Sensors, data capture and analysis, remote monitoring, and educated alarms mark the arrival of the well servicing rig’s transition from a basic labor operation to an integrated system that saves time and money while providing a learning trail for operators and service employees.
That sophistication shows up in varying degrees of technology and varying degrees of integration around the industry as manufacturers, operators and service companies collaborate on the needs of the industry.

Nabors Industries, for example, introduced the Millennium rig, replacing the hand-operated brake and throttle levels with a joystick.

Operations
Key Energy Services Inc. combines system integration in a patented approach designed to convince operators there’s a better way of doing business. The company holds patents in the

A workover rig employee checks operations on the KeyView monitoring and data recording system. (Photo courtesy of Key Energy Services)
United States and other countries on its KeyView system of sensor measurement coupled with activity data gathering for well service rigs. It operates the industry’s largest onshore well servicing fleet with about 930 units in the United States, another 40 units in Argentina and a fleet that will grow to six units working for Pemex in Mexico this year, according to Don Weinheimer, senior vice president of business development, technology and strategic planning for Key.

Intervention includes maintenance, workover and completion services. Where a drilling rig touches a well once, workover rigs might touch an oil well once a year for maintenance operations such as pulling rods and pumps and replacing electric submersible pumps. The well servicing rig might touch a gas well once every five years. While workover operations handle problems in the hole, completions and recompletions affect oil and gas wells as production moves to new zones. This is a growing area, particularly in natural gas, as more complex wells demand recompletion operations to block water invasion into formerly productive zones.

The fishing business is another major intervention area. As wells grow more complex, the need for fishing services grows.

As operators re-enter existing wells in maturing fields with depleting reservoirs, the need for snubbing units to avoid killing wells in underbalanced operations should grow, Weinheimer added.

Demands
At the same time traditional operations increase, operators — particularly majors — are reinstating production from fading fields, and they want faster work. They also want well servicing companies to move away from pipe-handling operations as a safety measure. Some small start-up companies are dedicated to that task alone, and Key is exploring that area.
On the intervention side, majors consider well servicing a large cost factor in maintaining oil wells. They want advanced technology that reduces the number of people in an operation from both a cost and safety point of view. That wish list must be offset by the higher cost of advanced well servicing rigs, he said.

Major and large independent oil companies drive the business demand for onshore production maintenance on existing fields as they take advantage of high product prices to squeeze maximum value from fields. Occidental Petroleum has turned this into a focal operation for its properties in the Permian Basin and at Elk Hills in California.

As unconventional gas operations look at multiple-stacked lenticular plays such as those in Jonah and Pinedale fields in southwestern Wyoming, the demand for well servicing intervention to maximize production from these complex wells will increase.

Those operators look for quality of work and safety and increased mean time between failures, a more sophisticated approach than more basic operations of the 1990s.
Chevron, he said, wants a well servicing company that will supply a rig anywhere with consistent quality and reliability that the operating company can depend on.

Technology
Companies like Key can meet those requirements through technology. In Key’s case, much of that technology lies in the company’s patented KeyView system.

“If you take your car to a garage, you rely on the mechanic to properly assess and repair the car with all the work done well. You have faith that it’s done right, but you typically don’t have records or verification of the details of how the work was actually performed. If it fails later, you don’t know if they (the mechanics) were at fault or not,” Weinheimer said.

On a well servicing location, the company man may come and go. He or she depends on the well servicing company to do the job right, like a person leaving a car at the garage.
The KeyView system monitors and records the parameters that show the details of how well the work was done; how fast tubing or rod strings moved in and out of the hole, how much torque was applied to make up tubing, and that proper safety procedures were followed.

For successful joint make-up, information gathered by sensors travels to an onboard computer that monitors the joint make-up settings and signals to rig hands when the make-up is successful. That has resulted in joint make-up success rates in the high 90% range, he said.

“It gives our guys tools to perform a higher quality job and demonstrates how well they’re doing for the customer,” he added.

The crown-out, floor-out system prevents collision between the traveling blocks and the crown or the rig floor, not just by proximity sensing but by sensing block speed and weight and with the ability to shut the operation down in dangerous situations. The system also provides hook load overpull protection to avoid dangerous situations such as tubing parting.

Additional safety features include H2S and gas monitoring with alarms as well as the ability to verify, through sensor monitoring, that safety and procedural processes were properly followed “For example, when an operator needs to reverse the tong heads, we can verify that proper engine shut-down and hydraulic pressure release processes were followed, ensuring maximum safety for our employees,” Weinheimer said.

All the data can be sent by satellite to the main system database for viewing and analysis via the Web for both the service company and customer personnel.

The system is a lot like giving the mechanic the ability to show the car owner how well each and every step in the repair process was performed; that every bolt was properly torqued, ensuring the motorist that the best quality job was actually performed, Weinheimer said.

Results
The KeyView technology convinced Pemex engineers to try Key’s well service rigs and to try KeyView technology on their own rigs. The operations were deployed and managed from Mexico, but the KeyView technology allowed experts to monitor activities in the Mexico office, Midland and Houston. “Pemex said that operations with KeyView technology are already more than 20% more efficient than without,” he added.

The results are apparent within Key as well. The company measured operations on rigs with and without the new technology and found a 50% reduction in safety incidences on KeyView-equipped rigs compared with traditional rigs.

All those gains can’t be credited to the mechanical and electronic aspects of the system, Weinheimer said. Some of the gain came just because rig hands knew their activity was being recorded and took extra care to do jobs right.

The system helps operators in other ways. Modern operators collect information on their wells for history-matching and model-matching and to set baselines for improvement. The Key system can download its information to complement the operator systems.

It can compare similar operations on similar wells, pick out the best practices and advise operators how to conduct their well servicing operations more effectively. It also can keep scorecards on the quality of its own work.

He said he believed his company had an edge in technology. Other systems, he said, are basic crown-out, floor-out systems. The Key system not only monitors operations but intervenes when it senses a problem.

For the future, Weinheimer said, well servicing rigs will become more automated, component by component, starting with the equipment that makes the most sense to automate. As automation grows, the KeyView technology will increasingly become the nerve system that makes the rig work in an integrated way. “That’s the next generation of development,” he said.