state-owned petroleum company there,

“The company that sold them the equipment said ‘we don’t know how to run them’”, he said.

The India deal “is a feather in the hat” for the Red Deer company, he said.

“To see to a company that size, it’s a resume thing,” he said.

Cupples said it will serve to boost the company’s profile on an international scale.

Although the company serves the domestic market, international clients have always been the company’s target, he said.

Because of the often antiquated overseas oil and gas industry , Alberta companies have a lot to offer on an international scene, he said.

Many of the international deals the company has made in the United States, China and Russia have been struck through an initial hit on the company’s website, a must- have for companies wanting to deal internationally, he said.

With expert advice from Alberta Economic Development, and help from the Canadian Commercial Corporation to secure pre-shipment exporting financing, it took 14 months for the company to secure the contract, he said.

Contact with India was made initially through an agent in India who had checked out the company’s website, he said. Further contact was made during an oil and gas expo in Calgary, and finally the tender was let.

It may not be a large profit making contract, he said, but sales-wise it will be a boost to the firm’s reputation.

The unit will be placed on a Kenworth truck custom designed for the right-hand drive requirements in India.

“We’ve had to stop and think a few times how this is going to work because it’ll be controlled from the right-hand side,” he said.

Representatives of the Oil and Natural Gas Company of India will travel to Red Deer to be trained on the unit in October.

Next year, Cupples said he hopes to secure contracts in Latin America.
 

-Written by Lea Hilstrom, Staff writer