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Oil and Gas Upstream
Tyler Rice, SPM Oil and gas, continuous pumping and linear pressure control | Ep 332
00:24:54
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Oil and gas production is the union of natural systems with advanced science and complex engineering. Smart people across the globe create this remarkable place we call Upstream. And each day brings a new challenge.
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This is the Oil and Gas Upstream podcast where we look at how these
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systems come together and learn from the people who make it happen.
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Welcome to Oil and Gas Upstream. I'm Elena Melkert, your host. Some of you know me as the former Director for Oil and Gas Upstream Research at the US Department of Energy while I retired from the doe, founded Energia Consulting and joined the Oil and Gas Global Network as a podcast host. Our sponsor is IFS Upstream. Teams are being asked to cut costs, boost production and digitize operations all at once. IFS delivers industrial AI that connects the entire oil and gas value chain on one platform. Land accounting, production assets and operations, helping companies reduce downtime, stay ahead of what's happening across their businesses, and optimize assets faster. Learn more@ifs.com Today's guest is Tyler Rice, Pressure Control Sales Manager with SPM Oil and Gas. Tyler, thanks for joining us today.
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Yeah, thanks for having me. Good to be here.
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B
Great. We're looking forward to hearing what you have to share. Pressure Control Sales Manager Tell us a little bit about yourself, your background and then we get into the company.
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Yeah, sure. So I started in oil and gas roughly 20 years ago. I went to school at University of Utah and following that I got into a role as a technician up in the Wyoming Jonah field. So I started up there doing various completions projects, held a number of different roles for a company that did frac, wire line, some drilling and even some production work. So I was able to get a pretty diverse amount of experience in that time and throughout that time with that company, they bounced me all over the US as well. So just about every major play in every key basin in the United States, I had some kind of experience and which was good. So again, it was just, it was really nice to be able to have that opportunity to travel around, see the different types of oil and gas wells across the US and really sharpen my skills as a, as an oil and gas professional at that time.
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Before you go into that, the oil and gas. Was that something. How'd you get attractive to oil and gas? You had thought about that?
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Yeah. So great question. I didn't know anything about oil and gas and I knew I wanted to be an engineer. So when I was in school, like a lot of college students, I was running a little tight on on money and funds. School's pretty expensive and So I ran across a friend of mine who I went to high school with, and he was driving a very nice car. And I was like, man, how do you, how did you, how do you afford this car? I'm scraping by for nine bucks an hour here and struggling in. And he was like, I'm working in the oil fields. I'm like, oh, okay. And I, the only thing I knew about the oil fields was a pump jack, which I'd seen in movies and whatnot. Long story short, he asked me, would you like a job? I'm like, sure, that sounds good. He's like, can you drive? I lived in Salt Lake City at the time, Utah. Can you drive up to Wyoming tomorrow for an interview? I'm like, yeah, why not? I can do that. So I jumped in my truck, drove up to Wyoming. Very informal ad hoc interview. And the hiring manager at the time asked me if I could start the next day. I let him know, I said, hey, I don't have any clothes or anything with me. He's, I don't worry, we'll take care of that.
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That and you're not allowed to wear your clothes anyway. We got special clothes for you.
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Exactly. Long story short, he threw me in a truck with a supervisor. They handed me a bunch of coveralls, went to Walmart, bought some work clothes and some steel toes and the rest is all history. So I went straight to a job site the next day and had absolutely no idea what I was walking into. But I fell in love with the industry. I loved the work ethic of it all. I loved how fast paced it is. It's constantly changing. There's always opportunity to learn different things. Being on the production side for a little while, I got a little bored with that. So it was very easy transition over to completions or drilling or anything else I wanted to do. So there was lots of opportunity to cross train and better myself all the time. And you meet great people. This is a very, it's a very work centric community. Everybody's very tightly bound and, and it's one of my favorite things. It's a small world. I run into people all the time that I may not have seen for 15 years, I may have worked with in the Northeast somewhere and I run into them in the Permian, Texas. Yeah, no, that's the long and short of it all.
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Absolutely. And I got into the oil business by accident also. I got married and moved to Bakersfield and the rest is history. Bakersfield is all about oil and gas, so I understand completely. And of Course, that's why even though I retired, I'm still doing things in the industry. Because founding a small consultancy and doing the podcast because you're right, it gets into your blood. Definitely. It's a special culture and you value that because it's not every culture. So you appreciate something good when you see it and you find it. And of course, the brain candy. I am an engineer, petroleum engineer, and so the brain candy, I just couldn't walk away from it. There's nothing else that fills you. And when I talk with young people, especially girls, I said any major that you want to go into in school, there's a need for that skill set in the oil and gas sector and you might be surprised, but even something like literature or English, a specialty in literature, whatever, just the need for communication and being able to explain things in different ways to different people that they would understand. It's just a very diverse industry, but you wouldn't know it until you get inside of it and very technologically sophisticated. So tell us about your company, SPM Oil and Gas and how you got into that area and you specializing it sounds like in pressure control.
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Sure, yeah. SPM Oil and Gas has been around for several decades. A lot of people might know us as Weir. We've gone through a couple of different name changes and acquisitions over the years, like many. So most recently they were purchased by caterpillar back in 2020 actually. And most people know Caterpillar as construction equipment, backhoes, engines, things like that. Right. So a lot of people don't know just how involved Caterpillar is in the oil and gas space. And SPM Oil and Gas, this business is really how they is really at the forefront of all of that. Right. Specifically in the pressure control part of that business. Again, kind of like I mentioned before, I got in to various different roles throughout my career and the one thing I really enjoyed doing the most was pressure control. It just seemed like it was the fastest evolving. There was always new challenges and it's. There's always high demand for it. And no matter what, if we're going to fracture wells, if we're going to put wells on production, we have to have this surface pressure control equipment on site to do. I really fell in love with that piece of it. And a couple of years back, I actually worked for a competitor company of SPM Oil and Gas for a long time, for about 18 years. And I guess, long story short, Caterpillar reached out to me to recruit me over and they had some new challenges and they were. Had this vision of how they wanted to meet the oil and gas industry's needs from really the engine all the way through the wellhead and wellbore itself sounded great. I love, like I said before, I love new challenges. And so I thought about it for a while and I accept it. How do you say no to something like that?
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Yeah, absolutely. I'm going to ask you some more questions here just because not everyone who listens to the podcast is a subject matter expert. In oil and gas, there's different areas where pressure control comes into play and the reason we care about it is because we work in high pressure situations with respect to the physics of it. Also, there's stress, high pressure, but the point is it's the physics of it and it can be very dangerous. Do you want to talk a little bit about just the different applications of pressure control, just as a survey for people who may not be familiar?
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Sure, yeah. Anytime anything comes out of the formations in the earth, it's typically going to be coming back at us at higher pressure, sometimes high temperatures, very volatile fluids, times sand proppant that we put down hole. We're going to use pressure control in just about every stage of the process in some way, shape or form. So on the drilling side, we're going to have some pressure control for any kickbacks that come up from the well while they're drilling it. On the completion side, which is where you're going to see the majority of it, we have to be able to direct the high pressure fluids and sand down hole from the frac pumps and the blenders and everything like that. So there's going to be a lot of fluid and sand and everything pumped at very high rates, at very high pressures on surface. And we need to be able to control that. Not only direct it down hole to the proper well, but also protect any people on site, protect the environment, things of that nature. And then if you continue on downstream from there, of course, when things are wells are put onto production, we still have surface exposure and so there's still going to be piping and there's still going to be a need to really contain and direct that flow to the pipeline where it can be sold to the community.
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Yeah, yeah, absolutely. That was perfect. That was perfect. It really gives people a sense of how it's not just one controller. If you will tell us a little bit about how you assess the situation, perhaps, or some of the products that your company presents in the different applications. Is it all just hydraulic fracturing that you're involved in or every Aspect or give us a sense of that.
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Sure. Yeah. So we got to start back at the beginning of the process again. On the drilling side, SPM globally, we have service centers just about every major play across the world. So not just in the US but anywhere where there's oil or gas, essentially across the globe. We start with the wellhead process. Right. SPM does have a division. We have our own API6A facility in Indonesia. And we manufacture the actual drilling surface wellhead, which is essentially where the well casing itself is hung off to for the oil and gas. So we manufacture that and we do sell and service a lot of that stuff across the globe, going from there to the actual hydraulic fracturing process, essentially. And like I mentioned before, everyone's familiar with the fact that we build the cat engines for the frac pumps that pump a downhole. We also SPM also make, manufactures and services the pumps that actually pump the fluids down the well. So between there and the surface well head that we've already sold and installed on the drilling string. Right. And the production string, we will. There will be a bunch of essentially API 6A iron in between there typically, or unionized flow line. Right. So we manufacture and sell all of that as well. So between the pump and what gets directed down the wellbore, that is our main focus as a. As it sits today. And the reasoning for that really is just because that's just the efficiency metrics and the demands in the industry seem to be just really focused on that little piece of the pie. Right. We're constantly looking to get more efficient, we're constantly looking to make things safer. And really it's one of the most expensive parts of the process. When you're talking about overall spend for an exploration and production company to produce these wells, how do we make it more economical and how do we get it done faster and safer?
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Yeah, yeah. And the kinds of pressure that we're talking about, it's high pressure. It's very high pressure. I'm trying to think of an analogy I'm coming up with. Perhaps in the hydraulic fracturing arena, we're talking about injecting fluid and sand. It's faster, it's harder, it's higher pressure than sandblasting, I think. What might people relate to give us a piece of that hose that the pressures you're controlling with your equipment, right?
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Yeah, exactly. So everybody can picture in their mind a garden hose, right. So if you turn on a faucet and you have your little control valve and you imagine if you have garden Hoses, you're trickling water out and then you open it all the way and it's just blowing out the other end. Right. So that little bit of water pressure can even harm a person at that, at those low pressures. That is if you get someone in the eye, something like that. Right. Kind of gives you an idea there. And then on the hydraulic fracturing process, we're pushing upwards of 120 barrels a minute through this piping. Right. Which people aren't familiar with what a barrel would essentially equate to. That could be upwards of 5,000 gallons a minute. Right. So very high volume fluid can be treating pressures will, can be upwards of around 15,000 psi. So very high pressure. You combine that with tens of thousands of hydraulic horsepower that are actually pushing all this fluid through this pressure control equipment on surface, down the wellbore and you get very, I hate to say chaotic, but it's really what it is. You're controlling chaos. Right. So it's. How do we keep all of that chaos contained to where it's not exposed to people, it's not exposed to the environment, and we can effectively direct it down hole where it needs to go ultimately into the reservoir.
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That's good. Tell us about some of the tools or products that are especially valuable and important in protecting people and the environment from these high pressures.
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Sure. Yeah. And actually I'll give a little bit of history real quick too roughly. It's about 10 years ago, maybe a little bit longer at this point. We used to traditionally frack through just a steel pipe as unionized flow iron. A 3 inch and 4 inch type pipe, which is basically kind of a picture like a screw and a nut, thread and a nut. They would just thread together to be hammered up with a sledgehammer. And you'd have kind of a rubber O ring to keep everything together. And that was great for a number of years. But as things became more and more demanding, we started seeing the industry shift more towards these multi well pads where we're not just trying to frack one well on a site anymore, we're trying to frack several, several of them through various zipper frac type setups and operations.
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And zipper frac is just a style of fracking where you don't do the next lateral. You skip over and go left and right, kind of like a zipper, kind of like a zigzag.
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That's exactly right. So instead of just completing vertical stages, coming up of either lateral or vertical stages, whatever, on a single day, you would bounce back and forth between 1 2, sometimes several wells and basically frac, whichever stage information that the frac order and the reservoir engineering deemed would be next. So it's a more efficient process. It also allowed them to target certain zones and formations a little better.
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Yeah.
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Great.
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Okay, tell us some more about pressure control and what you like to do there.
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Yeah, so I show this following on what I was just saying. So we used to do things when we got to the zipper fracking point. So this unionized flow iron location, really, it was starting to have issues. Right. Like we were starting to realize that they just wasn't going to be the most effective way to do things anymore. So essentially, if you went out to these sites back in the day, anyone involved in the industry will remember that it looked like spaghetti string everywhere. Right. There was just piping all over the place. And you would have an army of people who would show up swinging sledgehammers to get all the stuff put together. So it wasn't very effective. And you'd have hundreds and hundreds of connections that are very prone to leaks. So we were constantly shutting down frac sites and hammering up leaks, replacing O rings, all these things. A lot of non productive time, which is not something we really want. So we transitioned over to this linear pressure control model which is essentially, we've gotten rid of 80% of all the connections on location, all of this spaghetti string iron, and we've really gone down to these large bore, single line or single, sorry, single type bore setups where you have some 7 inch API spooling equipment and things of that nature that are put together which are much more robust. You're getting rid of the unionized nut and thread type connections that are prone to leaking. And you're going with a really, it's like a permanent flange connection that we've made semi permanent. So we go and rig these jobs up and it's just a lot more robust. It lasts a lot longer, they don't leak. We really were able to do these zipper fracking type operations and remove all of that non productive time that would normally happen.
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Is it fair to say that we were using what we could almost buy at the hardware store in terms of the pipes and the connection, but we had to move into some specialized equipment in order to deal with these high pressures and the potential. Right. Is that a fair thing to say?
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Yeah, and I wouldn't say something we could buy at the hardware store because the piping was engineered and designed specifically for this type of application. So it still was a specialty type of piping. But it just, it was a little. The design for just wasn't really meeting the new demands of the industry.
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Ah, the evolution of the longer, higher pressure frac design. Okay, okay, I'm with you.
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So once we transition to this, more of this linear pressure control model where we've gotten rid of all this, these small 3 and 4 inch piping on location, and we've really streamlined it into the stronger, larger, more robust API6A equipment, we're able to reduce hours and hours of downtime on location, sometimes every day with just typical zipper fracking. And in terms of uptime, we're able to go from say, pumping 12, maybe 14 hours a day of productive pumping time down into the well, upwards of even 20 to 22, 23 hours a day of pumping. So very huge improvements, leaps and bounds over the last decade and just how much we've been able to do in a single day. And of course, being able to do that reduces costs. It puts more wells on production every year for our customers and just reduces npt. There's no more exposure to people in the red zone that are going in there to hammer up connections. So you have this major safety factor improvement that comes along with it as well. And again, as we've evolved and we've been able to achieve these efficiencies, we start to look at things in the industry in general and how do we make it even better? How do we make things more efficient? Is 22 hours a day the limit? Or can we get to a continuous pumping model where it's almost perpetual and we can show up on site and we can pump until the well's done and take a job that may have once upon a time, taken us 35, 40 days to complete a pad. And maybe we can do it in two weeks or less now. And that's the direction we're heading today.
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Oh, my gosh, I had no idea. I had no idea. Just keep going along, talking about what you're able to do for the industry and the benefits thereof. But it's the idea that it's hard enough to crack rock, it's hard enough to do that, and then we've got these very long laterals and then it's not just pumping sand and water there. There are different stages. Do you have to go in and come out, and go in and come out? Is that part of the time as well? As well as, I want to say, continuous? But that piece of the work that is associated with that high pressure that breaks through the rock and creates the fractures and props them up with them. So tell us a little bit more about that. It's non trivial that like what's the longest frac that you've been on that you're aware of, your company has been working on?
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A
Sure. Now could you define longest frac a little more Just as in the.
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I'm sorry, the longest lateral for which you want to create a number of stages of fracking. I guess I didn't ask that correctly. That's fair.
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Yeah. That's kind of part of the issue. Right. Is again looking at economics. A lot of these EFP companies have, have also looked on the drilling side, not just the fracturing side. So the laterals just continue to get longer. I think roughly was it 25 or 30% of all in the Permian, Texas where I'm sitting today actually have 3 to 4 mile laterals now. Right. So these are 3 to 4 miles long. Companies are starting to do horseshoe laterals where they're actually making a U turn and coming back the other direction so they can target more more of the target zone as opposed to having.
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B
That's huge because that force has to turn. How do you turn that and have it obey the turn? How does that work?
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Yeah, I can't really speak to it on the directional drilling side. That's not my area of interest.
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Okay, that's fair.
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Yeah. I can tell you that from a fracturing, hydraulic fracturing point of view, it just means longer laterals. We have to pump a higher pressure. So you do start to see. So there's some friction throughout the whole process. Right. So it means higher pressures for us, it means longer time on jobs, more stages, which means more wear and tear on equipment. So we really have to keep that in mind when we're designing our next gen equipment. Right. On how we can really meet the demands of this new efficient operating model. Not only are we having three to four mile laterals and U turns and all kinds of other things that these companies are wanting to do now, but we're also wanting to do it faster. We want to do it in less time. So we don't want to spend 30 days on a job anymore. We want to do it in four days. And so that's where the continuous pumping comes in. So back to the linear pressure control model. Once we got to there, another trend that took off on the completion side in order to make these operational or to make operations a little more efficient was we're going from zipper fracs to what they're calling simultaneous fragging. Our simulfrac or trimal Frac. And what that essentially means is instead of having one frac crew on a job, you may have two to three, even four that are pumping through different lines and fracturing, hydraulic fracturing. Basically two, three or even four wells at the exact same time.
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B
Wow.
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We're doing that. And again, the linear pressure control model really set us up for success there. Because if we were doing all of this with the older style, again spaghetti string type iron, right. It would just, it would not be practical at all. It just, there would be thousands and thousands of feet of this off the ground and we'd be chasing NPT all day, every day. Again, it just really, the evolution of it really set us up for success in these higher demanding applications. Applications with SimoFrac and TrimoFrac Now. And of course the next phase of this, which is already started to trend in the industry, is just the continuous pumping model. How do we prevent us from being able to shut down on site at all? We want to pump for a week straight without ever shutting pumps down. Right. So we're not going to be bleeding off pressure at all. We're just going to be pumping stages with these simulfrac type setups until the wells are done. And again, that's shrinking our operational time on site from again 30 days down to 1412. And these are on multi well paths, pumping hundreds of stages away.
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B
Oh my gosh. So what's the future you think?
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A
The future, I think. And again, this is where we're heavily focused, right. Is one, how do we continue to make sure that equipment is built robust enough to handle these type of new demanding applications? Because these equipment is seeing millions of pounds of profit now in a single job as opposed to multiple jobs like it used to. So we're seeing a lot more wear and tear. And this is for us on the pressure control side as well as our pump business. We need to design a pump that can handle that kind of stress as well. And then we have to get creative. We have, you know, kind of special configurations and designs of our large warfracked missile that actually is the pressure control piece of equipment that attaches to the pump that actually directs fluid to the, to the frac stacks or the wellbore. Right. We've designed our equipment now with higher grade material specs gone way above and beyond what API6 and calls for just so we can make sure that it's lasting longer. We've designed our missiles now to do what we're calling active pump maintenance, where essentially we don't have to shut down the job anymore. If a pump needs maintenance, valves and seats, things of that nature used to have to shut down. We'd pull a truck out. We do offline maintenance. We're able to do that all active online now in a safe manner. Right. We can continue pumping even if maintenance has to be done. So that's been a huge improvement. And then, of course, following that, the next step is going to be automation. Automation. How do we remove people from the process a little more? How do we make it more intelligent? And how do we get this done more safely? Right. We don't want people in the red zone. We don't want a person opening, closing valves manually anymore. There's hundreds of valves on location sometimes, especially on these larger jobs. So we want to be able to figure out how we can make automation do all that for us and then eventually integrate AI as AI becomes more advanced into the process as well. We're already there today, for the most part. Things are going to continue to evolve, of course, but the goal is you have a single person in a frac data van on a site that can essentially control one or multiple sites while you're fracturing.
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B
Oh, my gosh, I hope there'll be at least two. Even an airplane has two, right?
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A
Yeah, exactly. And the second one might be in a command center somewhere in Houston or Austin.
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Oh, that's right. That's right. We can really be anywhere and everywhere. Isn't that exciting? See, this is why we love this industry, Right? It just continues to advance and move forward and amaze us. Excellent, Excellent. We are running out of time, but I want to be sure you have a chance to share everything with us that you had wanted to share. It's tricky because there are some so many questions I wanted to ask you, but I didn't want to make it too fundamental. But this is just. The hydraulic fracturing is what has made such a difference for energy availability in the United States at lower cost. It's just really fabulous. And we're blessed to be able to have companies who continue to advance the technology like that so that we can do that. Is there something else you wanted to share?
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A
No, that's really. It just really. That's the biggest thing for me. I just want everyone to know that we are heavily focused on meeting all the demands for the industry for today and for five, ten years from now. We want to continue making this industry more advanced and more profitable for everybody, safer for everybody, more efficient. And we believe that we are uniquely positioned within Caterpillar to do that.
- [23:48]
B
Excellent, Excellent. I think you are too. We've seen just so much advancement and it's really made a difference for our country. Energy supply, energy availability, energy security. It wouldn't be possible without the technologies that companies like yours do and do so well. And the safety factor goes without saying how important that is today. Tyler Rice, Pressure Control Sales Manager for SPM Oil and Gas, thank you so much for joining us today.
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A
No problem. Thank you for having me.
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B
Great. Thank you. And thank you everyone for listening. This is Elaina Melkert, your host. More next time.
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A
Thanks for listening to oggn, the world's largest and most listened to podcast network for the oil and energy industry. If you like this show, leave us a review and then go to oggn.com to learn about all our other shows. And don't forget to sign up for our weekly newsletter. This show has been a production of the Oil and Gas Global Network.