JST Group at Gastech 2026

Gastech 2026 came to Bangkok this week, and JST Group spent it on the floor at BITEC from 14–17 September. It is one of the largest gatherings in the global energy calendar, and walking those halls gives you an honest sense of the scale of the sector — the number of companies, technologies and people involved across the entire value chain.

Gastech landing in Thailand matters for our customers. It puts natural gas and LNG, hydrogen, low-carbon solutions, shipping & marine and AI in energy on the doorstep of the Eastern Seaboard’s own production, refining and petrochemical base — and it brings operators, EPC contractors, technology providers and financiers into the same building as the industries we serve every day.

We were there on two fronts, and they are the two halves of the same business: the technology that keeps assets running, and the people who build and run them.

Deepwater — eliminating corrosion at pipe supports (Stand R115)

Deepwater Corrosion Services, our long-standing execution partner for corrosion control, exhibited on its own stand at R115 — built around one of the most persistent and least-managed integrity problems in any plant, terminal or offshore facility: corrosion under pipe supports.

Wherever a line rests on a shoe, a Grinnell clamp or a steel beam, the flat contact face traps moisture, salt and debris. Water cannot drain, the coating cannot be inspected, and the metal loss happens out of sight — usually on the underside of a line nobody has lifted in years. It is the kind of damage found during a shutdown, not during a walk-down.

I-Rod® addresses it mechanically. A non-metallic, water-shedding half-round is fixed to the support so the pipe sits on a narrow line contact instead of a flat, wet face. The interface drains and dries, the coating is protected from wear at the contact point, and the material is strong enough to carry the load without creeping or deforming over time. The panel that drew the most attention on the stand showed an I-Rod installation still sound 28 years after it went in. It fits pipe shoes, Grinnell clamps and U-bolt arrangements, which is why it works as a turnaround retrofit as readily as a new-build specification — see our pipe supports page.

Two more Deepwater lines shared the stand. TelPro supplies high-quality, low-cost mixed metal oxide (MMO) anodes for storage tanks, groundbeds, pipelines, jetties and rebar — the consumable end of any cathodic protection system. And Electrobraze, the rugged battery-powered pin brazing system for attaching CP cables to metal structures, which JST Group now runs as a resident in-country capability. We wrote up the method, and how it compares with exothermic (CAD) welding, when we brought it to Thailand: Pin Brazing for Cathodic Protection Now Available in Thailand.

Vahterus and Continental

The Vahterus Plate & Shell heat exchanger puts a fully welded plate pack inside a pressure shell — the thermal efficiency and compactness of a plate heat exchanger with the pressure and temperature capability of a shell-and-tube unit, and no gaskets in the primary duty. That combination is why it appears in LNG and gas processing, CO₂ and liquefied gas regasification, condensers, evaporators and oil coolers, where footprint, weight and turndown all matter at once. Available through our pumps and heat exchangers line.

Continental exhibited at stand K18 in the USA Partnership Pavilion. Their energy hose range covers marine offloading, rig supply, drilling and production flexible lines — and now ammonia transfer and carbon capture and storage hoses, which is the energy transition arriving as hardware rather than as a slide. We supply the range in Thailand through our marine hose and high-pressure hose offerings.

Where there is investment, there is a need for people

The clearest takeaway from the week had nothing to do with any single product. It was how much activity and investment is still moving through this region — new facilities, expansion projects, and international operators taking positions across Southeast Asia.

Every one of those projects meets the same constraint eventually. The investment is committed, the equipment is specified, the contractor is appointed — and then somebody has to find, hire, onboard and legally employ the people who will build it and run it. In Thailand that is rarely the simple part. Work permits, visa quotas, Thai labour law, social security, payroll and severance obligations all sit between a funded project and a working team.

That is the other half of what JST Group does. We support companies entering Thailand for the first time, companies expanding operations already here, and companies building project teams from scratch — across the Energy, Engineering, Manufacturing and wider industrial sectors.

• Executive recruitment. Country managers, plant and operations leadership, engineering and commercial heads — the hires where getting it wrong is expensive and slow to undo. We looked at where Thailand’s manufacturing leaders are actually coming from in our analysis of the Eastern Seaboard market.
• Manpower solutions. Technical and skilled personnel supplied against real project scopes and schedules — offshore, onshore, shutdown and turnaround — scaled up and back down as the work demands.
• Employer of Record (EOR). Employ people legally in Thailand in days rather than months, with no local entity of your own. This is the route most companies take for a first hire, a pilot operation, or a project team that has to be working before registration completes.
• Payroll services. Thai payroll, tax, social security and statutory reporting run correctly and on time — the part nobody notices until it goes wrong.

What that looks like in practice: we recently took a new manufacturing operation in Rayong from an empty plant to a full workforce, and wrote up how it was done. If you are costing a Thailand hire before committing to it, our employee cost calculator, work permit guide and free HR calculators are open to use with no sign-up.

What visitors kept asking about

• Where do I look for corrosion under pipe supports first? Start at the underside of lines at shoes, clamps and beam contacts — and prioritise anywhere the interface stays wet: insulated and clad lines, jetty and splash-zone racks, and anything downwind of a cooling tower or wash-down area.
• Retrofit or new-build? Both, but in Thailand the volume is retrofit. Supports are changed out during turnaround, one at a time as lines are lifted, which makes the work plannable against an existing shutdown window rather than a separate campaign.
• Can CP cable connections be made on a live line? This is exactly why pin brazing exists. It puts far less heat into the pipe wall than exothermic welding, which is what makes it viable on thin-wall, alloyed and in-service pipe. The full technical comparison is here.
• How quickly can we staff a project in Thailand? Faster than most people expect. Under an Employer of Record arrangement, people can be legally employed and working in days, without waiting on entity registration. Recruitment lead times depend on the role, but the legal and payroll infrastructure is not the bottleneck it is usually assumed to be.
• Who actually does the work? The question almost every conversation ended on. Product is the easy half; the hard half is survey, installation, supervision, documentation — and the people to deliver it. That is what JST Group is built for: a Thailand-based corrosion control, industrial sales and HR solutions team, in one place.

Talk to us about anything you saw at the show

Four busy days, a lot of steps, and a lot of good conversations. Thank you to everyone who stopped by, and to the Gastech team for bringing the event to Bangkok.

If you could not make it to BITEC, nothing above is out of reach — every technology and every service mentioned here is delivered in Thailand by JST Group. For a technical consultation, a site survey, budget pricing, or a conversation about staffing an upcoming project, contact the JST Group team. We would be glad to pick the conversation up where the show floor left it.