Encore Oilfield Adds Manufacturing Space with Custom Compression Systems Acquisition

Encore Oilfield Services completed its acquisition of Custom Compression Systems (CCS), formerly named Williamson Production Systems and now a wholly owned subsidiary of Louisiana Machinery Co. (Louisiana Cat)—the authorized Caterpillar dealer in Louisiana. Founded in 1996, CCS is located at the Port of Iberia along Louisiana’s Gulf Coast in New Iberia.

“We are incredibly excited to welcome the Custom Compression Systems team into the Encore family,” said John R. Simonetti Jr., President and CEO, Encore Oilfield Services. “With the expansion of our facilities, the addition of substantial new horsepower, and our Ariel distributorship, we’re positioned to deliver even more robust and reliable compression solutions to our clients.”

The acquisition provides an additional 103,000-square-feet of large-scale manufacturing space, two 80-ton overhead cranes, and 70-foot eave heights, marking a notable milestone in Encore’s growth. Also, per the deal, Encore partnered with Louisiana Cat to supply 225,000 hp of Caterpillar natural gas-fired engines for gas compression packaging.

Leveraging its Ariel distributorship, Encore will continue supplying and supporting Ariel products for current and future customers. In addition to broadening Encore Oilfield Services’ physical footprint, this strategic acquisition aligns with its long-term vision of offering a comprehensive range of products and services across key markets.

Optimizing Data Centers

In November 2025, Vertiv and Caterpillar signed a strategic collaboration to provide advanced energy-optimization solutions for data centers. Vertiv will integrate its power distribution and cooling technologies with Caterpillar’s and Solar Turbines’ power generation and combined cooling, heat, and power (CCHP) products. The combination will deliver pre-designed architectures to simplify deployment, accelerate time-to-power, and optimize performance for data center operations.

Specifically, Caterpillar and Solar Turbines will supply natural gas-fired turbines and reciprocating engines to generate reliable, scalable electric power and thermal energy for CCHP applications. Vertiv will provide power and cooling solutions packaged as modular, pre-designed blocks to shorten design cycles and standardize deployment. These energy-optimization solutions offer multiple benefits, such as:

• Quicker Time-to-Power: Using pre-designed, modular reference architectures significantly speeds up deployment time.
• Lower Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE): Minimized PUE improves energy efficiency and lowers carbon footprint due to end-to-end system optimization, including power, cooling, distribution, and dynamic load management.
• Global Lifecycle Support: The architecture is backed by the global service and support networks of Vertiv, Caterpillar, and Solar Turbines.

The partnership addresses the rapidly increasing demand for onsite energy solutions that deliver stable power and cooling and, together, the companies can offer a fully integrated design with validated interfaces and performance. This all-inclusive solution allows customers to accelerate design, installation, and deployment. The memorandum of understanding also represents a step toward refining the data center ecosystem, helping users overcome energy constraints to deploy optimized facilities.

Hydrogen Fuel Cells

In early 2024, Caterpillar successfully collaborated with Microsoft and Ballard Power Systems to demonstrate the feasibility of deploying large-format hydrogen fuel cells to supply sustainable backup power for data centers. The technology demonstration provided insight on the capabilities of fuel cell systems to power multi-MW data centers, guaranteeing power supply to meet 99.99% uptime requirements.

It was conducted in a challenging environment and validated the hydrogen fuel cell power system’s performance at a height of 6,086 ft. above sea level in below-freezing conditions. The demonstration simulated a 48-hour backup power event at a Microsoft data center in Cheyenne, Wyoming, in which a hydrogen fuel cell was integrated into the data center electrical plant to support critical load.