Award Recipients

Since its incorporation in 2005, Cokebusters has been based at Hawarden Airfield in North Wales. Family owned, the company’s foundation centred on the mechanical ‘decoking’ of tubing and pipeline systems for the oil refining sector. This technique is essential in maintaining operational efficiency.

Based on patents from 2007 and 2012, Cokebusters subsequently introduced ultrasound inspection technology using an ‘intelligent pig’, which passes through small diameter tubing and pipelines, collecting and analysing data not only to assure cleanliness, but to identify and qualify any areas of corrosion, so ensuring safety and integrity. By packaging these two very different services into one offer, delivered concurrently by the same team, the company created something very special and appealing to its customers.

To meet demand in the United States, a subsidiary was established in Houston, Texas in 2013. Now, with over 100 employees internationally, Cokebusters is a well-established and recognised world-leading technology provider in this niche field.

Managing Director, James Phipps, says: “This double win is extraordinary, a King’s Award in both International Trade and Innovation is indeed a proud success. It’s clear that one feeds the other whereby the client belief in our leading tube inspection technology has directly fuelled growth in export trade.

“We are small enough to be nimble, to energise R&D through close site operation links and react swiftly to customer demands. Across our business we are delighted to receive this supreme accolade, especially knowing we’ve been so thoroughly vetted.”

Facing the industry’s challenges
By focusing on internal R&D, Cokebusters’ first generation ‘intelligent pig’ (2007) was capable of gathering 1,280 measurements per second, providing an unprecedented insight into tube wall condition.
Their second generation development was revolutionary and, in 2013, its patented single bodied intelligent pig was made available to the market. The uniqueness of the single body removed many prohibitive navigational challenges, the so-called boundary of ‘unpiggable pipelines’. By 2020 the third generation pig could gather up to 30,720 measurements per second.

Having been set a specific challenge in Oman, Cokebusters created a bespoke fourth generation pig (2022), capable of navigating ultra-small diameter tube networks as narrow as 38mm. Heralded as the smallest untethered ultrasonic inspection pig in the world this tool is particularly targeted at solar steam projects, opening Cokebusters technologies to the renewable energy sector.

Investing in a greener future
Now, in a single engineering operation on site, with experienced colleagues working together, Cokebusters’ technology service focuses on mechanical cleaning to drive process efficiency and intelligent inspection to assure asset integrity. Importantly, by using in-house specialist pumping unit machinery, their cleaning operations capture and permit ethical recycling of the removed fouling. The effects of a clean tube wall simultaneously reduce energy consumption and GHG emissions.

Cokebusters designs and fabricates all its own machinery, and continuously invests in technological improvements. Employees engage in the buccaneering nature of foreign site works, currently serving clients througout Europe, Middle East, South America and the United States of America. With in-house technology and a dedicated team, Cokebusters is able to satisfy complex client demands by delivering innovative services in a timely and cost effective manner.