In
heaven, there’s only one drill rig. It’s perfect for every job for every
drilling contractor (those who’ve made it past the pearly gates, anyway). It’s
light as a feather, goes anywhere, is amazingly fast and efficient, requires no
fuel, never needs maintenance, and at the end of the workday, it pours you a
cold beer. Oh yeah – and it’s free.
Here on planet earth – it’s another story. The mere mortals of the drilling
industry must perform a juggling act that involves what we want in a rig,
what’s available, and what we actually are willing to pay for. Drilling
contractors have their wish lists, and the manufacturers that can fulfill those
desires enjoy a competitive advantage. And the manufacturers have R&D
departments working hard to come up with equipment that will give their
drilling contractor customers an advantage – at reasonable
expense.
Everybody is doing their best, so where are we at? What’s the state-of-the-art?
I posed these questions to some of the leading rig manufacturers, and this
article series reports on what they have to say about the latest innovations
that are having an impact in the drilling marketplace.
“What we’re focused on – from a developmental standpoint – is what we call
‘smart iron,’” says Ed Breiner, president and CEO of Schramm Inc. “We came up
with the i-Control, which basically is computer-assisted
drilling.”
Breiner elaborates: “We have the 455i rig that has two joystick controls for
activating different functions; those two joysticks replace about 18 valve
handles. That product has been out to our customers for about a year and a half
now on a demo basis, and we began selling the product in 2007. A group of new
owners is coming in to give us some feedback on their experiences. A lot of
information out there gets whispered down the alley, and by the time you get
the message, it invariably gets confused. Obviously, our people are on this
equipment and have spent time with these contractors, but this meeting is to
get them in front of the management team, and make sure we completely
understand because that this technology is critical to our business. We have a
patent pending on it. Whenever you get a machine out in the field and in the
hands of the contractors, you learn something.”
And as the envelope gets pushed further and further, information begets more
information. “With the i-Control, we’ll be able to get key communications back
about the condition of the machine so we can anticipate failure,” Breiner
explains. “Instead of the customer calling us and telling us he needs to
replace a trashed main pump, we’ll be able to call him ahead of time and let
him know that the temperature of his main pump indicates that there’s
particulate in the system, and it has X amount of hours to live, so we’re
shipping our a new one right away. We feel that this communication and
monitoring is important, with feedback going to the rig operator as well as the
home office. We were on the Internet looking at one of our 455i drilling rigs
in North
Carolina, and we were seeing the feed rate and the rotation –
the same thing the operator was looking at. We were doing that with cellular
technology. We’re putting more information in the hands of the operator, and
now they’re asking questions they didn’t know to ask before. The developers
don’t have all the answers, but we certainly have some of the answers. And
sometimes, we anticipate an answer to a question that isn’t asked. Innovation
is one of our core strategies; we want to be leaders.”
The
good folks at Atlas Copco also stress the work-smart approach in their
offerings to the industry. Alex Grant, product manager for water well and oil
and gas drill rigs points to Atlas Copco’s on-demand hydraulic system. “The
whole principle behind that,” Grant explains, “is the hydraulics will operate
cooling fan for the oil cooler and engine cooler systems. It also will run the
hydraulic controls. What it basically is doing is load-sensing. So, if we don’t
have a great load on the hydraulic system, then the engine will reduce its
idling speed to match the demand.
“We also have a variable-speed cooling fan that also will reduce the speed of
the engine. If conditions are cooler, there’s no need to run that cooling fan
flat out, and you can save some fuel consumption. Of course, the amount of
savings depends on how far down the hole is going and the weather conditions,
but mostly it comes down to the individual operators and how they run their
rigs. And you can save even more by disengaging the compressor as you’re
tripping out the hole. But basically, the operator does what he normally does,
and the system will take care of itself. The sensors in the hydraulic system
will do everything for him; there are no manual adjustments to be made. The
sensors look at the loading on the hydraulics, and then determine the lowest
speed at which the engine can run. Let’s say the operator is using the main hoist
winch. The system will determine that there is a high demand on the hydraulics,
and the engine speed will increase to meet that demand.”
Atlas Copco engineers also have been able to increased the pressure within the
hydraulic system. “That means we can put a 30K winch on a rig, and the
footprint is the same size as the 18K winch that we had on our previous
generation of rigs. So there’s more power but no increase in weight,” Grant
notes. “That’s been available since the middle of 2007. There are nearly 20 of
these systems out in the field at the moment. The feedback from the operators
in the field has been good, and there’s been some fine-tuning as a result. When
you’re pushing the envelope, you certainly expect some of that. A lot of what
we have on the drawing board at the minute is refinements of what we have
already done, which was a big step.”
Always on the lookout: “One of our main goals is to reduce service intervals;
we’re working to get longer lives from the existing components wherever
possible. We’re also looking at ergonomics. Can we get the controls to where
the operator can position the controls to preferred heights or angles? Can we
swing those controls around to the side of the rig and keep the operators out
of the way of the drilling a little more? It’s a balancing act for
manufacturers – we can come up with all sorts of stuff, but what does it cost
and what does it weigh?”
We’re not quite there yet, but someday, we might just be able to drill with
that most-righteous iron they use to make holes up in heaven.
ND
The Latest In Drill Rig Technology -- Part 1
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