Hexagon Agility celebrates 60 years of Lincoln roots

It was here in 1963, amid the angst and uncertainty of the Cold War, that Brunswick opened a plant that made the bodies of Polaris missiles, which were topped with nuclear warheads and placed on Navy submarines.

The plant, near 27th and Superior streets, is still there today. It’s now owned by General Dynamics and makes missile and rocket bodies, pressure vessels and a number of other products.

In 2005, General Dynamics spun off Lincoln Composites, a division it had formed to make commercial products such as tanks for the oil and gas industries that are made out of composite fibers.

The company that bought it was Hexagon Composites, which formed Hexagon Lincoln, a company focused on making composite tanks for the alternative fuels industry.

A boom in the natural gas industry led to rapid growth and a relocation to the new rail center at the LNK Enterprise Park more than a decade ago.

Though Hexagon has gone through some ups and downs in the alternative fuels space, as well as a number of acquisitions and divestitures, it still has a large and growing presence in Lincoln.

Now called Hexagon Agility, the company has five locations in Lincoln — four of which are in the LNK Enterprise Park — and about 340 employees.

“We’re a longtime member of the Lincoln community, but probably one of the least known,” said Chet Dawes, senior vice president of global cylinders engineering at Hexagon Agility.

“To be here 60 years and you tell people you work for Hexagon Agility and they still don’t know where that is or who you are …” he said.

Dawes said that could be because the company has gone by so many different names and what it does has changed some over time.

It’s currently on its ninth different company name, although the name has started with “Hexagon” for nearly two decades.

The name Hexagon Agility comes from Hexagon’s purchase a few years ago of Agility Fuel Systems, which was a leading manufacturer of natural gas fuel systems for medium and heavy-duty vehicles.

It currently makes composite fuel tanks for a number of medium- and heavy-duty vehicles in industries including package delivery, waste management, public transit and over-the road trucking.

Among its most recognizable customers are UPS and Waste Management.

“A huge amount of refuse trucks built today are powered by natural gas,” Dawes said.

He also said transit buses have been a big part of the company’s past and current growth.

A big growth area in the future, according to Dawes, is the over-the-road trucking industry.

There are a couple of reasons for that, he said. One is that companies are trying to meet sustainability goals and reduce emissions. The other is that natural gas is a more efficient fuel for large trucks than other alternative fuels, such as electricity or biodiesel.

While vehicle fuel tanks are a growing and important business, one of the staples of Hexagon’s work in Lincoln remains its mobile pipeline business.

For years, the company has built large fuel tanks, assembled them on tractor trailers and shipped them off to customers to use to transport compressed natural gas.

Those systems used to be used exclusively in the oil and gas industry, usually to transport natural gas to a stranded user, such as a high-energy-consumption industrial plant that’s not near a natural gas pipeline, Dawes said.

However, “that business shrunk radically,” when oil prices crashed in 2015, he said.

While oil prices rebounded and have stabilized, the mobile pipeline business has evolved, Dawes said, and now has a much larger focus on renewable natural gas.

Instead of users needing to get gas from a pipeline to a location, they now need to get renewable natural gas, such as methane from a livestock operation, to a pipeline.

Dawes said renewable natural gas now makes up about 50% of the company’s mobile pipeline business.

“So, it’s a big growth sector for us,” he said.

It’s also one that appears to have a brighter environmental future than traditional natural gas, which has faced some political backlash in recent years.

Rick Rashilla, senior vice president of research and development, said renewable natural gas creates a circularity, “where you’re actually able to utilize your waste to manufacture your fuel on a continuing basis.”

Rather than the methane from livestock manure being released into the atmosphere, it gets captured and used for fuel. That leads to fewer emissions overall, Rashilla said.

While the Lincoln operation remains focused on natural gas, its parent company has divisions that focus on hydrogen and propane, as well as battery packs for electric and fuel cell vehicles.

That’s a hallmark of the company’s focus on “clean air everywhere.”

That might not seem to be such a good thing in a conservative state where residents often oppose solar and wind projects and politicians often express rather vocal opposition to clean air mandates.

But Rashilla said state, local and federal officials have offered support when it’s been needed.

“Whenever we’ve needed help, and we’ve gone to our elected officials either at the state or the federal level, we’ve gotten great cooperation,” he said.

Hexagon Agility, which accounts for about 70% of the parent company’s overall revenue, continues to have a bright future, both in Lincoln and elsewhere.

“Growth trajectory is very encouraging,” said Dawes, who called five-year growth projections “very strong.”

Hexagon Agility is finishing an expansion of its plant in Salisbury, North Carolina, to more than double its size. The plant will focus solely on making tanks for large trucks. Future expansion also is planned that would enlarge the plant enough to eventually match or exceed the capacity of the Lincoln plant, he said.

But Dawes said that doesn’t mean the Lincoln operation’s role or scope will diminish. In fact, it continues to grow.

The company has made about $25 million worth of investments in the Lincoln plant over the past year, much of it for the mobile pipeline business.

In addition, virtually all of the research and development for the natural gas tanks takes place in Lincoln, making it a very strategic location for Hexagon.

The company this year completed a large expansion that included installing a new type of winding unit that represents the “pilot” of what it will be doing in its Salisbury plant.

Dawes also said a product and process developed in Lincoln was recently deployed to a factory in Kassel, Germany, allowing it to now build product that used to have to be shipped from Lincoln to Europe.

The Lincoln site also offers some other pluses, such as a centralized location and low costs.

Rashilla said one other factor brought Hexagon to Lincoln and is likely to keep it here for a long time: the quality of the workforce.

“Innovation and workmanship have been some of the hallmarks of our six decades here,” he said.