"We needed a new plant," says Seth Robertson, retired NGO president. "We had lost part of our property to an easement, and our process had become obsolete. Most refineries had begun to use a different method of sulfur removal and were no longer producing our raw material as a by-product. Walt Helmerich, III, asked me where I would like to be, and I told him we could locate near Humble in Baytown. He knew the Humble president, so he set up a meeting, and in about 15 minutes we had acquired 15 acres for our new plant. It was that simple."
Today, NGO is one of North America's largest manufacturers of mercaptans and natural gas odorants. Its CAPTAN brand is seen on distinctive barrels in all 50 states, in Canada, and in major export markets, including Japan, Korea, and Australia.
Besides acquiring NGO, Helmerich & Payne made other investments in the early 1960s. An interest was purchased in the Ross-Martin business forms company. The first of several real estate investments was made when the Plaza Corporation was acquired. It owned a two-story office building and seven acres of land at the corner of 21st and Utica in Tulsa. Helmerich & Payne planned to add five stories onto the office building and develop it into its headquarters.
In 1962, Helmerich & Payne purchased Horton Company, a contracting firm that specialized in laying underground cables for telephone companies. Horton had patented a special plow that cut the trench and laid the cable in one operation. Although Horton was a good business by itself, the synergy of the acquisition became apparent when ECCO began using Horton's techniques to lay pipe more efficiently.
In still another diversification move into an energy-related business, the F. H. Maloney Company in Houston was acquired in 1964 and became the Helmerich & Payne Manufacturing Division. It produced molded rubber, machined metal, and rubber-metal bonded products, primarily for pipeline companies and others in the oil and gas industry.Not all the new ventures were successful. Helmerich & Payne joined with the Oil Recovery Corporation (ORCO) in February, 1960, to operate a new secondary oil recovery process using carbonated water injection, under ORCO patents. Later that year, the two companies built a new carbon dioxide liquefaction plant in Pecos County, Texas, under their jointly owned West Texas CO2 Company. Roughly half of the plant's production was used in their carbon dioxide water injection project. The rest was sold commercially. By the late 1960s, the carbon dioxide injection process had proven to be uneconomical, and the west Texas facility was sold to Olin Chemical Company.