Our speaker last Wednesday was Colby Crenshaw, President of Tiger Rentals Group which provides products and services to all facets of the energy industry in 25 different countries with headquarters right here in Beaumont. He has expanded the company from industrial cleaning equipment beginning in 1995 to multiple products and services through five energy cycles since then and now has approximately 700 team members. Tiger has three primary areas of business – offshore, industrial and safety.

Mr. Crenshaw started his talk saying how several members of our Rotary club have had an influence on him through mentoring and inviting him to attend informative meetings. Those mentioned were Morris Windham, David Holloman, Pat Parson, Dan Parker, Floyd McSpadden, and Joe Domino.

Mr. Crenshaw indicated that Tiger is basically a service organization with a rental component. He introduced several members of his team in attendance that he named as critical to the business. Of the 702 employees, about 480 are based in the US and 222 are international. The company focuses on its culture of entrepreneurship, execution, customer dedication and candor. He then showed numerous slides of their equipment helping customers in the US, offshore and all over the world. He said they currently have about 35,000 pieces of equipment all over the world. They deal with logistical problems moving equipment and face considerable danger in some areas (animals, pirates, etc.), yet they are always focused on safety and solving problems and saving money for their clients. They also provide blast resistant structures for some of their clients.

He then expressed his views on the economy, specifically in this area. He said that we are in great shape economically in this area. We have many hydrocarbon facilities in the area, and he believes we will need oil and gas for a long time to come. The fact that twenty percent of a barrel of oil is used for gasoline and the rest is used to make other products we use every day, including making electric cars. He said there is a good argument that it will take more diesel fuel to obtain the materials to make electric cars than they will save in gas. It will take time to transition to renewable energy, and in the meantime, we will use a lot of oil and gas to get there. With hundreds of billions of dollars spent on wind and solar in the past few years, we are now up to about four percent of our power being generated by those two sources.

Why does he like this area? We are about to have the first and second largest refineries in the country right here. We have the port, which places eighth in the country in tonnage shipped, ahead of Los Angeles. We have rail and a major freeway. We have great food, and a wide variety of it. We have a world class symphony. And we are close to the coast, two lakes nearby and a river. The bottom line is that he has travelled a lot of places in the world, and he hasn’t found any place better than Southeast Texas that he would rather live.