Machine over Man
Out on the oil patch, opportunity comes to the firm that can do the job more safely, cheaply and quickly. “The motivation for technical innovation has always been threefold,” says Mark Salkeld, president and chief executive officer of the Petroleum Services Association of Canada (PSAC) in Calgary. “First and always foremost, companies are striving to improve safety. Second, to reduce costs and improve margins, and third, to gain the edge that will win them the next contract.”
Salkeld served in the oil and gas business for 36 years before joining PSAC, the national trade association of the upstream petroleum industry. He started as a mechanic on drilling rigs before working his way up the ranks through maintenance, human resources, safety, operations, procurement and back to school for business and management degrees. He has seen oil at $20 a barrel and at $150 a barrel; he has also witnessed the oil business at its height and nadir.
When Salkeld started in the sector, crews would set up around hydraulic drilling rigs in their campers and school buses for the whole summer. “It was like a gypsy camp,” he recounts. “Many men brought their families along.” Today, with modern drill bit technology, high-tech rigs can eat through 2,500 metres in two-and-a-half days, and crews are always on the move. “I expect we will see totally robotic rigs in the field in the not-too-distant future.”
Not like the old days
“It is rare to see a worker even touch a piece of pipe on one of our automated drilling rigs,” says Bob Geddes, president and chief operating officer of Ensign Energy Services Inc. in Calgary. Ensign’s design team has worked to engineer out any manual intervention in the drilling process. For example, an automated skate-catwalk system brings the drill pipe up to rig floor, where the top drive grabs it and pulls it up, and an “iron-roughneck” makes the connection and lowers the pipe back to drilling.
Founded in Western Canada in the late 1980s, Ensign currently runs some 200 rigs across North America and around the world. Ten years ago, the company launched a $4 billion building program, adding state-of-the-art rigs, better controls and new features. “We design them to be faster and safer by testing technical innovations in the field and then make them part of the next generation of rigs,” Geddes says. “An $8 million old-style rig costs $20-to-25 million today, but drills a well in a quarter of the time of conventional rigs.”
The modern Automated Drilling Rig (ADR®) is not only highly mechanized; it is also more versatile. Using a hydraulic system, the self-walking ADR can crawl along the well pad to drill a series of wells 25 feet apart. And if relocation to a different site is necessary, the rig can be broken down and set up two to three times faster than the old models, cutting well-construction costs and improving safety.
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