Above: A new mill at Sinton, Texas, allows Bull Moose Tube to expand the size range of HSS and make pipe piling
July, 2024- As the saying goes, there is strength in numbers. Founded in 1962, Bull Moose Tube has been supplying a variety of steel pipe and tubing products to North American customers for over six decades.
The company has grown both organically and via acquisition over that time and now has eight plants (and 19 mills) that convert steel coils into hollow structural sections (ASTM A500, A847, A1085 and A1112), mechanical tubing (ASTM A513), sprinkler pipe (ASTM A135 and A795) and pipe piling (ASTM A252). Bull Moose also has expanded its size range by opening a 350,000-ton mill last year in Sinton, Texas, on Steel Dynamics’ (SDI) flat-rolled campus.
Nate Carruthers, director of marketing at Bull Moose Tube, says, “Texas is a large consumer of HSS. The state is business friendly, so it’s a good market to be in as more manufacturers move operations there. We already had a good number of customers in Texas, but now we are more competitive due to lower freight costs compared with some of our other locations,” he says.
One of the biggest benefits of building the Texas mill is being able to enhance the product range. “We previously made rounds up to 4.5-inch diameter, and Sinton has expanded that to 18-inch diameter,” Carruthers says.
In addition, Bull Moose increased its wall thickness range up through 3/4 inch. Bull Moose and one other American producer make that product via the straight-seam production process, he says. “We previously made up to 12-inch square tubing and rectangular equivalents with 5/8-inch-thick walls. Now we can make 14-inch squares and rectangular equivalents with 3/4-inch-thick walls.”
CAPACITY GROWTH
“Product offerings in the market changed quickly,” Carruthers says. “When we first announced the mill, Atlas Tube was the only mill that made 14-inch square and 18-inch rounds and, by the time we started up, Nucor Tubular Products also could make those sizes.” In the structural tubing market altogether, “we added capacity, Atlas added capacity and Nucor added capacity. Then we had a couple newer entrants into the U.S. market: Nova Tube of Canada built a tube mill in Delta, Ohio, and Altex Tube built a tube mill in Columbus, Mississippi.”
However, he notes, capital investments are for the long term. “Our investment was based on our market research, customer needs and the benefits of being on SDI’s flat-rolled campus.”
Carruthers surmises that “if more than one mill produces the size, engineers are more likely to specify those sizes on their projects,” increasing demand for all the producers. “With the big rounds, they can be produced to A500 or A252 standards, which allowed us to enter the pipe piling market. That has been a nice addition to the product portfolio, and that market is showing strength through infrastructure investments.”
POST-PANDEMIC CYCLE
“The biggest negative in demand that we have seen is with commercial construction,” according to Carruthers, and that is a very recent trend. “We saw record year after record year in the buildout of distribution warehouses, but higher interest rates have had a negative impact on the market.
“In 2021, 2022 and 2023, demand was amazing,” he says. “Part of that is that distribution centers use large HSS—10-inch and 12-inch square tubing—as support columns.
Processing pipe and tube products has become much more precise at Bull Moose Tube.
Engineers are more likely to specify larger diameter products if more than one U.S. manufactuer makes them.
SECTOR SALES
APPLICATIONS EVOLVE
In the agricultural equipment sector, applications for Bull Moose Tube’s products include auger tubing, roll-over protection and long arms on tillage equipment. “The arms must be able to handle the torque of moving soil and crops,” says Nate Carruthers, director of marketing.
In the energy sector, “solar torque tubes are the rotating portion of a single-axis solar tracker,” he says. “Solar torque tubes must have certain dimensional tolerances, a minimum physical yield and twist tolerance for the trackers to be effective. The solar market is still pretty strong.”
But only three companies consistently make 12-inch square. Those projects consumed our largest products.” The other product line that benefits from data and distribution center construction is sprinkler pipe throughout those warehouses, he says.
According to Carruthers, data centers have been a bright spot as more companies are trying to leverage generative artificial intelligence. Companies and organizations use data centers to house their critical applications and data. Designs for these buildings are based on a network of computing and storage resources that enable the delivery of shared applications and data. Key components of a data center include routers, switches, firewalls, storage systems, servers and applicationdelivery controllers. About 25 million square feet of new data center capacity came online in 2022 with an average capacity per plant of 132,000 square feet, according to Upsite Technologies.
HOLDING ITS OWN
“One comment I found interesting in a recent Jacobson & Associates Steel Survey was that Bull Moose is ‘kind of a small player,’ but it’s not true,” Carruthers says. “We have 500 to 600 employees and 1 million tons of rolling capacity for pipe and tube. The Sinton, Texas, mill alone added 350,000 tons of capacity.”
Carruthers says that Sinton’s expanded size range as well as its recent jumbo HSS partnership with Mitsui & Co. USA, MM&KENZAI Corp. and Nippon Steel Metal Products Co. Ltd. gives Bull Moose the second largest HSS product offering in the market.
The Sinton mill also enhanced its sprinkler pipe offering up to 10-inch diameter, giving it what Carruthers calls the most comprehensive offering in the industry. Earlier this year, Bull Moose was able to begin producing pipe piling at Sinton, which, like sheet piling, makes ground more secure. It is used for foundations and prevents the erosion of shorelines, for example.
One of the reasons pipe piling is a bright spot is infrastructure spending. “Pipe piling provides foundational support for bridges. There have been a lot of port upgrades and expansions. Pipe piling is used around coastlines so it has helped there,” says Carruthers.
“Airports are also undergoing upgrades and expansions and some of those projects need pipe piling,” he says. “When you walk into an airport, HSS tubing is used for structural columns and canopies.” Airports in Houston and Charlotte, for example, used large-diameter structural tubing. Pipe bollards posts filled with concrete that act as security barriers are also prevalent at airports. “We produce that pipe, too,” he notes.
One of the advantages of being on SDI’s campus in Sinton is the ability to source EAF coil with virtually no transportation emissions, “which allows us to have one of the lowest carbon footprints for a steel pipe and tube mill in North America,” Carruthers notes.
DIGITAL WORLD
E-commerce, even at tube mills, could use improvement, according to Carruthers. “We developed a new e-commerce platform from scratch. That was an important investment. With our distribution customer base, we want to make it as easy as possible for customers to do business with us.
“They want to know your rolling schedule and stock on the floor, be able to order material, track their orders and build truckloads for release all online,” he says. Customers also want to generate their own reports, “so we invested in that capability.”
“Even two years into this process, we continue to meet with software developers weekly and update our platform based on customer feedback. From a technology perspective, we always have to be aware of the trends,” Carruthers continues. “We have done data analytics projects with St. Louis University and also went through an ERP system upgrade. The next big thing is AI. We will follow those developments and determine whether using that helps us make work easier for our own people and for our customers.”
“The real goal is to become the best, which requires leveraging technology to complement the work our people are doing.”
Bull Moose Tube, 800/325-4467, bullmoosetube.com
