Company growing by keeping plants going
April 23, 2025
They searched all over the Houston area for a site to locate their ever-expanding business and Atlas Copco Power Technique found it at Cedar Port.
“We were in a 14,000-square foot building and growing rapidly,” Ben Morello, Service Operations & Remanufacturing Manager, said. “We were looking for something we could grow in. We had outgrown our old facility in a year and a half.”
Officials and workers with Power Technique North America LLC, a business unit of Atlas Copco Group in the United States, opened the new 50,000 square-foot service center in Baytown last week.
The new facility is located at Cedar Port Park, Building 2, 4323 Oscar Nelson Jr. Dr. It was designed with service operations in mind and is strategically located to support the company’s field-based service operations across Texas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana.
The 23 employees now housed in Baytown work with contractors who toil inside area refineries and chemical plants, repairing the contractors’ equipment to get it back up and running.
“We service generators, compressors, pumps and light towers,” Morello said.
Service Manager Ozzie Rodriguez led a short tour of the building.
“If it (equipment) goes down, if it’s something they can’t figure out themselves or it’s under warranty, they bring it here to our service center,” Rodriguez said. “Or we actually go out there and service the equipment onsite.”
The new service center, the largest of the company’s five North American service centers, once was a logistics warehouse.
“This was an empty shell,’ Rodriguez said. “We had the office area built, which is about 4,000 square feet. We have a dedicated storage area, which is about 3,000 square feet with 25-foot high racks. In our last place, we didn’t have much space so that was a big improvement.”
The workspace includes 16 total bays, where 13 technicians work, four of whom are also field technicians for when the jobs can’t come to them.
There are five overhead cranes to ensure that equipment of all sizes can be serviced. All products in the portfolio will be supported from this location, including compressors, pumps, generators, and light towers.
Atlas Copco Group is a 150-year-old company with 55,000 employees worldwide. It was founded in 1873 and is headquartered in Stockholm. It has production facilities in Cologne, Germany, and Shanghai, China, as well as application centers in the US and India. And it is divided into a number of divisions, each with their own focus, expertise and application knowledge.“This new facility is testament to our commitment to have field and service operations that are strategically located close to our customers,” Wouter Vlamynck, general manager at Atlas Copco Power Technique North America, said.
“We have a large presence and footprint within Texas, and this new facility will take our service and technical support capabilities to the next level.”
Company officials making the trip to Baytown for the grand opening included President Stefaan Vertriest and Andrew Walker, Business Area President for the Power Technique division. Among those coming from North American headquarters in Rock Hill, South Carolina, was Clayton Jones, a Baytown native and Sterling High grad who is Vice President of Service Operations.
Both Morello and Rodriguez highlighted a newer product of the company, a hybrid electric and gas generator dubbed Energy Storage Solutions.
“They’re large lithium battery packs and we marry them to our generators. The idea is less fuel burned on the generator,” Morello explained. “The generator will charge the battery and the battery will provide power for the generator.”