7 Oil expanding market into Lone Star State

Clinton’s 7 Oil production plant has the potential of selling a lot of its product to the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT), says Circuit Engineering District No. 7 Executive Director Monte Goucher.
“Texas is getting ready to start buying some of our oil,” Goucher told his board of directors at their monthly meeting Tuesday. “I’m really excited.”
There’s a catch, though, albeit a small one. Goucher said to operate in Texas, the CED’s 7 Oil Energy District must have better insurance than it currently gets from ACCO (the Association of County Commissioners of Oklahoma). Consequently, the board gave him authority to seek a new commercial liability insurance policy.
“It’s going to be really good for us,” Goucher said of the prospect for selling the chip-sealing oil which is used here primarily on county roads.
Initially, the oil would be sold to TxDOT’s field division based at Childress, Texas.
“There’s about 12 different maintenance yards that we have the potential of selling to,” said Goucher. In Texas, he said the state takes care of all the roads, including those that individual counties handle in Oklahoma.
Childress is located southwest of Hollis, Okla. Hollis is in Harmon County west of Altus, about five miles from the Texas state line. Harmon County is one of 11 counties in Circuit Engineering District No. 7.
“Going on two years ago, I gave them (Texas officials) a load of oil to do a test project and they were very pleased,” said Goucher. “They’ve been watching how it performed over the last two years.”
The free sample was used on a road that handles a lot of cotton traffic.
“Chip seal is a hard-surface road,” Goucher added. “Texas does a lot of chip seal on all their roads.”
He said officials there were “really excited” about the feedback they got from the gin road on which the sample was used.
Goucher said at the board’s last meeting the plant was shutting down for a time but now it’s “firing back up.”
The plant is located in the south part of Clinton adjacent to CED7 headquarters near the intersection of Commerce Road (Old Highway 66) and S. 28th Street.