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Bloomberg
President Donald Trump’s “America First†approach to energy doesn’t scare Paolo Rocca. The billionaire steel tycoon who controls Tenaris SA, the world’s largest maker of seamless-steel pipes for the energy industry, expects the creation of American jobs at his $2.3 billion plant in Texas will allow his company to continue to import certain types of pipes into the US. The pipe-making plant is due to open this fall in Bay City to serve the shale wells.
Rocca is joining an array of investors and oil industry giants racing to get a piece of the action amid a resurgence of shale drilling in the US, like real-estate mogul Sam Zell and oil major Exxon Mobil Corp. His engineering, steel and energy conglomerate is also investing $2.3 billion in Argentina’s Vaca Muerta shale formation to drill 150 wells in the world’s second-biggest reserves of shale gas and fourth-biggest of shale oil. Rocca said his team has received encouraging feedback from the Trump administration, and that the president’s bottom line is jobs, with the new plant creating 600 positions. And it doesn’t hurt that a member of the Trump cabinet, Energy Secretary Rick Perry, championed Tenaris’ investment decision when he was governor of the Lone Star State.