Summit Casing Equipment
6575 Corporation Parkway
Fort Worth 76126
817-529-2400
www.summitcasing.com
2015 revenue: $43 million
Employees: 90
Year founded: 2005
Type of business: Provides the oil and gas industry with casing equipment
Summit Casing Equipment has gone beyond offering top casing brands to selling its own namesake products.
Since 2005, the Fort Worth firm has constructed casing materials that allow horizontal drillers to reach oil and natural gas deposits quicker and more efficiently.
By offering only casing equipment, the privately held company has built a reputation on products that make drilling operations easier for energy producers in the increasingly competitive field.
Having watched the strategy pay off, the firm did not rest on its laurels. Instead, it introduced its own casing products.
“Summit has transitioned from being a provider of other manufacturers’ goods to manufacturing better than 95 percent of all product offerings,” said co-founder Andy Eldridge, who along with partner Mitchel Hansen learned the ropes at Halliburton Co. before striking out on their own.
Since founding the company in January 2005, Eldridge, chief financial officer, and Hansen, chief operating officer, have struck lucrative deals with Cabot Oil & Gas Corp. and other clients that buy Summit products for their own drilling.
A product introduced in 2014 put Summit Casing on the map. The TD Loco Composite Centralizer was lauded for its one-piece design that maintains integrity in extreme well bore temperatures due to what Hansen calls its high-impact stress and heat resistance.
Happy with the product’s success yet determined to raise the bar even higher, the firm this year expanded its manufacturing capabilities from solid steel centralizers to Go Flex bow spring centralizers and float equipment featuring its Pro Guard Valve.
Such terms likely mean nothing to non-industry folk, but they have kept the firm riding the crest of industry innovation.
The company continues gaining notice, with its manufacturing facility this year receiving Spec Q1 certification from the American Petroleum Institute. The designation denotes the highest standards of quality management and manufacturing through an on-site audit and evaluation.
Also this year came legal validation of the firm’s patent on the TD Loco Composite Centralizer. Shortly before the product’s release, Houston-based Downhole Products plc challenged the company for the patent. By rejecting Downhole’s patent claim, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office freed Summit to run with its idea. And earlier this year came news that a decision by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s Patent Trial and Appeal Board affirmed the patent office’s prior ruling rejecting the claims of Downhole’s patent.
“We were on the right side of things,” Hansen said at the time. “After that, we pursued our own patent and here we are.”
Where they are is the company’s 70,000-square-foot headquarters in West 20 Business Park just west of Loop 820 and north of Interstate 20 in Fort Worth. Three buildings house its corporate office and manufacturing operations.
Just 10 years ago, Summit was formed in Elk City, Okla., and later moved offices to Woodward, Okla. It subsequently set up shop in Cleburne, a move allowing close proximity to the Barnett, Eagle Ford and other shale plays, as well as to the potential clients drilling at those sites.
Fort Worth serves as headquarters for the company, which has grown to 90 employees at 11 locations nationwide. Some offices are one-man operations, while others are staffed by several employees.