How ATI Designed the Pile Cutting Machine and Set a New Industry Standard

In 2008, Motiva’s Crude Expansion Project was transforming Port Arthur, Texas into the site of the largest oil-producing refinery in North America. The scale of the project was historic — and so were its demands. Among them: 50,000 concrete piles that needed to be cut.

At the time, the industry standard was wall saws. Two operators. An excavator and its operator to hold each pile steady during the cut. Crews sometimes working in standing mud just to get the job done. It was slow, labor-intensive, and — most importantly — dangerous.

ATI was on that job. And we knew there had to be a better way.

The idea came from ATI Vice President David Rogers. During his early career at Aggregate Technologies, David drew on his background in the timber industry — and he recognized that the feller buncher, a machine that grips and shears trees at the base in a single fluid motion, was solving essentially the same problem: controlled, efficient cutting of a vertical structural member. The question was whether that principle could be engineered for concrete piles.

Under the leadership of CEO Ronnie Wills, ATI designed and built the machine entirely in-house. The result was the Pile Cutting Machine — the PCM. One machine. One operator. No excavator. No secondary crew holding the pile. Just a clean, safe, repeatable cut.

The Results on the Motiva CEP:

100+ Piles cut per day with a single operator

30 → 1 Workforce reduction on pile cutting operations

Zero Lost-time incidents across 10,000 cuts

The results on the Motiva CEP were immediate and dramatic. ATI completed over 10,000 pile cuts with the PCM — delivering more than 100 cuts per day where the old method had required two operators, an excavator, and an excavator operator just to execute each single cut. The pile cutting workforce dropped from 30 people to one. And through it all, ATI recorded zero lost-time incidents.

The PCM didn’t just solve a problem on one project. It changed how the industry thinks about pile cutting altogether. What ATI designed and built in-house on the Motiva job is now effectively the industry standard — proof that the best innovations don’t always come from equipment manufacturers. Sometimes they come from the crew on the ground who got tired of doing it the hard way.That’s the ATI difference. We don’t just perform the work — we engineer better ways to do it.

Aggregate Technologies, Inc. has been delivering innovative industrial demolition and concrete cutting solutions since 1997, operating across nine market sectors from Houston, TX.