Join us as we dive into the world of large diameter HDPE pipe and discover how this innovative piping material is revolutionizing infrastructure projects around the globe. We explore the benefits of using HDPE pipe, including its durability, flexibility, and cost-effectiveness, and hear from ISCO expert Mike James on the current state and future advancements in HDPE technology. We'll also discuss real-world examples of HDPE pipe being used in large-scale projects, such as the Steinaker Canal in Utah. Tune in to learn how HDPE pipe is helping to build a more sustainable and resilient world.
Join us as we dive into the world of large diameter HDPE pipe and discover how this innovative piping material is revolutionizing infrastructure projects around the globe. We explore the benefits of using HDPE pipe, including its durability, flexibility, and cost-effectiveness, and hear from ISCO expert Mike James on the current state and future advancements in HDPE technology. We'll also discuss real-world examples of HDPE pipe being used in large-scale projects, such as the Steinaker Canal in Utah. Tune in to learn how HDPE pipe is helping to build a more sustainable and resilient world.
Welcome to ISCO Insights, the podcast. My name is Sean Moth. Great to have you along, as always. Thrilled to be joined by Mike James, vice president of Business Development and Sales at Isco. We're going to talk large diameter pipe. We're thinking Big Mike. I know you're about as busy as they get in the business. We really appreciate your time. Thanks for having me. Glad to be here. Give me a little background on how long you've been in ISCO and what you were what you've been doing here. Well, I've been at ISCO for about 16 years in lots of different roles at ISCO, mainly in the West, but also some international work and in really business development all over the country. Been in the industry for about 30 years and just have lots of different experiences in the industry, which I love. The definition of large pipe has become a little bit of a moving target. I'm sure as you got into the industry, I'm thinking maybe 36 was large pipe, but at least from an FDP standpoint, where does that target standing now? Because I've I've heard some different views, but but tell me about the evolution of large diameter HDPE pipe. Yeah, you're exactly right. I remember being a young guy in the industry and buying our first 36 inch fusion machine, and I think it was like a $100,000 machine. And it was a big deal. Like, Wow, this is big pipe, big machine. So on over the years, it's gravitated up to a 48 inch machine and bigger pipe, and then you get into the 54 or 65 inch range, which is kind of where we've been for a long time. And we stalled out in the U.S. or North American market kind of in that 6365 inch range until recently. And now pipe is much bigger than that. And in my job luckily is in the business development side, being able to travel the world and work on really cool projects all over the world. I've been exposed to some really cool opportunities where pipe is bigger. So as an example, you go to the Middle East or you go to Asia or you go even to Australia and New Zealand, they're making pipe and have been up to 2000. MM And today it's even larger, you know 3000. Mm. Or 3500. Mm. 4000 millimeter diameter pipe that can actually be fuzed and welded is available in other markets today. So that's, that's kind of where it's evolved over the last 30 years. It started Yeah. 36 inch and today's much, much. Bigger and I understand as it's evolved to that now the evolution continues with wall thickness and and how that impacts the size of the pipe and its, its sustainability in terms of its structure. And that's changing and evolving as we speak. Yeah. So the diameter is, of course have gotten bigger, The fusion equipment is, is bigger, but also the resin advancement is much better. So we've gone through two or three different generations of resin and we will continue to improve on the resin side of things, which does a couple of things. It helps you with the pressure reading capability. It helps the extruders to extrude much thicker or heavier wall pipe. You know, when you get into larger diameters like we're talking about, to maintain the same pressure rating or DR class, your pipe wall thicknesses get really thick, so you have to be able to first of all extrude that and make sure that the pipe stays round and in shape that you want. And you also have to make fittings out of it as well. So maintaining those wall thicknesses and the pressure ratings that's gotten better as well. Obviously large diameter in other forms. Some of the legacy systems has been around a little bit. And while it feels new to people, you touched on the Middle East and overseas, I mean, it's not new in Europe in some of those other countries. It's something they've been doing for a while. Domestically, it was a little difficult to get it over here. But now that it's being produced domestically, it's my understanding that's kind of what's revolutionized the movement toward the big pipe here in the U.S.. Is that an accurate assessment? It is, yes. A big pipe has been around for a long time. It's just in HDPE or the polyethylene world. You know, we're we're a little bit behind on that, but we're catching up quickly. So as a materials, you know, whether it's steel pipe or concrete or fiberglass or ductile iron, you know, some of those pipes have been around for a while. But but today we have the capability of of of in big pipe or mega pipe, you know, kind of meeting some of the same requirements. So when we talk about HDPE as opposed to some of these other systems and piping systems, the advantages of large diameter really reflect the same advantages that two inch, eight inch, 36 inch do in terms of you're still leak free, you know, you still working with fusion, you don't have the the joint thing. It's still got the flexibility, the responsiveness to seismic activity. You know, the list kind of goes on and on. Are there other benefits for large diameter that maybe are a little bit different than the smaller diameter? Yeah, I think there's it depends on the type of project you're working on, but all of the things you just hit on are the same key benefits just in much bigger diameters. We do a lot with large pipe in the offshore side of things as well. So on land you can do it. But offshore or we have such advantages to be able to, to pull water in for a power plant or an effluent line maybe offshore or even some of the really cool stuff that we're doing today for offshore wind and diesel plants and things like that. Our pipes offer so many advantages over conventional pipes and the longevity of our system. And we don't know, we say 50 years, we say 100 years, but in some of those applications, heck, we might be around way longer than you and I are around. And that's a good thing. I kind of sense that to be the case. I think the one I didn't touch on is the corrosion and regulation, which I know is a a big point with the ductal iron And that and that does a huge advantage is there's just it's almost an ambivalent reaction to everything around it and everything inside of it, which has to be a huge advantage. It is one of our biggest advantages in and I think as an industry promoting that and educating our customers on the fact that we can offer these diameters and all of those same advantages, you have a corrosion resistant leak free system that's going to be around for a very, very long time maintenance free if you're a if you're a taxpayer or you're an owner of a project, those are really, really big benefits. You're not having to replace this pipe. You know, I'll give you an example. We did a job in California a few years ago for an almond farm, and it was really good experience for me when I went out to that job site and talking to the owners of that job, the steel pipe that they had in the ground, it was like 14 years old and it had leaks and things in it already at 14 years old, this was a private, big farm, but a private owner. And I know the pipe that we put in the ground now is going to be there, you know, for 100 years, and they're not going to have any issues. So that's important. It's a perfect segue way. I want to talk about markets, and I know that irrigation and canal replacement is is maybe at the forefront, especially out west, where the humidity levels are low, the ground is dry, there's a lot of seepage problems. You referring to Baker Farms and Firebaugh, California, That was two and a half miles of 54 inch or 17 HDPE pipe with multiple sidewall connections. And I don't know that it was revolutionary in terms of the job, but I know some of the fusion equipment and the size kind of open semis as that project came to fruition. Yeah, that was a fun project. It was our very first project that we brought the McElroy Talon Machine out, which is their biggest fusion machine first job to get on that site. And it was a great experience. Along with that, the outlets that that the farm needed, the sidewall outlets, you know, conventionally you would have to do that in, you know have to well that in the field or cut out a very large excavation to put a T in, we were able to take some of our custom equipment and actually do sidewall fusions in the field in a much smaller footprint at a much less cost of performing that work. And it was just a really good job to do to showcase all of our expertise. So Mike James is our guest from ISCO the VP of Business Development and Sales. We're going to hit cost effectiveness and sustain ability at every turn and we'll kind of save it for the end to maybe specifically focus on it. But you can't help but talk about those two, I guess I want to call them buzzwords, but they're really not. I mean, everybody cares about money and everybody cares about sustainability. We talk about money. Steinaker Reservoir in Vernal, Utah, the Uinta system there, they had a 12 mile canal, open water canal. They were losing 25% of their water annually. And I think if you think of water out west, maybe it's different in other parts of the U.S. or the world. But I mean, water is money with the drought that's been hitting everybody out west, you guys installed 78 inch HDP, which was the largest diameter HDP, high pressure water pipe in U.S. history. It's it's a work in progress because as they can get financially in a position to continue to do that, they will. But another groundbreaking performance utilizing the talent. I know the technology was involved as well, but kind of a trend there with that canal conversion because you are giving back basically 25% of their profits, so to speak. Yeah, it's it's pretty amazing. You know, I live in Arizona, right? So, sure, we're pretty dry climate, of course, but really any of the Western states are in need of this. And what most people don't realize is, you know, a lot of our drinking water, for instance, my drinking water in Tucson, Arizona. So it comes from a long ways away. It goes from the mountains in Colorado. Yeah, it makes its way all the way down the Colorado River in an open canal, you know, to Phenix and down to Tucson. And so the seepage that you're talking about that goes into the ground or the evaporation, both, plus, you know, the other things like you have an open canal that's dangerous for those things, for animals, for people and so forth. And can contamination when you can put that in a pipe and eliminate all of those factors, that is huge. So if I'm the owner of an irrigation district, the one of the most precious commodities that we have today is water, especially in the west, there's water wars going on in California. There's billionaires buying up land. So they have their water rights, right? It's it's it's the gold rush in the current climate that we're in right now. So losing water to seepage or evaporation, you know, you don't need to do it. Let's put it in a pipe and and save that water. It's precious for us. Yeah. And it's funny, the Baker Farms and the Steininger project both could probably be a podcast on their own because you mentioned, you know, obviously the savings that they had a better way of, of gauging water usage on the, on the, the offsets from that from that irrigation system then they're able to to bury the line couldn't put grass over the top. It was low impact because it was going through neighborhoods, it was going through farms and that it there's more information on this website about that Steinberger project. It really is a fascinating one. But the irrigation canal replacement definitely has a high presence with large pipe. Another is the sewer and wastewater. And I know there's a project up British Columbia that was pretty remarkable. It was afloat and sink 88 inch HDPE I think that's still the largest solid wall HDPE outfall in North America. And it gave Isco another opportunity to kind of pioneer because I think that was about a mile offshore and maybe explain explain a little bit about that project and maybe get into the float and sink aspect and and what that variable is. Yeah, that's a good example. Our Canadian team has done a great job of promoting a large diameter pipe up there, and this was a wastewater to an offshore outfall line. And what most people don't realize is there's there's a ton of these around or in lakes or around the coasts. You just don't see them. So they're kind of out of sight, out of mind. But when you flush the toilet or you put something down the drain, it has to go to a wastewater treatment plant. And then they they get rid of that water somewhere, right? A lot of it goes back into our bodies of water in this. This is a good example. This is a wastewater out shore outfall line using HDPE So fused joints, Lille. And what what we do is we work with marine contractors and they'll take that pipe and put concrete weights on it and take it offshore and seek it down at the bottom of of a lake or a reservoir or the ocean in some cases. And and in those cases, Mike, correct me if I'm wrong, but you're almost eliminating any other type of piping. HDPE is unique in its quality that you can weld on site, floated and then sink it, you know, can't be done with anything else. Well, you can you could do it with maybe some other materials like steel pipe and fiberglass, but there's definitely some advantages with the toughness and the flexibility of HDPE being able to weld that up onshore and pull it out into a body of water and then go through the thinking process. There's some definite advantages of using. HTP, no question. I know we spoke a while back about the uses of large diameter pipe and mining and those advances and I think you mentioned South America in particular. There were some some projects there. Maybe you could expand upon that a little bit. Yeah, I'd love to. Yeah. The mining industry is an industry. I grew up in Arizona, where the copper. Copper is. Yeah, that's a big it's a big deal. And I kind of cut my teeth in in the mining industry. The mining industry uses our pipe and has for a long time in the most toughest, most like corrosion applications you can think of to mine copper, you need sulfuric acid in copper. So you're, you're putting your pipe in a pretty tough application to mine gold. They use cyanide. Well, people don't know that. I did not. And you know, we're in this sustainable world. We're in to electric cars. We're into all kinds of things like that these days that all needs copper. You need gold, you need lithium. And the mining industry for us is very important. So in the mining applications, there's there's corrosion issues, there's tailings, and where issues they use a lot of HDPE and they have for a long time. So the job we're talking about down in down in Chile, one of my favorite places to go, the people are fantastic down there and it's a great place to do business. The world's largest copper mine is called Escondida and it's in the heart of Chile in the Atacama Desert and a really high elevation, massive copper mine. It's unbelievably big. The tailings pond for that mine is it's unbelievable. I mean, I can't explain how big it is, but I look out at this tailings pond and it just goes for miles and miles and miles. So they use large diameter HDPE pipe for their tailings application. And the job we did with them about a year and a half ago was the first job in South America where we sent the Talon down to weld up this pipe. And it was a perfect application. I knew it was where you could take and stretch out the pipe, weld it all up and just build this giant tailings tailings pipeline out there. That's a really cool job. I'm sure many more applications in the mining industry, desalinization. We said sustainable sustainability was going to be a talking point and I know that there's a lot of diesel work, especially in California. I know there's some coastal work that that's being done with large diameter, but it feels like that's one of those that we're going to look at the growth rate from now to 20, 25 years from now. And it's just going to be a steady climb upward. Yeah, kind of going back to the west again, we need water. Right. So how do you get water right if we don't have it? How do you get it? You can pull it through a diesel plant. Now. It's very expensive to do that. diesel water is expensive. It's used in lots of areas around the world, not as much in the U.S. for a lot of reasons. But we did have the largest diesel plant in the Western Hemisphere built in Carlsbad, California. Beautiful area, but nobody really wants it in their backyard. But we need water. Yeah, there's a giant plant that was built in in Carlsbad, and we were able to supply some large diameter pipe for the intake line for that diesel plant. Sure. And when I was traveling around the world in the Middle East, a lot, there's diesel plants all over. They need it. So they're used to using it there. Historically, they would use fiberglass pipe or maybe steel pipe. Today they're using HDPE, just like we did in Carlsbad. So it was a good win for us and it was a great job to to get some poly pipe out on the, on the island itself. Yeah. To desalinate you have to have saltwater come through and I'm sure that the pipe isn't always happy to have that, that saline coming through it municipally as somebody that's a little bit new to this, especially compared to someone like you, it feels like I don't want to badmouth people, but there's kind of a stubborn quality to some of the legacy piping systems. And I know that Duluth, Minnesota, is a case study that we've looked at where water mains left and right that were made of Dr. Lyon, 20, 25 years old, are failing. And and to be able to replace those with HDPE gives them the solution for 100 years or more. Like you pointed out, it's not going to have any leaks, as we pointed out, leak free. What is the future for municipal systems and FDP? Because they're large undertakings, obviously, but they're also going to require large diameter pipe and it feels like another market that the smart money is to head that direction, even though it may cause some headaches and may well, we haven't done it that way in the past, but it seems like the right move. Yeah, it is right move. There's there's a lot of work to be done, though. Yeah. As an industry, our job is to go out and educate and continue to educate the challenges that we face with a legacy municipality is you've got people in there that have just done it that way for so long and it's they're in their comfort zone and they have crews and maintenance people set up to do it the same way. They don't really want to change. So change is our biggest challenge when what we see now, though, is as new people enter into a municipality, a new engineer, or a young up and comer that's maybe taking a leadership role, they're open to new ideas. And so when we continue to educate and show them the advantages of HTP, a leak proof system, the longevity, the corrosion, resistance, all of those things are huge benefits. We just we have to educate them though, on all of the maintenance side of things and how to install it. And it's different. But once they adapt to it, it's a game changer. So there's a lot to do. There's a lot of work to be done there, and we have to do that as an industry, not just disco. Sure, our entire industry has to continue to do that. Yeah, the two things I'll say about that, one, we used to put water through hollowed out elm and cypress trees, so we have moved on and it's worked and you know, it is one of those situations too, where if I'm a politician trying to save my taxpayers money, that always seems like a really good marriage. When you can help save money. And this is obviously a money saving move, whether the cost is similar, different or otherwise, you're talking about installing a new ductile iron or PVC system three or four or five times in addition to repairs over the course of the life of one HDP system. Yeah, goes back to the education part of, you know, the things the things that that sometimes drives me crazy. But we're continue to educate you know they use our pipe in in a lot of municipal applications like for directional drilling or for pipe bursting or trench lists, technology ways of installing it. They'll use it, you know, for that. And then they transition back to the conventional pipes once once they do that. But as long as we continue to educate and you're right, the politicians need to know it, we're the taxpayers, right? They should be open to new ideas. Our job is to continue to educate and show them the advantage. That's what we're here for. Couple more applications. We've talked about hydroelectric and the I think we go back to Central America, if I'm not mistaken, but taking water in the mountains and having it go down an incline and creating power into a turbine and obviously large diameter comes into play there, maybe talk a little bit about hydroelectric and then I think there's some some thermal energy conversion that you're doing in the ocean as well. Yeah. Yeah. There's some fun projects. The the first hydro electric, small hydro will define this because there's big hydro that we're our pipes probably can't be used today, but small hydro or mini hydro, there's some great applications where our pipe can be used either on the entire pipeline or even a portion of it. So this job in Guatemala, that Challenger project that we worked on in Guatemala, was the first job to use HDPE Pipe for a small hydro project and they collected the water out of the mountains. It was a private farm and Guatemala needed more power to the grid. So they were encouraging people to build small hydro. They were able to use our pipe to collect all of this water, bring it to a really large diameter tank, and then from the tank they were able to put it into a pen stock line which would go down and spin the turbine and create power and send it to the grid. And so it was kind of a hybrid project where HDPE was used on the collection lines. And then steel pipe for higher pressure readings was used on the pen stock line. So it was a win win, in my opinion. Sure. And the owner of the project got all of the benefits of HDPE on this really cool, curvy, mountainous terrain. I remember walking down the job with him and about halfway through as we're going around these mountains and curves and up and down and everything else, he's like, Mike, you keep telling me that we don't need elbows in all of these locations. I go, Rudolph, you don't, and you're going to need a few, but you don't need as many as you're used to. Yeah, He's like, It's unbelievable because we're used to putting in steel elbows with every change of direction that we have, and that's very expensive and very costly. You have to restrain it, you have to welded, you have to protect it. And that's where it leaks. And we we had a few elbows on that job, but boy, we eliminated a ton of them. And he was able to use our pipe and just curve around all these mountain terrains and and install a really cool system was one of the funnest jobs I've worked on in my life. And it was because we were adding value. I felt really proud when we got done with that job that we're adding some real value from that job. We were able to do two or three more other projects that we're continuing to do more down there. So it was a win for us. Sure. And I may have this wrong, but ocean thermal energy conversion, taking seawater, creating power with power plants near large bodies of water offshore, I think you called it Otec. Otec is just another large pipe application that's maybe going to boom down the road. Yeah, there's there's potential for it for sure. It's a it's a really it's a really unique opportunity for us to provide some pipe for, for ocean thermal energy. Or there's another thing called SWAC sea water, air conditioning where you can use our, our pipe. And really what you're doing is you're taking the cool or cold seawater down at a lower depth. You're bringing it up into a warmer, a warmer body of water. And through the otec process, they can actually generate power with it, which is really cool to clean. It's expensive to do right now. It's challenging, but I can see in the future that that's going to be a way for some power to be made for maybe some remote applications. I think our U.S. military's looking at it as well. It's not new. It's been around for a long time. But the advancements with HDPE today are are allowing them to consider this in some applications, just like sea water. Air conditioning would be as well. If you could talk a little bit about pressure ratings and the capabilities there too. I know that there are many cases, especially when we talk about some of our like our spiral light, which I know has a large diameter and slip lining where you can replace a bigger pipe with a smaller HTP pipe. And because of that, the smooth walls on the inside, the flow rates are higher. You can get away with smaller pipe for what you do usually would be a bigger job. But in terms of pressure ratings in those capabilities, how does the large diameter compare? Yeah, it's still it's a it's a ratio of wall thickness and what we can handle. But again, as I said earlier, as the resin advances and the resin gets better and the wall thicknesses, if we can maintain them on the extrusion process, we're able to to maintain pressure ratings today on large diameter pipe that we would have never been able to do, you know, 20 years ago. So that opens up opportunities for us not only on pressure but also on temperature as well. You know, if we can if we can maintain pressure at an even a little elevated temperature, that helps as well. So it all goes back to the capabilities of HTP today that will continue to get better every single year. Fascinating fittings. You mentioned it a little bit earlier. Being able to fabricate and create fittings is not unique to small diameter. It's you have all the same capabilities basically with large pipe. It's just obviously on a bigger scale. It's on a much bigger scale. And I think, you know, making pipe is one portion of it. You know, being able to extrude large diameter pipe, it takes a lot of space, takes a lot of room, There's a lot of capital investment. The same thing goes with fittings, right? You have to have the capability of of manufacturing the fittings. And that's really where Isco steps in. We're really good at that. We have great fabrication shops, we have great technology. Well, I think we're leading leading the charge on that. But also it's a big capital outlay as well. So you have to have the equipment to come in to be able to fabricate. So they need to be married together along with the fusion equipment. Right. So you need all three of those to be able to do a complete system. You're so good at Segways. That was the next subject I have because one thing I'm amazed that with this go is it's not about solving a problem with pipe, it's about solving a problem with a solution. And it's all inclusive from what the folks do with the CAD drawings to helping you decide how much you need, what you need, what fittings you need, where they need to be fabricated, where they're delivered and with that is the fusion we brag on. Leak free, leak free. Now we said it with an asterisk. There are companies that can handle HTP if the fusion is not done right, it's not leak free. That's the caveat. It has to be done correctly. It is go certified with McElroy and the great relationship we have with them and their fusion equipment. Our staff comes in and certifies people to perform the fusion or performs it for them or with them or both. Talk a little bit about that, that fusion and fitting relationship of how it how it marries and how valuable that is to a client, to an engineer or to a customer or to an owner. Well, one of our taglines is we're a total piping solutions provider right now. So we had clients in yesterday and the cool thing was I took them out to a river port of our fabrication shop here, and their perception of us coming into the visit and leaving the visit was totally different. As I spoke to to our client yesterday, the president of us of this company, when he left our fab shop, he had he had changed his view of us like 180 degrees. He thought that we were just a pipe distribution. Yeah, he came out of it going, Wow, you guys have great capability. So bringing all three of those components together to be a total piping solutions provider is really what we do. So it's the pipe, it's the fabrication and and structures that go with your system, but it's also all of the fusion equipment that you need. And we have a very large fleet of fusion machines. We have great technicians, we have great technical people here. We bring all of those resources to play when we get that first phone call from a client, Hey, I'm thinking about this project. Is there any way you can use HTP? We love that first phone call. That's when we go to work. And sometimes you don't see the benefits of that for years down the road or the sales cycle on these jobs sometimes can be a long time, but there's a lot of work that gets done behind the scenes and we pull in all the resources that we can do to help. And that's to me, that's fun to see all of that come together. Yeah, yeah. And maybe one of those calls will come to fruition. Listening to the podcast again, we're joined by Mike James, VP of Business Development and Sales at Cisco. And we're we're getting close to the finish line here. I think we probably could do an entire podcast on the Talon, but take a look at some of those Steininger videos in that and Fireball and see that that machine in action. It it picks up the pipe from underneath. It travels along the route. It's fascinating. Solid wall profile wall. Give me just a primer on the differences, the similarities, the uses, applications, etc. when it comes to large diameter. So yeah, we have both, right, which is great. So we have the solid wall pipe that gets fuzed together has all of the advantages that we've been talking about. The pressure, ratings, all that. That's a great piping system for the right application, the pro firewall pipe, which is going to be a little bit lighter weight, right. Just a different manufacturing process. It's really meant for a different application. So it's going to typically be for either really low pressures or gravity systems. Sure. The capabilities are really, really good as well. You might have to deep bury some pipe. You know, there's a lot of gravity systems out there. Maybe you don't need a pressure application and you don't need to spend the money on maybe a solid wall system we can go with. We can go spirally in in a profile wall pipe. And so there's both advantages. The capabilities of the diameters are even a little bit bigger for a profile wall pipe. Today we can manufacture up to four meter diameter or I believe 120 inch pipe. Today globally, four meter pipe in profile. Well know we get that that European influence with the metric measures, which I'm still getting used to but I was just on a jobsite just down the road to Saint Croix, Indiana with some some culvert replacement Brian Harrington 96 inch spiral going into dual corrugated metal that had rusted out and it it is fascinating and again that could be another podcast in and of itself but certainly the versatility of large diameter pipe is there. We've touched on sustainability. Mike. It's fascinating to me. It's the sustainability begins with the production. It's more sustainable, the production process of HTP and then you load it and ship it and the sustainability continues there because of the weight. You know, if you're shipping ductile iron, you maybe need more trucks, they work harder, you know, you're pouring emissions into the environment, you get to the site, it's a lower impact. You can do trench lists installing you know, you can you can do the directional drilling, you can do the the other trench list applications. You know, it's the eliminating leaks and saving water. It's almost staggering how sustainable it is. And I think it's ironic, too, that people want to put the stigma of plastics on it not being the case, but it is just the opposite. HTP is the most sustainable solution when it comes to piping systems. Yeah, it's it's an interesting topic because when you when you talk about sustainability, we do have a lot of advantages and there's a huge impact on it, right? When you look at the entire lifecycle of the piping system from the very beginning, I talked about from production to the very end of the lifecycle, which by the way, our lifecycle is going to be much longer than most traditional pipe. So that's a huge factor right there. But everything you just hit on is is super important. But we do have the stigma of plastics, right? And how are they made and so forth. But I think what our society just needs to understand is like we talk about electricity or electric vehicles and so forth, fossil fuels, we'll look at how the batteries are made. Batteries are made using copper and lithium and gold and other precious metals. And all those things have to come out of the earth and you have to use piping materials to be able to process that. So we have to blend all of that together. We can't just we can't look at sustainability from just one view. We have to look at it from many, many different views. And I think I think there's more education to be done there for sure. Yeah, and your point is well taken that we install ESCO installs in HD system a solution instead of 18 years later having to dig at this spot with more emissions and more disruption and more road closures to repair it. And and here and there, you know, you do that over the course of the 100 year lifetime and it's it's almost immeasurable. So certainly sustainability and as we mentioned, cost to kind of go hand in hand. But finally, I just I want to ask you about the future in general. If you're a dreamer, if you're if you're just taking a realistic view of what's down the road. But what what do you see the future of large pipe being? Well, I think I'm excited about it, first of all, because I've seen the advancements over the last 30 years of where we started to where we are today. So I'm excited to know that we're continuing to grow. We're leading the charge on bringing the best technology to North America. So it's always exciting to see that, you know, I'm excited to disco because I see the young talent that we have coming into our company that's going to be leading these efforts for the next 30 years or more. So I'm excited about it. But I also think the large diameter pipe, we're just scratching the surface. I think, you know, 20, 30, 40 years from now, we're going to be doing some really cool, large diameter, even bigger projects. And the stuff we work on today is really exciting. I'm working on a job in Colorado right now that has been in existence since President Kennedy signed the bill in into office. Right? It's as old as me. And we're just getting started on the final tail end of this piping portion of it that's going to go for the next 15 years. Well, it's probably the life cycle of this entire project is 60, 70, 75 years before it's done. It's pretty amazing. So we're impacting that. It's pretty cool to see that and how long it's been in existence and where we're at today. Wow. And then you get to do it all over again. But I'm really excited about, I think the technology, the the equipment, the projects are always going to be there. You know, our population's getting more the need for power, the need for heat, the need for water. We're in every one of those aspects. When you when you turn on your light switch and power is made, you're using our pipe to make that power. When you turn your gas furnace or your heater on that gas pipe that brings gas to your home today is polyethylene pipe. Yeah. And when I going away so not excited about it. If you have more questions and you want to maybe get a little deeper and deeper dive into large pipe, you can register for our webinar on its website. That'll be March 30th. If you've found this podcast either not soon enough to catch the webinar or a little bit after they are archived on the website as well. We're looking forward to more great conversations. We can only hope that the guests are as great as you. Mike, we really appreciate your time and look forward to maybe having another conversation with you down the road. Thanks for having me. All right, Mike James, our guest on Cisco Insights podcast. Again, if you have any questions, head to our website. We'd be happy to talk to you about any possible solutions. Thanks for listening.