Serco, Inc.

Serco opened for business in July 1981. It chartered as a Texas Corporation and the founding shareholders were H.P. Johnson, D.W. Williams, and Steve Williams. It began in Borger, TX performing equipment repairs for the local petroleum refining and chemical industry. That service sustained the company for several years as it evolved into a construction company. The first construction jobs were electric conduit and wire jobs at the beef packing houses scattered throughout the Panhandle.

In 1986 we sold the repair business to an employee and Serco began its full time work as a maintenance and construction company. Some of the earliest jobs were energy efficiency projects in refinery and chemical plant settings. Those projects led to work on steam and condensate piping and included insulation and asbestos removal projects. That same year, Mr. Johnson left the company to start his own business. Later in the 80’s both H.P. Johnson and D.W. Williams sold their shares to the sole remaining shareholder Steve Williams and the ownership remains the same today. Through the 1990’s, Serco worked in refineries and natural gas plants repairing steam systems and removing asbestos insulation. The asbestos work was booming during that period and Serco took many asbestos removal jobs in Houston, Odessa, and Kansas. Later in that decade, as the number of those jobs began to ebb, Serco quit the asbestos business but continued with construction and maintenance offerings. The first work was in the beef packing houses but that was followed by work in the petrochem plants.

Beginning in the new century, Serco found its market for construction and maintenance services in the local chemical and gas plants but then expanded to work in similar plants at a distance. Serco has worked at hundreds of locations in the Great Plains. From Duluth to East St. Louis to Corpus to Lyman, we have put workers on the job and done our clients right. We loved the travel and the excitement of working away from home. Even so, the hometown customers, those here in the Texas panhandle, the gas midstream plants, fertilizer plants, and carbon plants were then and have always been faithful clients.

From the beginning, Serco’s greatest interest has been industrial work. A list of notable jobs would include converting a train of ten rotary carbon kilns to off-gas firing which was a huge emissions improvement for a carbon plant. The list would also include ground-up new construction of multi-engine field compressor stations in southwest Kansas, part of a new field build out and some of our largest jobs. It would be an omission not to include the frigid wintertime reconfiguration of yard pipe and valves at one very large Kansas compressor station requiring 128 heavy-wall 24” welds in 14’ deep trenches with howling wind and snow. It would take a long list indeed to include the scores of high-performance, early-finish turnarounds. But the longest list of all would have to be of Serco clients, the very best in the world, to whom Serco owes so much, its very existence.