Tom Moran delivers high wire corridor update

The Presque Isle Community Men’s Association hosted Tom Moran recently for a talk on the high wire corridor and what it means to business in Presque Isle County. Moran is the founder and CEO of Moran Iron Works in Onaway. He began his talk with some brief remarks about his early education. Moran described himself as “not a very good student” at Onaway High School but he always knew he wanted to work with iron and metal. When he took shop class in school they did not have a metalworking component, so Moran took it upon himself to create one. “When I started out with welding, I was just a rod-burner,” Moran said.

HE EXPLAINED that his dad and brothers were in the wood products business but he decided to strike out on his own. Soon he had hired one, then two more workers until his company grew into one of the premier employers in the area. One of the keys to his success was hiring people directly out of school and investing in their training and knowledge to the point where he now has a relatively young workforce of about 50 employees with up to 15 years of experience.

Today Moran Iron Works is the largest consumer of industrial electricity from Presque Isle Electric & Gas Company. The customer base for the company is broad and diverse. Moran has provided items for customers overseas and throughout the U.S. At the same time, a lot of the work revolves around the northern Michigan area.

MORAN CITED power companies and large quarry operations in the region that have been regular customers over the years. Turning to the high wire corridor, he described the concept and how the idea came into being. “About four years ago, we got a contract from Detroit Edison for unit called an SCR, which stands for selective catalytic reduction. Basically it’s like a catalytic converter that goes on a coal-fired power plant, and those units will eventually end up on all coal-fired

plants throughout the United States,” Moran explained. The original fabricator on the project made some mistakes on the design and had other problems with delivery and construction on site to the point where Detroit Edison went looking for alternatives.

“THEY CAME to us and asked how would we solve the problem. We laid out a plan that they accepted and then we designed and built the SCR units for them. We shipped the units to Detroit and it saved them $25 million on their project,” Moran said. Moran pointed out that, as a businessman, his objective has to be to save the customer money; otherwise, they go looking elsewhere. The success of the original plan led to potential orders for many more units. “They were huge components and we had to build them in sections and they were assembled on-site by local craft labor, and that’s expensive and time-consuming,” he added. Moran’s design team set out to design the units in even larger sections to minimize the on-site craft labor and time. Moran explained, “The size of the units dictated the need for maritime transport, by boat or by barge, and that’s what gave rise to the high wire corridor idea. I wanted to raise all the lines and gain access to a deep water port.”

“WHAT HAPPENED, though, and I guess I can say this even though I am basically a Republican, is that when Bush got elected he told the power companies ‘You don’t have to worry about those pollution controls,'” he said. Mora

n decided to go ahead with the high wire project regardless of the decision by the Bush administration and continued to secure the additional funding and local support for the project. His plan is to stick to the idea of building huge components that can take advantage of the route along the roads to the water. “The high wire corridor was substantially completed in March and at the same time we received an order for a 19-foot diameter 55-foot long exhaust stack for the Russians who bought the Ford Rouge Plant and the only reason we got the contract is because we could ship the unit in one piece,” he said.

He also mentioned a utility company outside Chicago that requires 14 units that are even larger and other similar projects that are just starting to fall into place now that the corridor is finished. “The truth is there is a need for larger and bigger components. Companies that are on the water have a tremendous overhead that I don’t have and that gives me an advantage,” Moran concluded.