Brock Yordy: 

Good morning. Welcome to episode 143 of The Driller Newscast, your update on all things that innovate, impact, and inspire the drilling and construction industry. I'm your host, Brock Yordy, and this week in the news we're heading to EPA and OSHA and the science agencies that support them to protect all things environment and all things people. This week's feature we're heading down under to talk with Soren Soe, who is a coiled tubing rig designer. He has a long legacy of developing rigs around the world and I am super excited for him to break down how coiled tubing rigs work in the industrial applications and what we can get into. Let's now jump into the news for this week.

In the news, we've got to talk about the EPA, OSHA, we can talk about NOAA, we can talk about the USGS. We've been seeing a lot of things in the news.

It's Wednesday, February 19th and there have been a lot of discussions about overreach and overextended budgets. And when it comes to this, all of these things are bipartisan and have been bipartisan for a very long time, over 50 years. And so I think it's time we break down exactly what is going on with an executive branch agency such as the Environmental Protection Agency, which is a regulatory agency that Congress authorized to write regulations explaining the critical details necessary to implement environmental laws. The EPA conducts research by performing a wide range of studies including laboratory experiments, field investigations, surveys, and epidemiological studies focusing on various environmental aspects like air quality, water quality, climate change, and the effects on pollutants on humans, their health, microorganisms, and their health. And it often utilizes data from monitoring stations and collaborating with universities and other research institutions to gather the best available scientific information to support environmental policy decisions.

So as we see grants and loans frozen, as we see the USAID frozen and ripped apart, how does this impact us? We see environmental impacts around the world. We study them. We understand our small 300-plus million population versus a population of eight, 900 million into a billion. We collaborate. And I want you to think about how these policies are made because the alternative is Congress passes a bill into a law. I wanted to call it a ball. What they're having right now is a ball out there. No, it's a law that makes it so that we have some sort of repercussions to the impact to anything that could possibly impact Mother Earth or Americans. And I want you to think about how these policy decisions help impact air pollution, water quality, hazardous waste, pesticides, climate change, and the impacts to people in these environmental exposures, these research entities.

As we look at the CDC and NIOSH and universities doing research and all of these collaborative impacts, this is how we get to proposing a rule. And then once we have a rule, we open it up for public comment that's right from the companies that'll be impacted to the people that have been impacted to states, to the entire piece of what has made us a great country and constitution of understanding. Every voice has an opportunity to share, as we saw with the Waters of the United States two years ago, as we've seen with PFAS and Municipal Water. These are big pieces to everything. And then once all of these pieces have been taken into account, that's when the final rule is discussed again and gets put into the Federal Register and becomes a code of federal regulation. 

The EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency — not the environmental advocate for what we think is right right now, but protection agency — their team, the people that we put in place for the last 50-plus years since Nixon started it as our astronauts looked down and said, "Man, look at the amount of pollution we have going on!" I want you to think about the eighties, the sci-fi movies, the talks we've had. This team protects us to ensure clean water, clean air, and the prevention of catastrophic toxic events and protection of underserved communities that major polluters have exploited.

By the way, as we talk about environmental justice and underserved communities, I want you to understand that we have many big cities around the United States. Many of these environmental justice communities are less than 10,000 people and often can be as small as 2,500 people. So rural America has the waste dump that's gone in rural America, that sees Parkersville, West Virginia and down river. And as it impacts, as we see PFAS, as we see nitrates, as we see phosphates, as we see air quality, this isn't a color situation. And when I say that red or blue, this is a red, white, and blue situation of protection and we all deserve to be protected and these are the things we need to think about as these pieces come together.

Alright, let's jump into OSHA, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. It's a federal agency overseen by the Department of Labor that sets and enforces workplace safety standards. OSHA also provides training and assistance to help employers create safe and healthy workplaces. OSHA identifies hazards, gathers data, and develops rules just like the EPA where a rule is developed. Then we have public comment and we have more research. And NIOSH, which is under the CDC, those folks that maybe you've seen the NIOSH Heat Index app or NIOSH sound Decibel meter, they're the ones that determine that a time weighted value of eight hours over 85 decibels will start damaging our hearing. And I can think about that as my father got down to listen to my son with his left ear, the offside ear to the rig. These are the pieces that we need to think about. So what does OSHA do? It sets and enforces standards for construction, agricultural, maritime, and general industry. OSHA requires employers to provide a workplace free of serious recognized hazards. OSHA provides training and outreach education and compliance assistance. Dave and I have talked about it many times. Dave Bowers, great safety advocate, great champion for the International Operators Union and Drilling. OSHA's goal is to ensure safe and healthy working conditions for employees across various industries.

Many, many pieces here come back to how NIOSH and how universities and research is done. Research is not generating revenue. We have to have science-based research funding in order to know how many people have lost fingers on this type of task or how many people have been impacted, how many individuals. It's about protecting and educating workers. It's about protecting and educating employers. It's about preventing catastrophic events that could lead to death, protection for workers who have been exploited by companies creating dangerous working conditions. I want you to go and look at Labor Day and understand why we have a Labor Day and then I want you to high five. Every individual in an operating union was developed because employers were exploiting workers in hours in safety, in time weighted value as we consider, is this going to be a local or state situation? I want you to think about black lung or I want you to think about mesothelioma. I want you to think about asbestos exposure and all I've talked about right now is fine particulates being breathed into our lungs and the time-weighted value before you realize it's too late and you're slowly suffocating. The same as absorbing chemicals or the exposures. There's a reason we have executive branch agencies to do research, to go out and get public comment, to champion these things. And it's not to create red tape. It's to protect us. It's to protect mother earth. It's to protect states and local communities and your family. That's what this is about. So as we start talking more and more about where we need champions to protect us that aren't generating revenue are just looking to improve the possibility for us all to be safe and profitable, it's these individuals. I want you to think about that.

For this week's feature, we're heading down under to talk with Soren Soe and learn about what he has done in the drilling industry to continue to advocate and innovate.

This is part one and we're going to get into his background, what got him to where he is today, and just scratch the surface about coiled tubing rigs. In 144, we will jump into coiled tubing rigs and the questions that we all want to get answered and understand how they can value and benefit our company. I hope you enjoy it. I'm very excited about the industry. I have a new industry friend that I met at the New York Geothermal Conference in October in Manhattan, and he is based in Australia and is innovating the drilling industry, but just like many of us in this drilling industry have a long and storied career of how do you get from the beginning to where you are now. And so I'm just going to open it right up.

Good afternoon. What time is it over there, Soren?

Soren Soe:

It's 9:00 AM here in South Australia. And compared to where you are, it's sunny and summer here now. Yeah.

Brock Yordy:

Yeah. It is dark here and I don't think as North Americans, we really congratulate the time difference and change, but we'll just jump right into it. Soren, go ahead and introduce yourself and where you're at.

Soren Soe:

Thank you, Brock. Yeah, my name is Soren and I'm one of the co-founders of company CoilRig, which is based here in South Australia. We are, you can say, building and developing drilling rigs for the geothermal industry predominantly in the USA. Yeah, my background is drill rigs and building drill rigs, and I've been doing that for pretty much all of my career.

Brock Yordy:

So we're a tribal self-taught industry that's full of trial and error and sometimes we get equipment and we take it to the back of the shop and we grab a hammer and a cutting torch and we improve it. But that doesn't really get back to designs, drawings and an ability to scale. So first, how did you get into the drilling industry in designing drill rigs?

Soren Soe:

Yeah, that's a good question. And a long time ago, I'm a mechanical engineer coming out of university in Denmark, in Europe, I had my first jobs in cranes. So lightweight designs for, you can say truck-mounted equipment. So everything about making things compact and lightweight and user-friendly. So that was my first couple of years out of uni. And then it's in the mid - late nineties. Long time ago, the world was in black and white. I started working at the only company in Denmark that actually built drilling rigs and they were building all sorts of drill rigs, of course for the domestic market, but also for export. So I got exposed to the drilling world at that point in time, and I was fortunate because we were doing everything you talked about going into the workshop. There was a very short turnaround time from an idea from a client until we actually built the equipment and we had to have pretty much everything.

So every detail of a drill rig was pretty much in our hands to improve. And it was everything from water well drilling to mineral exploration to geotechnical stuff. So there was a great variety of products in that range. And being a very agile and small company, you get exposed to a lot and you get a lot of responsibility very early. It's not that you're sitting in a corner looking at one aspect, now you're thrown into it. My first day on the job, I was asked to build my first drill rig, and I was just given that responsibility with, of course, guidance of the experienced persons there, but a good year later and 35 or whatever, 60,000 pounds of material later, there was a big double master drill rig and ending up having me on the levers, trialing it out and making it work. But yeah, that was a very steep learning curve. 

After that, I progressed in that company, ended up managing it, and we were involved with a company that is very much US-involved, Boart Longyear, a big company. They came around and bought the IP of a new range of drill rigs that we've developed. These were fairly advanced for the time. We're talking early 2000s. We were starting to have some electronics in it and had that, you can say, making them reliable for some of the models. But anyway, we got partly taken over and I was given the opportunity to look after all the capital equipment in Europe. So moved to Poland for some years, had responsibility for a factory there with just under 350 employees, building drill rigs, all sorts of drill rigs. Again, implementing the technologies from Western Europe into Poland at that point in time, is a really good story. We had a lot of success doing that, upgrading the products, the output of the factory, the quality. So I think that was a really good match at that point in time.

And then, yeah, drilling has taken me around the world. I moved to China after that, got involved with one of the biggest companies in Denmark, A.P. Moller - Maersk, was doing oil and gas drilling and exploration as well. And that's where I got introduced to coiled tubing drilling, which was a new thing in that aspect. But to try to cut it a little bit short, in 2013, I moved to Australia to assist the minerals or mining industry here working out if this thing, coiled tubing drilling, would work in a mineral exploration context. And have been here in South Australia since, and 10, 11 years later, there's proof now that coiled tubing drilling definitely works in different settings very efficiently, and it has some differences to conventional drilling and definitely some advantages. That was a long story, Brock, but there you are.

Brock Yordy:

No, thank you for that. Because as we look at our rigs and our industry, we are slow to adopt technology and part of that is what we're using in one region or one area. If it's successful, if it isn't broken, don't fix it. And I think from Denmark to Poland, to China, to Australia, before we jump into coiled tubing, thinking of drilling and developing equipment globally, what are some of the lessons you've learned from customers or feedback? How do you make adjustments from how maybe they want to drill in a massive country like China that could have every different type of scenario possible to a smaller country like Denmark that relatively could have some changes, but not the changes you could have from being in China?

Soren Soe:

You are right, and there are probably major differences, right? Because it's a very different culture when you go around the world. And that is to how you operate, what is expected of operations, how you can say organization, treat their drillers. I can't help it. I have a passionate heart for helping drillers, not the drilling supervisor. I'll do what I can to help him. I will do everything I can to make drilling a viable business option for the company because it has to be profitable to work. But at heart, I'm actually profoundly caring about the health and safety and what the driller is exposed to. And you said going from different countries, you can say Western Europe has different standards than Eastern Europe at that time, and Asia has different standards again, and Africa again has different standards on how you do things.

And automation might start in one part of the world and then transition across. But health and safety for one thing, right? Slinging drill rods and being around the compressed air, and it is all managed differently. What I've tried to do in the different locations I've been, and you can't come in, it's a very conservative industry. You can't change everything, but you can influence health and safety. And this might not be a super relevant example, but even you can say introducing a way of safe thinking in terms of improving productivity. That's probably always been something that I've been passionate about. In one end of the world, it's safety systems and guardings. In other parts of the world, it might be replacing a bamboo ladder with something else. So yeah, there's all sorts of approaches to it. But I agree with what you said first. We are in a very conservative drilling industry in a lot of aspects, and I allow myself to be hard on the drilling industry because I've been part of it. So I'm hard on myself saying that as well. So yeah, I'll take responsibility for some of it.

Brock Yordy:

Yeah, our industry, we go from densely-populated areas we're drilling in to some of the most extreme remote. Australia isn't as big as China, but when you look from where you could be manufacturing to where they could be mining in Perth, those locations, there is no fast emergency response. It's the responsibility of being smart and mitigating as much risk as possible because a minor injury can turn into a major catastrophe.

Soren Soe:

It pretty much always does. And I mean, it is also treated differently. I mean, here in Australia, health and faith is very high on the very agenda. And if you are working with, you can say, the big mining companies, they all have their good safety standards and procedures. So a small injury can shut down a drilling operation very easily. So it's a very big focus. And I mean, there's a lot of good things going on in the drilling industry now. There are a good read of where the injuries happened and it's constantly monitored. I mean, one of the big things has for a long time been and still is, hand injuries from handling drill rods. There's a lot of good work going on in terms of rod handlers that takes some of it away. But we still see some hand injuries and lost time because of that, even with rod handlers moving rods around in those. And another big thing is setting up, if you have a lot of equipment to set up, there's injuries related to that. And if you have a drill rig with drill rods, you need the drill rod, you need the rod handler. There's a lot of equipment that needs to move around, and there's always possibilities for injuries. And it is the driller and the offsiders and whoever's there that are bearing the grunt of that if something goes wrong.

Brock Yordy:

I couldn't agree more, hand injuries lead our industry by 80%. It's wild to think how much we actually handle tooling versus actual drilling. And then you get into a repetition and you get thinking about other things because you're doing the same thing. So you may physically be there, but mentally you have decided the risk isn't that bad and you daydream or something else happens. And that's when we see those catastrophic events because we do a lot of making up and taking apart, tripping in and out tooling.

Soren Soe:

And it is dangerous. And you can say still, in a lot of drill rigs, also in the geothermal and definitely the geothermal drill rigs that we were building in the early two thousands, right? There's one person at the operational panel and there's another person on the drill rod. So you've got two persons that actually have to be a-hundred-percent coordinated all the time for an injury not to happen. Of course, there's things you can build into the machine to make it safer, but there's still one person doing one thing and another person, another. So it is just intriguingly engineered to be a little bit unsafe from the starting point. And on top of that, you've got compressed air maybe, or compressed fluid, or all that stuff that's around you and additives and what have you.

Brock Yordy:

Yeah, it's the Australian Drilling Manual and the safety standards have definitely helped push our industry from cages to situational awareness of our hands to just the country of Australia, having lots of deadly other things out in remote locations and in the United States with OSHA, we talk about anything that crushes, reciprocates, rotates, has a great degree of thrust or pull that you need emergency response within two to three minutes of a location. And we have lots of remote locations to the states yet, and that's not possible.

Soren Soe:

Same thing here, I mean, in every drilling operation. Also here in Australia, you work based on a risk assessment and you can have the code of conduct and the good recommendation, but each drill site would have to have a risk assessment and a risk management plan and all of it. But you're right, if something really bad happens remotely, it is not a matter of minutes. You can do the response you can do onsite. But for something really bad, that, thank God, does not happen very, very, very often at all. But yeah, you're right. It's very remote in a lot of the exploration settings here.

Brock Yordy:

Thank you for joining us for episode 143 of The Driller Newscast. Go right now and check out thedriller.com. There's lots of active things going on in our industry that we need to be paying attention to. Johnny O', our editor, is hard at work. We have all of our contributors out there that are working professionally and actively creating, and we need you too, if you've got a great story, some insight, some change. We as a drilling industry are very nimble and smart and innovative, and we need that more now than ever. Again, go to thedriller.com, check it out. 

In episode 144, we're going to jump into the technical aspects and the value of coil, tubing, rigs, and the insight that Soren has to share.

Everybody have a safe and productive week. Cheers.