HDPE Poised To Handle "The Oil of the 21st Century"

Drew Wilson

Barnsdall, OK — 97-year-old Arthur Moore peers down into an open ditch to inspect a new 2-inch polyethylene water line for his 136-tap rural water district in Northeastern Oklahoma. He shuffles his boots as he goes and the white hair and unhurried movements seem out of place on a construction site. Nevertheless, Moore is up to the job and it is fitting that he is the inspector of the pipeline because in many aspects, it is his water district. He was the visionary who started the water company eons ago which has the bragging rights of being the first rural water district in Osage County Oklahoma and the second for the entire state. He is still a member of the water board, which holds its monthly meetings in his living room where he has lobbied for the past several years for the use of high-density polyethylene (HDPE) pipe for the district's much needed infrastructure rehabilitation. They're finally taking the old man's advice.

"We need to look down the road past the end of our nose into the future," says Moore while wearing an irony-laced grin. He bends over and gives a sharp whack to the pipe with the end of his walking stick and says, "It's the best pipe we could put in the ground because we'll never have to come back and fix it."

From small rural water districts to giant municipalities like Houston and Los Angeles, HDPE is finding its way into water systems and proving to be a piping material with benefits that can no longer be ignored. State and Federal Governments are also getting into the act with their own HDPE pilot projects and everyone using the pipe has a few common goals driving their efforts – conservation of water through elimination of leaks, reduction of maintenance costs over a long-life expectancy, and upfront savings on installation.

The material's use for water applications has been climbing over the past several years but rose sharply in 2004 when sales of HDPE water pipe over 3-inches in diameter jumped 54% above 2003 figures. It is a trend that many in the water business say is here to stay and the entire polyethylene industry is ramping up to serve the impending boon.

One industry indicator of HDPE's growth in water is the new manual being published by the AWWA. It is due out in the fall of 2005 and intended to help civil engineers design polyethylene water systems. Another is the number of independent polyethylene pipe manufacturers popping up across the country along with HDPE pipe distributors who are expanding by adding stocking and sales locations. These expansions are more prevalent in areas where the tough groundwork of getting municipalities to try HDPE in a pilot project has already been done. A further sign of polyethylene's market growth is that McElroy Manufacturing, the leading manufacturer of polyethylene pipe fusion equipment, is in the process of doubling the size of its manufacturing facility following several years of record sales that they believe in large part is coming from the water industry.

"We've been expecting this polyethylene spike in the water industry for many years," said Dave Dutton, Vice President of Business Development for McElroy. Dutton, an engineer with a 36-year history with McElroy, was very much involved in the missionary work that brought the benefits of polyethylene to the gas industry in the early 1970's. In those days he piled into a panel van with a small fusion machine and traveled across the country giving dog-and-pony shows to gas companies. The routine was the same in each location – show people how easy it was to butt fuse polyethylene pipe. "It just made a hell of a lot of sense to the gas industry that since PE didn't leak, it was the best pipe to use," says Dutton. "Those same material characteristics are making the water industry take notice and we're expanding our facility because we're going to be prepared to serve it."

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