ProCoat Coatings: Serving the Oil and Gas Industry Globally
By CATHOLINE BUTLER
Early one frosty Alberta morning, I visited ProCoat Coatings in Calgary. The company specializes in industrial painting and sandblasting and like many other businesses in Alberta, their work is driven by the oil and gas sector of the economy of that province.
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| PAT McCAY of ProCoat Coatings in Calgary shown here in his work yard. |
ProCoat Coatings Limited is located in the industrial area of 90th Avenue in the South East area of Calgary. The yard is filled with mobile equipped facilities for sandblasting concrete and steel and the application of internal and external protective coatings. Their motto is, “if it’s made out of steel, we can blast it and paint it.”
When I arrived at the office, I asked if owner Pat McCay was available, Office Manager Debbie Henderson said to look out in the yard for the guy wearing the baseball cap with a cell phone in one hand and a Tim Horton’s coffee in the other – she was right.
Speaking about his business and the economy in the past year, Pat said, “well, obviously the economy in Alberta has an effect on my business, but for the past year and a half, the booming part of Alberta has been up north in Fort McMurray and Grand Prairie. They have been booming north of Edmonton for the past couple of years, but from what I understand from Red Deer south it has not been so busy.”
A lot of ProCoat Coatings work is destined for overseas to such countries as the Middle East, Russia, Japan, Korea and China. McCay said, “really, it’s the global economy that has the largest effect on my business. And because of world affairs, my business has been off for the last couple of years, but we seem to be entering into an upswing.
“The American economy also has an effect since they’re the largest importer/exporter in the world, and because of their financial clout they can buy and sell things much faster. But if their economy is off, then world transactions are off and that will have an effect on my business.
“We do mostly oil and gas bound items and that could be within the confines of Alberta or now British Columbia. There’s a lot of activity outside of the province and the country. The industry has gone modular and therefore portable and readily movable all over the world. And that’s what we do, if it’s made out of steel, we can blast it and paint it from the smallest rims to the largest two year projects of vessels, piping, structural steel, skids, valves, you name it.
“What we send overseas is the whole package. It would be a designed, engineered and a constructed money making process – a filtering package to take oil or gas and process it to sell it to markets – that’s what we do. Everybody in the oil and gas wants true turn-key operations, as they call it. It goes to the customer, the end-user pushes a button and he can start selling the product that comes out right away.”
Speaking about the current prospects for the economy and some of the hurdles in his business, McCay said, “we seem to be in an upswing situation. We’ve certainly been busier in the last eight months than we have been for the past couple of years. The biggest hurdle in any business is labour and we always seem to be hiring labour.”
Born in an Irish community in the Gatineau Hills of Western Quebec, with Mayo roots on his mother’s side and Tyrone on his father’s side, Pat McCay is very proud of his Irish heritage and he said, “whenever possible, I try to support the Calgary Irish community as much as I can.”
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