Cummins Inc. announced the Cummins Oil and Gas Center of Excellence, a business launched to serve the needs of its growing oil and gas customer base. The Houston land-based center is located in a primary hub of engineering and technology for the oil and gas industry, and represents a significant investment by Cummins Inc. The Cummins Offshore Oil and Gas Center of Excellence is located in Singapore, geographically positioned in a global center of oil platform and shipbuilding and the home of related suppliers.
“The Cummins Oil and Gas Center of Excellence allows Cummins to expand our current product offering beyond the broad range of diesel and natural gas engines currently available to customers,” say Tom Linebarger, president and chief operating officer. “What makes our Center of Excellence business model unique is our ability to provide customers with a complete integrated product designed to meet their unique needs.”
Linebarger says that with the aid of Cummins’ 6,600-plus distributors and dealer locations globally, the company is able to support the product around the world. “The centers provide global technical sales support, design, testing and validation and package manufacturing and assembly,” he says. “The final result is an integrated package delivering the superior performance and reliability that Cummins customers have come to expect.”
Both operations will utilize Cummins standard work processes and procedures to perform design and validation testing of integrated equipment. The Houston center will deliver customized packages for the customer, starting with workover rigs capable of operating worldwide, certified to stringent environmental regulations in California and other nonattainment regions. The center also will have the ability to integrate the new QTR Series Transmissions with Cummins’ QSK50 or QSK60 engines. Other products include land-based drilling power modules, hazardous-area packages, pump drive packages and oil field power generator sets. All complete and fully tested customized products will be covered under Cummins warranty, and can be supported by more than 6,600 Cummins distributors and dealers worldwide.
The new Cummins Oil and Gas Center of Excellence will be fully operational at the end of June and will add 50 highly skilled jobs by the end of 2012, with future job growth expected in 2013. The new 70,000-square-foot building sits on six acres of land on the north side of Houston, and features office and meeting spaces, assembly cells, a paint booth and two test cells physically sized for up to a 78-liter engine. The two test cells with AVL instrumentation and testing system are capable of supporting both engineering and production testing and testing of mechanical or electrical drive systems up to 3,500 hp (2610 kWe).
The test facility is capable of conditioning the intake air up to 50 degrees Celsius for high ambient temperature testing, as well as supporting standard 23 degrees Celsius test conditions. All data is stored through a high-speed data acquisition system that ties directly into Cummins global test database.
“Cummins has chosen to locate the Oil and Gas Center of Excellence in Houston because we fully recognize that Houston is a major hub for business and engineering for the oil and gas market,” says Carlos Ayala, General Manager, Center of Excellence Houston. “Because of the importance of the oil and gas business to Houston, there is an excellent source of industry resources. We are also fortunate to expand upon our existing relationship with the University of Houston, allowing us to tap the university’s resources for testing and foster a mentor program between our product engineers and students.”
