Kilgore’s can-do culture spurs startup’s success

Pipes and composites have been with us since ancient civilizations first developed the means to transport water and used straw to enhance mud for construction. Thousands of years later, a game-changing technique is advancing the same technology for the 21st century – born from a startup in the heart of the East Texas oilfield.

According to B.G. Clark, President of Kilgore's Composite Piping Technology, MaxDR™ is the world's first large-diameter, high-pressure, Fusible Composite Poly Pipe and is a major step-change in piping. The venture's focused development spanned more than a decade, drawing on the prime resources of a smalltown East Texas community.

"This is a Kilgore product," Clark says. “We've been able to take technology, piping that was used in the oil and gas business a century ago, and advance it with state-of-the-art equipment and materials to create a new product that's solving today's problems – doing more with less."

Lighter and easier to handle, it is thinner but has a capacity for significantly higher pressures. It's even eco-friendly, using 50 percent less material compared to its comparable ID and pressure-rated high-density polyethylene pipe (HDPE, a.k.a. poly pipe). This advanced pipe boasts a wide range of applications – liquids, gases, slurries, and more – to serve an array of industries from Oil & Gas to mining, from municipalities to utilities, CO₂ gathering, and more.

Years of research and development went into the pipe, centered on the historic home of the 'World's Richest Acre,' now an ever-evolving, diversified economic hub in East Texas.

This advanced pipe boasts a wide range of applications – liquids, gases, slurries, and more – to serve an array of industries from Oil & Gas to mining, from municipalities to utilities, CO₂ gathering, and more.

"Half my career has been in startups, and I've been to many locations, metro as well as rural," Clark said. "After 35 years of working throughout the United States, I can tell you I am very impressed with Kilgore."

He officially came on board in late November 2022, charged with bringing the company to market. Clark launched parallel tracks of final equipment engineering and fabrication alongside site selection and building construction at CPT's FM349 headquarters.

For business owners, Kilgore is an exceptional location for expansion or relocation, Clark says.

“We've been very lucky that the workforce in Kilgore has oilfield and equipment experience, and we're able to directly apply that experience to operating our advanced technology equipment and building our facility."

Before 'Composite Piping Technology' and the MaxDR™ moniker were coined, the initiative's research and development was housed in an initial facility in Kilgore Economic Development Corporation's Synergy Park. Years later, KEDC helped CPT site selectors find a prime spot in Kilgore's East Industrial Park.

The company's 600 foot-long, 45,000 square-foot manufacturing facility was completed by Spring '24.

“Kilgore Economic Development Corporation was instrumental in helping us get incentives and tax abatements for the city, the county, and the college, Clark said.

It's a runway, he said, a path to steadily increase revenue and reach a sustainable level.

"After that, we will be putting more than $300,000 a year onto the tax rolls," offsetting the tax burden on Kilgore and Gregg County residents, Clark added. "This is going to come back to the normal citizen tenfold.

"What we're doing creates jobs and diversifies the local economy, and initiatives like this help lower the tax burden on residents."

Almost a century since the world's largest oilfield discovery made Kilgore a boomtown, the community is, by its nature, a fine-tuned spot for startups – a composite of a skilled and evolving workforce, easy access to key transportation routes and diverse resources.

"We've been able to assemble a very solid team for our phase one," he said. "We're very fortunate here in Kilgore that we have a lot of support infrastructure. We've got supply shops. There are welding shops. There are fabrication shops. There are machine shops.

"We have those businesses that help us create the special tools that are required to do research and development and, ultimately, manufacturing. It's the entire historical support infrastructure for heavy industry that has helped us do what we do."

At the same time, Kilgore also has great quality of life, Clark added, a small-town atmosphere with the amenities of a larger community. The laborshed population for Kilgore exceeds 700,000 people, though only ~14,000 live within the city limits.

If nothing else, that means plenty of caffeine and snacks close to hand.

"When you're a startup, you live on fast food and coffee," he quipped. "And we work from dawn to dusk. We're doing the mad scientist stuff."