Emile Joseph Bourgeois Sr.
May 25, 2009
Madeline Marie Cadiere Usie
May 29, 2009
Cameron International Corporation’s plant in Berwick should be turning out an increasing amount of oil and gas drilling equipment for the next two years, said the company’s aftermarket manager J.J. Prejean at last week’s meeting of the South Central Industrial Association in Houma.
Cameron, headquartered in Houston, makes equipment that processes oil and gas during production, especially flow equipment. The 21-acre plant in Berwick on Bayou Teche specializes in making pressure containment items and subsea equipment.
In recent decades, the company has been moving increasingly toward producing equipment to operate on the sea bottom.
“There’s still a lot of opportunities in the deep sea,” Prejean said.
Subsea products, he said, have become the largest part of Cameron, which has 260 locations throughout the world and $7.5 billion in sales a year.
Two-thirds of its production comes from outside the U.S.
“If there is oil and gas, Cameron has a facility there,” Prejean said.
The company’s plant in Malaysia recently underwent $60 million in improvements. Other plant locations besides Berwick include Romania and Wyoming.
Cameron also operates plenty of machine tools that can perform multiple operations to make their equipment. Its MEG reclamation units remove salt.
Prejean said the company strives to decrease the size of the equipment it creates and to make products that are more efficient. The company stresses safety and fights against complacency, he said.
Cameron was founded in 1833, but has gone through numerous acquisitions and name changes since then. Prejean said Cameron took off during the 1920s when it developed a blowout preventer that stopped pressure from coming to the surface.
The company operated in Patterson beginning in the 1940s before setting up operations in Berwick.
Cameron’s years in Patterson preceded the era of deep-sea oil and gas exploration. Perhaps most notably, the Patterson plant turned out Swift boats for the U.S. Navy.
Cameron took over an existing plant in Berwick in the 1970s, coinciding with the boom in deep-sea oil and gas exploration.
The company’s expansion into producing subsea drilling equipment started with floating platforms tethered to the sea floor. Production then moved to equipment that lies on the sea bottom itself.
Prejean said one deepwater well can turn out 20,000 or more barrels of oil a day, but the entire process of developing and establishing the well on the sea floor can cost billions of dollars.
Besides producing deepwater drilling equipment, Cameron’s Berwick plant is also a major equipment repair center. The plant has 340 employees, most of whom are from Berwick. Thirty-four are from Houma.
The company has spent more than $20 million on capital improvements over the last five years on the Berwick plant.
“Our company is engineering focused,” Prejean said. “We don’t make cookie-cutter products.”
J.J. Prejean Cameron Intl. Corp. Aftermarket Manager
