HydroTech Testing Services
The people behind the book and the class
The book was written by people who run the work, and the class is taught by them. This is who they are.
Henry Froats Jr.
Owner and Head of Engineering · HydroTech Testing Services and NitroTech Rentals
Henry owns and leads the engineering side of both companies, and joins the classroom alongside the HydroTech crews to work the examples — the jobs discussed in the room are jobs they ran.
HydroTech Testing Services was founded in 2018 as a pipeline commissioning and decommissioning contractor and now runs four service lines that map directly onto the chapters of this book: hydrostatic pressure testing, pigging and inline-inspection support, nitrogen services, and fluids management. NitroTech Rentals, a HydroTech company, supplies high-pressure nitrogen for pipeline, industrial and energy projects across North America.
The company works out of the northern panhandle of West Virginia and serves operators across West Virginia, Ohio and western Pennsylvania, with project work reaching internationally into the United Arab Emirates. Henry is a co-author of Proper Pigging and directs the certification programme the book grew out of.
Direct line: 724 809 3385 · info@hydrotechtesting.com
TJ Bartley
Client Relations
TJ handles client relations, and does it from more than ten years of field experience rather than from a desk. Operators calling about a test programme reach someone who has run the work, not someone reading from a service list — which matters when the first question is usually whether a schedule is realistic.
He is the editor of Proper Pigging, and the reason the book reads as a field reference rather than a set of procedures.
Michael Schricker
Director of Technology
Michael leads technology at HydroTech, covering the engineering tools the field crews use and the systems behind them. He built the HydroTech Pocket Engineer, the calculator set and iOS application that carries the pipeline fluid volume and nitrogen inventory arithmetic published in the reference section of this site, so that the same relations are available to a crew standing at a test head with no signal.
He completed the Agentic AI Intensive, a certificate program run by the Harvard Data Science Initiative at Harvard University and taught by faculty from the editorial board of the Harvard Data Science Review, which he attended on scholarship. He holds a Master of Arts in corporate communications from Hawaii Pacific University, and is the author of Proper Pigging.
How this connects to the class
Every course is taught by the people above and uses Proper Pigging as the text. The four-hour briefing, the eight-hour engineering workshop and the two-day, ten contact hour field certification all run at the HydroTech facility or at yours.
Courses and OQ support → · Questions about the class →