Farwest Corrosion Control Company

Farwest Corrosion Control Company (Farwest) has been a leading provider of cathodic protection and corrosion solutions to North America’s oil companies, gas companies, power companies, water districts and utilities since 1956. Operating eight branch locations, Farwest provides its clients with the world-class materials, engineering and installation services for complete cathodic protection, applied with integrity, service and quality.

“The company began in Seattle, Wash., and later Los Angeles, which is now our headquarters location,” explains Troy Rankin, president of Farwest. “I’ve been working here at the company for 33 years full-time, and our business model is simply to provide cathodic protection and corrosion preventative equipment and solutions to a number of different industries. Mostly, our work is aimed at protecting underground and underwater metallic structures for the oil and gas industry, as well as water and waste water and energy clients.”

Supplies sold by Farwest include anodes, anode backfill, power supplies, reference electrodes, test stations, cable, instrumentation, inspection equipment, a wide variety of coating solutions, rockshields, isolation products, pipeline casing products and more. Protected structures include pipelines, storage tanks, offshore structures and marine vessels, but we serve a wide range of industries such as oil and gas, the construction industry, water distribution, waste waster, power generation, communications, agriculture and more. Despite widespread use, cathodic protection slips under the general public’s radar. That doesn’t change how integral it is to maintaining imperative infrastructure, however.

“We work for people who have pipe or other metallic structures in the ground or underwater,” states Rankin. “It’s a very specialized business that is much more prevalent than most people realize. The oil and gas market is definitely our largest market and cathodic protection is very prevalent across the country. While not generally seen, cathodic protection systems are critical to maintaining pipeline infrastructure.

Continuing to Expand

In order to support clients across the country Farwest has expanded, now providing nationwide distribution and product sales as well as service offerings. “We have locations across the country, with three here in California,” says Rankin. “We really do three things in our business: we sell products worldwide that we distribute or manufacture and we run two service divisions. We have an engineering division that handles the design and troubleshooting of these systems and we also have a construction department that will actually install cathodic protection systems on site.”
Though the service divisions are concentrated primarily on the West Coast at the present time, Farwest works for clients throughout the country and even abroad.

“One of the most challenging projects we’ve worked on was for the marine industry,” says Rankin. “We had a crew in the Bahamas working for Princess Cruise Lines on the refurbishment of a cruise ship. Our crew was installing a cathodic protection system to the hull of the ship while it was dry docked and out of the water.”

Considering the average lifetime of a cruise ship fleet and the majority of the ships being 141,000-ton behemoths, the job was no small feat. However, Farwest is well equipped to take on complex, large-scale projects because the company holds a comprehensive, top-quality product inventory drawn from nearly 100 suppliers. It also maintains the friendly attitude and commitment to unsurpassed service that comes with being a family-owned and -operated endeavor. The firm has found success through a tried and true method: working only with the best of the best and performing most of the work itself for quality control.

“We rarely subcontract our project work,” asserts Rankin. “When we do, it’s usually for some very specialized requirement. Most of the project work we do is self-performed.”

Defining Quality and Dedication

In order to assure this consistency of service the firm believes in not only recruiting, but also retaining the most skilled and experienced workers in the industry. “One of the most significant issues we face as a company and as an industry is being able to find enough quality employees because the demand for qualified and technically experienced personnel is very high,” says Rankin.

“While there are new people coming into the industry every day, it takes time to become an expert at this kind of specialized work, because there are so many facets of what we do as a company.

Despite challenges in the industry and economy, we maintain an aggressive growth plan. “We were very lucky in our industry not to have felt much of the recession, but as an economy, things don’t seem to be turning around,” laments Rankin. “We are expanding though. We just opened a new branch in Houston, Texas, which is exciting because we haven’t had a branch there for some time. We’ve also now opened a location in the Philadelphia area, so we’re very focused on meeting customer’s needs in a more regional way and in expanding into regions we haven’t been.”

Offering complete cathodic protection through corrosion control products, engineering services, installation and maintenance, Farwest sets standards in its industry. With years of professional experience to build off of and a very resilient industry, Farwest Corrosion Control Company will continue to maintain its solid foundation, business stability and dependability as it provides new and repeat customers.