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Poisson's Ratio
If not for one fateful phone call, Pierre Crevolin’s (Metallurgical ’70) life would have run a much different course. That was before Poisson’s Ratio. But we’re getting ahead of the story… In 1973, Crevolin’s engineering days seemed to be behind him. A promised job at Celanese had fallen through, and Crevolin had returned to university to become a teacher. He had spent two years teaching classes at his old alma mater, Edmonton’s St. Francis Xavier High School, and he and his wife Sylvia (a graduate of Home Economics ’69) were preparing to head out of town for the holidays. Then the phone rang. It was Darwin Hawn (Metallurgical ’70) who called to say that Caproco Corrosion Prevention was looking to hire an engineer for a summer job. Crevolin took the job and, at the end of the summer, was offered a permanent position. He reluctantly decided to leave his teaching career behind. It was a wise move. With Caproco, Crevolin travelled to places like Iran and Kuwait before heading into the management stream. He helped restructure departments and, by 1979, was named the company’s Canadian manager—a huge responsibility, considering that 90 percent of business came from this country. In 1984, Crevolin and four co-workers left Caproco to form their own company, United Corrosion Consultants Ltd (UCCL). It would be the start of a 15-year run of building, buying, diversifying, and selling companies. UCCL grew quickly to 30 employees during its initial year, performing cathodic protection services mainly in the oil and gas industry. In early 1985 the firm diversified into a pipeline business and purchased SureLok Coupling Inc., a company that had developed a mechanized method of joining internally coated steel pipe used in saltwater injection systems in oil production. By late 1985, UCCL had a staff of around 70. The company’s ownership had grown to 20 key employees, most of who stayed with United through the years and whose investments would eventually pay handsome returns. Then, in 1986, Crevolin and his colleagues came up with an invention that changed the corrosion industry. They created a tight-fitting high-density polyethylene liner for steel pipelines, to pre-vent the extreme corrosion caused by saltwater when the pipe is put in the ground. One of the major shareholders, Dale Kneller, conceived the idea of using the “elastic band” approach to inserting a plastic liner into a steel pipeline. Crevolin recalled a mechanical engineering class given by Dr. George Ford (Civil ’42,MSc Civil ’46, DSc [Hon] ’88) in 1968, when the instructor introduced Poisson’s Ratio. “When a cylinder is elongated, the diameter gets smaller,” says Crevolin. “It was such a simple concept, and I remember the day I sat in class and Dr. George Ford told us about it. We used that simple principle to build our liner and it ended up becoming the strength of a separate corporation we spun off from UCCL, called United Pipeline Systems Inc. (UPSI). “UPSI was the first to develop a one-step process that was quick and efficient and technically, the best solution out there.” The industry responded. UPSI soon took 90 percent of the market share—all thanks to Poisson’s Ratio. UPSI became known as the world leader, and its product was not only attractive to clients, but to other companies as well. Insituform Mid-America, a St. Louis-based operation looking to expand to the oil field industry, looked all over the world and found United Pipeline Systems’ liner to be the best. Insituform ended up purchasing UPSI in 1991, and today boasts that United Pipeline has constructed and internally lined more than 10,000 kilometres of pipelines on five continents. So, after all this, Crevolin and the other owners were left with the original cathodic protection company, United Corrosion Consultants Ltd. (UCCL), which, in turn, had purchased CSI Coating Systems Inc., a company that preformed protective coating services to tanks and pipelines in the oil and gas industries. But the exchange in ownership didn’t end there. In 1994, Corrpro Canada, an Alberta-based subsidiary of a public company that traded on the NYSE, Corrpro Companies Inc., bought United Corrosion Consultants Ltd., including CSI, almost ten years to the day after UCCL was incorporated. But, after three months, Corrpro decided it wasn’t interested in the coating business, so Crevolin bought CSI back. Immediately bringing in four partners, Crevolin was back in business. And as usual, he advanced the industry again. CSI developed a quality assurance program to document his company’s philosophy and operating procedures, and the program continues to guide every CSI project. “The system we developed was quite unique, and it was through that and a lot of hard work that we built up our business,” says Crevolin. “We decided CSI had to concentrate on doing business in a different manner. We incorporated stringent quality assurance programs and employee bonus programs, rewarding all employees for increased customer satisfaction. We believed that no matter how big or small a project, or whether the job was in the middle of winter, we could tackle it.” That philosophy worked. CSI started turning increasing profits and attracted the attention of Corrpro Canada (yes, again). So, after many months of negotiations, Crevolin and his partners sold CSI to Corrpro in 1999. Crevolin stayed on with a three-year management contract, and finally left in 2002. At the time he officially retired, but he remains as busy as ever.  In 2003, Crevolin was elected president of NACE International, a Houston-based16,000-member engineering/technical society, becoming only the fifth Canadian to hold the post since its inception in 1943. Crevolin knew NACE well. He first started volunteering with the organization more than 25 years earlier in the Edmonton section, a strategic move that would pay off along the way. “In the mid-1970’s, as a rookie in my 20s, I organized NACE education courses for people to attend. “I met every single new person coming into the industry, and a lot of them would end up being customers. The payback might not have been direct but, because I met everybody in Canada in the industry, it definitely had its indirect benefits that couldn’t be measured.” Crevolin’s involvement in NACE went from local, to national, to international, before he finally ended up as president. If he didn’t know the answer to a problem, he could easily find someone who did. “That helped establish a technical credibility, and I and our companies got so much back from the experience.” Once his post as NACE president ended in 2004, Crevolin stayed connected. He remains on the board of the NACE Foundation, which raises funds and develops programs to increase the profile of corrosion control with high school and post-secondary educational institutions. And, just as he did when he developed his innovative pipe liner, Crevolin credits his success to the common sense engineering principles he learned at UofA Engineering. “We used an engineering approach to the ‘business of business’ and would develop different ways of doing things in the shop and inthe field that made us stand out,” says Crevolin, whose two sons, Jeff (Mechanical’96) and Patrick (Materials ’02), are both engineers. “We had a really analytical approach to evaluating what we were doing and, if we and other shops would offer a similar service, we would figure out a more efficient way to do it.” (Crevolin credits his wife for his success and that of his sons.) Crevolin’s short stint as a teacher also helped prepare him for the business world. It taught him public speaking, thinking on his feet, and team building—personal training you might not receive with a technical degree. “That’s why I migrated to the managerial side in business. With high school kids you can’t lead by an iron fist. You have to get your students, just like clients in business, to buy into what you are selling.” Still, he might never have put those business skills to work, if not for that one fateful phone call.“If that friend had not called in the summer of 1973, I would have retired as a teacher and missed out on a fortuitous career. It’s funny how things work out.” Phoebe Dey is an Edmonton-based freelance writer.
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Fall 2006
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