Process equipment, forklift aisles and a utility tie-in schedule define a manufacturing building, and Casper has a good example of how that plays out. The refinery at 5700 East Highway 20-26, HF Sinclair's Casper plant, is listed at 30,000 barrels per day, and its roughly $200 million modernization reported in October 2016 replaced crude units built in 1928, 1948 and 1955. The point for a smaller manufacturer is that plants here get kept running and rebuilt in pieces, so we design the building around the process first and around the next change to the process second.
Light manufacturing and aviation-related work cluster near the airport. The business park beside Casper-Natrona County International Airport houses more than 35 businesses ranging from manufacturing to aviation, and the airport operates Foreign Trade Zone 157 with a 492 acre Magnet Site at 8500 Airport Parkway. We build fabrication shops, assembly floors, machine bays and support offices for owners who need a building that is ready on the day equipment arrives.
Most of these projects are steel buildings with heavy slabs, so our pre-engineered metal buildings and crane building work overlaps with this page. If you are weighing your options, our manufacturing plant page lays out how we think about layout and loads from the owner side.
The buyers we hear from are fabrication and machine shops that serve oilfield and refinery customers, equipment makers who want a clean assembly floor, and food and consumer-goods processors looking at small regional plants. Many of them are manufacturers who have run out of room in a leased bay and want a purpose-built shell they own.
Casper's Industrial Revenue Bond policy, adopted by City Council on December 16, 2025, considers bonds only for projects over $2 million that create employment, expand the tax base and promote Wyoming products, and committee review takes about two months. For a plant that fits those terms, we build the schedule so the financing review runs alongside design instead of in front of it.
A manufacturing slab is not a warehouse slab. We pour thickened slabs and isolated equipment pads for presses, CNC machines and fabrication tables, with embedded conduit sleeves, trench drains and floor hardeners where the process calls for them. Power service size, compressed air, process water and exhaust are settled early, because moving a main switchgear room after the slab is poured is where schedules get lost.
Above the slab we erect the frame, the envelope and the interior partitions that separate production from offices and shipping. We coordinate the equipment vendor's rigging dates with the contractor's own schedule so the first machines land in a building that is closed in, heated and powered. Rigging a press through a wall opening is a different job from rigging it through a finished door, and we would rather leave the opening framed until the machine is in than patch a wall later. A plant that builds vehicles or parts has its own slab and equipment needs, covered in our page on automotive and EV plant construction.
Many expansions happen inside or beside plants that cannot stop. That means hot-work permits, lockout coordination with the owner's maintenance team, traffic separation for forklifts and trucks, and a daily briefing that names who is working where. A Casper refinery turnaround is the extreme version of this, with contractors on a tight shutdown window, and we borrow its discipline for smaller jobs.
We submit a site-specific safety plan at award and hold ourselves to the owner's own site rules when they are stricter than ours. If your plant is running three shifts, we plan work around the shift handoff so the people on your floor are never surprised by what is happening next to them.
We start with the process flow: raw material in, work in progress, finished goods out. Column spacing, door locations and crane coverage follow from that. A manufacturer in a building with columns in the wrong place pays for it every day, so we ask for the equipment list and the forklift paths before we draw anything.
Where the owner wants one team on design and construction, we propose design-build approach so the engineer, the equipment vendor and the builder share one schedule. Where the plant is already designed, we price it as drawn and flag the items most likely to move. Typical movers are slab thickness once the final equipment weights arrive, the electrical service size, and the number of overhead doors the shipping flow actually needs.
The east side along Highway 20-26 near the refinery area, the airport business park, and the parcels toward Evansville and Mills are where manufacturers usually look. The east Casper industrial area and the airport district already have industrial neighbors, truck access and the utility corridors a plant needs.
Outside city limits the adopted code and design loads can differ. We confirm them with the county or town before we price, and we say so in the proposal. Frost depth, snow load and wind exposure are set locally in Wyoming, so a plant in Mills may carry different design loads from one near the airport, and the structural engineer needs that answer before the steel is ordered.
Share the process flow, the equipment you plan to install and the date you need production running. We will return a building concept, a utility list and a schedule that accounts for the cold-weather months.
Before you buy the land if you can. Utility capacity, frost depth and soil conditions decide whether a parcel is cheap or expensive to build on, and those costs show up only when someone walks the site with the equipment list. We will review a parcel and tell you what the building and utilities are likely to cost.
Yes, and we recommend it. We lay out end walls, utility stubs and slab edges so a future bay can be added without tearing out finished work. The cost of doing that on day one is small compared with retrofitting later.
We schedule vendor deliveries against our own milestones, and we get the vendor's anchor-bolt templates and foundation drawings before we pour the pads. If equipment has to be set early, we plan the crane access and protect the slab.
The City of Casper lists the 2024 International Codes with amendments in Title 15 of its municipal code. Commercial permits there often require a life-safety plan and engineered drawings. Process-specific approvals, such as air or wastewater permits, depend on what you make, and we help you identify who to ask early.
It happens. We plan work in phases that can stop at a stable point, and we talk with owners honestly about how much of the building to commit to up front. A shell and the first production bay can often be built now with future bays on paper.