Powering industry: inside Alaska's oil & gas support services.

• Author: Swann, Kirsten
• Position: SPECIAL SECTION: Oil & Gas

Alaska's multibillion-dollar oil and gas industry involves much more than just the massive drilling rigs or pipelines so often pictured.

Those familiar symbols of natural resource development are propped up by a wide array of support services, from fuel transport to diving and salvage to metal fabrication and welding. The companies that provide those services brave everything from subzero temperatures and long, dark days on the North Slope to Cook Inlet's strong tides and black water.

Support services make up a diverse sector of Alaska's oil and gas economy. There are large corporations and small, family owned businesses with deep ties to the industry.

Metal Magic

On the Kenai Peninsula, Metal Magic has been providing quality fabricating and welding work for oilfield projects for nearly thirty years. The company's worked with everything from HVAC ducting, heat exchangers, helicons, and fan shrouds to stainless flare nozzles and tanks, pipe coils, winch guards, walkways skids, and wind walls. There have been fuel tanks and structural columns and concrete forms.

Owner and founder Scott Hamann took the business from a one-man shop to a multimillion-dollar company, and he says it all comes down to relationships and getting the job done right.

"I'm a little bit of a niche business," Hamann says. "I believe in equipment, and I have equipment that nobody else has." Hamann's Kenai shop is home to a 300-ton press break, a 100-ton iron worker, and a 350-ton punch press-- among various other metalworking machinery. There are angle rolls and plate rolls, pipe copers, mag drills, nibblers, and a mandrel bender.

A 200 amp plasma CNC cutting machine, added to Metal Magic's arsenal just last year, allows the shop to cut 2.5 inch steel. It's one of the most sophisticated setups in the state, Hamann says.

The variety of equipment gives Metal Magic the ability to perform an array of jobs serving Alaska's oil and gas industry. In early March, his shop was working on a boom-stick for an excavator working for an oilfield service company and modifying a trailer for Hilcorp, among other projects. The company can bend and manipulate metal in ways few other Alaska shops can.

"I have a real reputation in the industry for doing, sometimes, the impossible," Hamann says.

Metal Magic is a small company--employing anywhere from eight to around fourteen people--but the shop's owner says that's one of its biggest strengths. Hamann says the small size gives him the ability to keep a close eye on the quality of the work his company performs. Combined with the shop's diversity of equipment, the small size gives the business a valuable level of versatility.

"That's really the thing with us that we do differently than everyone else," Hamann says. "It's small enough that we can react pretty fast to people's needs."

A lot has changed in the industry since Hamann first opened up shop nearly thirty years ago. He says he still remembers every stage of the operation--beginning with work on his uncle's boat.

These days, Metal Magic fabricates parts and pieces for some of the state's most prominent oil and gas companies and can bring in $3 million on a good year, Hamann says. They've made skis for North Slope exploration companies and done cutwork...