Looking back on his career, Michael Robertson reflects on the challenges that led to his success in the oil and gas sector.
Chief Executive Officer of Arlington, Texas-based MCR Oil Tools, Robertson’s extensive experience includes petroleum engineering, project management, operations management, business strategy development, and strategic planning. These skills, and a passion for innovation, are reshaping the petroleum industry, making it safer, more effective, and more cost-efficient.
It sounds like quite a claim, until you look at the facts.
To date, MCR Oil Tools has been granted over 200 patents, with 32 pending. Almost all are thanks to Robertson, who isn’t shy about his journey, including legal issues (proof once again that when someone comes up with better ideas, the praise and admiration are often tempered with jealousy).
The origins of MCR go back to 1982. When Robertson was working as an Engineering Manager for an oil service company in Fort Worth, there was an industry-wide downturn, and the business was going under. Robertson left for a local, smaller oil service company, where he proposed developing what is now MCR’s Radial Cutting Torch™ (RCT™ tool). Nowadays, the RCT tool is the company’s flagship product, safely and efficiently severing drill pipe and tubing without explosives.
This saw Robertson enter into a development contract whereby the company he worked for, Pyrotechnologies, was responsible for building 180 tools—a 25-year exclusive licensing contract with a large oil services technology company. Unfortunately, the tech giant didn’t keep the agreement, and a lawsuit followed in 1990. “Pyrotechnologies could not market the torch in any form or fashion,” says Robertson, who wasn’t initially part of the lawsuit or the licensing agreement. Cancelling his contract with Pyrotechnologies, he formed MCR Enterprises and began marketing his radial cutting torch to oilfield service companies throughout Louisiana and Oklahoma.
Better and safer
For years, pipes in the oilfield were often cut with explosives. A charge was formed to a specific shape, screwed onto the end of a wire line, then run down a hole and detonated. Even with strict safety protocols, this method is problematic. “More than 50 percent of the time, it doesn’t cut,” Robertson explains. A second cut is usually needed, and explosives can only be used in fairly cool wells.
Many wells are in the 350 to 500° Centigrade (572 to 932° Fahrenheit) range, which is ideal for the MCR Radial Cutting Torch. “Our tool loves that temperature,” says Robertson. “We cut in many wells at 480 to 500° Centigrade (896 to 932° Fahrenheit), and we’ve probably made the deepest cut in the world at 32,000 feet deep in 8,000 feet of water. When the big guys are in real trouble, they call us.”
Widely considered the safest, most efficient pipe-cutting device in the industry, MCR’s RCT tool doesn’t use explosives to sever drill pipe, coiled tubing, and casing, but thermite, which is nonexplosive and nonhazardous. “We’ve never had an accident or an incident in 40 years, and we’ve shipped more than 40,000 tools all around the globe,” says Robertson.
Robertson developed his revolutionary new technology in the 1980s and 1990s, offering the oilfield industry a safer, nonexplosive, thermite-based technology. A mixture of aluminum powder, iron, and/or other metal oxides, thermite can reach temperatures of 2500 degrees C (4500 degrees F). Despite this high energy output, it is stable to transport since thermite requires extremely high temperatures to ignite.
Shouldering the responsibility
Robertson’s innovation came with “a lot of responsibility, and a lot of scrutiny,” he says. Years ago, the only competition for his RCT technology was explosives, which are dangerous to store, handle, and transport, and come with myriad regulations. The MCR Radial Cutting Torch changed the landscape, offering customers a much better, safer product that could reach them quickly.
“When a pipe is stuck, it can cost oil and service companies significant amounts of money, because time is of the essence,” says MCR President Cory Huggins. In 2019, 2020, and 2021, Huggins says “a few bad actors” contacted the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) and attempted to influence their regulation of the thermite product. If MCR’s Radial Cutting Torch were deemed a Class I explosive, it would no longer be considered nonhazardous and nonexplosive.
Ultimately, MCR Oil Tools had to sue the U.S. Department of Transportation for its actions and successfully received relief from the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA), an arm of the DOT. “This comes just under a year after our landmark legal victory in the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which confirmed the nonexplosive nature of our technology,” says MCR on its website. “PHMSA has also acknowledged that it is reevaluating its interim thermite classification policy and will be seeking input from domestic manufacturers like MCR.”
MCR is allowed to ship its proprietary B15 thermite mix as a nonrated material. For customers, this win means lower shipping costs, faster worldwide delivery, and easier access for oilfield operators to the company’s safe and field-proven technologies.
“We finally convinced PHMSA that we were not an explosive,” says Robertson. “You can take our tool and put it in the belly of a passenger airplane. If the plane caught fire mid-flight, all the aluminum would melt away at 660° Centigrade, which is about halfway to the ignition temperature of thermite. That is one of the most robust aspects of the technology; it is extremely stable. When other explosive-based technologies and hazardous materials are activated at lower temperatures, our thermite activates well north of 1000° Centigrade.”
Training and licensing
Taking safety seriously, every company using MCR oil tools pipe-recovery and well-intervention systems, including the RCT, is required to enter into a license agreement and be trained and certified. “You won’t go to a rig site and see an individual with MCR coveralls,” says Huggins. “We don’t have a service arm. We are a technology company and an R&D company. We license our technology to those service companies, and we train.”
Since 1992, Bill Boelte has led the company’s robust training program. “We take training very, very seriously,” he says. “It’s a unique product; when Mike developed this technology, it was the first of its kind. The thermite cutter did not exist in the marketplace, so training was critical in that cutting pipe was not new, but the method that was used to sever the pipe was brand new.”
Like the RCT, the Perforating Torch Cutter™ (PTC) is a safer, dependable alternative to using explosives in the oilfield, and “effectively perforates coiled tubing, tubing, casing, and drill pipe without the use of restrictive technologies,” according to the company. Once the tool is lowered into a well and reaches the appropriate depth, a thermal generator is activated. Internal pressure increases, and the pipe is perforated when plasma exits through the sides of the torch nozzle.
Made in America
The RCT, PTC, and the company’s many other products are all made in the USA with American materials. MCR manufactures approximately 95 percent of the hardware it sells, while the remaining five percent requires specific manufacturing processes that are outsourced domestically.
MCR’s dedicated team includes engineers, designers, and lathe and mill operators using CNC machines. Qualification processes are performed in-house, and the company’s quality management system (QMS) has been refined over the years to ensure consistency and reliability throughout the supply chain.
“We have an approximate 98 percent success rate in the field, which is astounding,” remarks Huggins. “We attribute lots of that not only to our training and our licensees—our customers that we work with—but also the steps that we take here before our customers receive the product.”
Adds Robertson: “We were asked by a majority of oil companies why we wouldn’t get ISO certified. Our response is that we do not want to lower our standards.”
MCR works directly with large oilfield service companies, and being near an international airport makes it easy to ship products worldwide. Sometimes, customers will come to Texas. In one case, a high-profile client with a well in Indonesia engaged two flight crews, rented a 747, and flew to MCR to pick up tools. “The combination of being a nonhazardous material and being close to Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport really allows us extreme flexibility to transport our product efficiently, effectively, and under extreme time constraints,” says Huggins.
Innovating new opportunities
MCR’s ability to do its own prototyping is another example of the company going far beyond just selling products. In one case, MCR got a call for a deepwater job for a much-needed technology that… didn’t exist. Within just 72 hours, the company developed a tool specifically for the application, tested to the correct parameters in MCR’s 30,000 psi pressure vessel. The tool was deployed within 48 hours, and the cut was successfully carried out later that week.
Says Huggins, “Within one week, we received a call from a customer—where we did not have a production off-the-shelf unit—and we internally qualified for their specifications and presented them with a unique technology that no other company could provide. So the rapid response is not only us getting product into our customers’ hands; it’s also for custom development. That is extremely critical, and sometimes larger companies struggle with that process.”
MCR’s reputation extends beyond its dedicated customers. In 2024 and 2025, the company was recognized as one of the Top 100 Workplaces in North Texas by the Dallas Morning News. And where many businesses say they treat employees like family, MCR acts, even supporting staff members who are unable to work through serious illness.
MCR Oil Tools sees a future where its already considerable influence in the oil industry expands even further. “We have other products we are working on that can revolutionize the oil industry as we know it today,” says Huggins. “This includes a product that will enhance old wells to produce 20 times what they are producing at their current state. Treat those wells, and get much more oil extracted than they ever dreamed possible.”
Indeed, from hard-won legal battles to groundbreaking technological advances, MCR Oil Tools’ journey reflects a company built on resilience, precision, and an unwavering commitment to safety and innovation. Under Michael Robertson’s leadership, what began as a single idea has grown into a globally trusted suite of solutions that continues to challenge industry norms. As MCR looks ahead to its next wave of breakthroughs, its story stands as a powerful reminder that true progress often comes from those willing to rethink the status quo.
