The combination of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing technology has put the US on track to become a top energy producer.

Industry estimates have each new well requiring 1,000 or more truck trips to transport materials like gravel and pipe, equipment, and water and to haul off wastewater, among other services. A recent study by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation estimated between 5,850 and 8,905 upstream truck trips were needed for a multiwell pad based on two rigs and equipment deliveries for eight wells.

Energy development activity in the US and Canada has been a shot in the arm for the trucking industry, powering a recent boom in truck sales – many now with automatic transmissions – and attendant growth in well service fleets along with increased demand for more general commercial trucking services.

Unusual driver demands

Transporting fuel, pipe, drilling equipment, sand, water, and other materials to and from a well site is a small fraction of total preproduction costs but generates an outsized number of business transactions in the process. Rapid fleet expansion and increased trucking activity in general are overwhelming the system capabilities of many firms to stay on top of wellsite demands and fleet resource allocation, not to mention billing.

A business with 20 to 25 trucks may now be expanding fleet size to 200 trucks or more in less than a year, only to find that its manual business procedures have been unable to scale. Hiring more office workers to manage paper job tickets and invoice production is the common response, but the opportunities for error increase with the volume of orders handled manually.

Both preproduction and post-production wellsite operations present logistics and scheduling challenges for transportation providers and their drivers.

In addition to logging their arrival and departure times, drivers record trailer tank levels on field tickets. Levels are measured using dipsticks before and after loading crude oil. With any delay in routing paperwork, oil may be delivered to a pipeline or refinery before customers even get quantity data.

When loading condensate at gas wells, drivers must further check wind direction, open collection tanks, and use specialized equipment to collect samples and conduct analyses for specific gravity and water content that also is captured on job tickets.

Environmental compliance is another record-keeping concern, especially with regard to the disposal of wastewater. The importance that oil companies put on tracking safety ratings for drivers and for-hire carriers adds additional reporting burdens on service providers.

Paper job or field run tickets are the primary means to track service hours and details, but their handling – or mishandling – is one of the major causes of inaccurate or delayed billing and customer invoice disputes.

Technology fills the information void

Transportation management systems (TMS) are designed to make complex logistics challenges simpler. Some are true business operations systems, integrating fleet management and visibility with customer service and billing to cover the entire quote-to-cash business process.

TMWSuite is a TMS that can increase productivity from fleet assets and lead to faster service response time to customers in the North American oil and gas industry.

Designed to replace manual, paper-based processes in busy fleet operations, a TMS can drive faster business transactions with the ability to integrate global positioning systems (GPS); in-cab wireless communications; and smart, digital form management. The TMS can manage location, service, and billing data for each customer and well site, which can simplify communications between dispatch and the driver and lead to the accurate completion of site services and the timely generation and review of invoices.

Vehicle tracking and mobile wireless communications systems such as those from PeopleNet Communications Corp. play a key part in fleet management and streamlining business when used with a TMS.

The level of automation possible with in-cab devices that have the processing power of small computers can transform the way an oil and gas supplier does business. Using a tracking system integrated with a TMS, for instance, a driver arriving at an oil lease will be presented with the form for the specific service needed. This service requirement can be automatically identified by the GPS coordinates of the truck’s location matched against the TMS data, which can hold coordinates for thousands of well sites as well as service order requirements. Data entry for the driver is kept to the barest minimum because the form pulls any needed location ID and other ticket information about the site from the TMS system wirelessly.

The driver fills in beginning and ending dipstick readings. The tracking system, available with an optional mobile printer, spits out receipts for the driver to give to the lease operator. At the same time, all of the necessary billing information is transmitted wirelessly to the home office where the TMS generates invoices and the load quantity and quality data before the product reaches the pipeline.

The system records delivery details in a similar fashion. As part of the process, carriers that haul wastewater can automatically track delivery details for environmental reporting compliance. Another benefit for energy companies from such an integrated TMS is the automated reporting and tracking of accurate safety data.

When a delivery or pickup is complete, the in-cab tracking system also can help guide the driver to the next stop with navigation powered by wellsite-specific GPS and directional data from services such as RigData.

Oil and gas E&P has become increasingly more efficient and less costly by embracing new technology wherever possible. Perhaps the next frontier for technology transformation will be the trucking operations that are so necessary to drilling and production activities. TMS and fleet management technologies can offer industry service providers and commercial carriers more efficient use and deployment of assets, strategic cost and capacity insight, instant access to critical information, and significant reductions in human error in combination with improved profitability.