When upgrading its newest rigs to AC power, a Texas drilling contractor turned to Siemens Solution Partner Current Power for highly reliable, packaged electric buildings, all standardized on electrical, control and automation components.
JOHN MEYER, Siemens
In the Permian basin, (Fig. 1), speed and capital efficiency are everything to drillers and the suppliers they count on.
E&P companies have huge investments in land leases and completed wells, with shareholder returns in many cases still depending on production efficiency. Numerous independent operators are highly leveraged with debt that needs servicing, while their wells often produce less oil than forecasted.
For these reasons, the entire industry has turned to deploying more automation, standardization and modularization in their operations than ever before. Two examples of firms doing just that are Current Power, a Houston-based Siemens Solution Partner, and its customer, Scandrill, a leading, land-based drilling contractor with more than 30 rigs in its fleet.
The latter commissioned Current Power as an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) to provide the packaged electrical buildings (Fig. 2) — also known as “e-houses” and “driller’s cabins” — for seven of its newest rigs. These are pre-fabricated, metal power houses designed to house and protect critical electrical equipment, such as variable frequency drives (VFDs), motor control centers (MCCs), switchgear, generator controls, operator controls and other gear.
According to Corbin Vader, Current Power’s automation and projects engineer, these e-houses and driller’s cabins, in effect, become modular, plug-and-play components of a Scandrill drilling rig.
“As such, they can be hoisted from the rig platform, where they typically reside, onto large flatbed trucks and transported from location to location,” he says. “The trucks have all of the electrical equipment, controls and automation the rig needs to operate.”
CHALLENGE: Streamline rig deployments and operations, while avoiding costly downtime. Neil Pierce, Scandrill’s senior vice president of Operations, explains how critical rig moving time is to the company’s customers. “When we get released from the customer on one well, and it's time to pack everything and move to another location, the customer’s budget only allows for so much time,” he says.
“The faster we can disassemble a rig, get it loaded onto our trucks, move it, unload and reassemble it, then re-hook it all back up, the better,” Pierce adds. “It’s quite a process, and we’ve worked hard with partners like Current Power to streamline it as much as possible.”
Joe Ward, a Scandrill project manager, has played a core role in the company’s efforts to streamline its rig set-ups, operations, teardowns and transport between locations. “Standardizing as many of the rig’s components as we can is the key to success,” he says. “You don’t want three or four different suppliers, especially for electrical, controls and automation, because everything from procurement, training, troubleshooting and spare parts becomes more complicated and often more costly. Worse, if an operational issue occurs with a rig, having multiple suppliers can result in time-consuming finger-pointing while root causes are investigated.”
If a problem is serious enough, a rig’s entire operation can come to a stop. Such a disruption can be costly and time-consuming for both Scandrill as the drilling contractor, and its customers, as other labor and suppliers must come to a standstill.
As Scandrill’s provider of e-houses and driller’s cabins for its latest rigs, Current Power needs them to be extremely reliable and rugged, down to individual components. “With downtime being a huge concern, even if it takes just a few hours to change out a faulty part or device, any disruption can jeopardize Scandrill’s next drilling contract or undermine their negotiating position,” says Vader.
SOLUTION: Standardize on Siemens drives, automation, control and electrical components. In 2015, Scandrill decided to update its DC-powered rig fleet with new rigs using AC power. For help, it chose Current Power for its reputation across the oil and gas industry as a top supplier of high-quality, rugged and reliable electrical equipment, including custom-fabricated, packaged electrical buildings.
“They’re easy to do business with and listen carefully to what we have to say, especially how we operate our rigs,” says Ward. “They're quick to respond, too, whether it’s getting information back to us, helping work through problems, or getting a field technician to our rigs, if there are issues out there that can't be resolved remotely.”
Current Power’s initial assignment was clear: To design, engineer and build an advanced e-house and drill cabin set for the first of what turned out to be seven new drilling rigs over the next few years. For these, the company chose to standardize on Siemens drives and automation components, including:
SINAMICS S120 VFDs (Fig. 3), designed to control the speed and torque of low-voltage induction motors, are extremely dependable and offer inverter modules that can be paralleled for a wide range of motor horsepower, up to 6,000 hp.
tiastar motor control centers (MCCs), with intelligent SIMOCODE pro motor control, plus power monitoring and protection, and network communications and automation interfacing using both fieldbus and Ethernet communications protocols.
WL power circuit breakers, to protect against damage or fire from short circuits, ground faults or overload faults.
SIMATIC WinCC software, for a supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) and human-machine interface (HMI) operation.
SIMATIC HMI Comfort Panel color touchscreen displays, to provide human operators with high-performance visualization applications, such as process flows and diagnostics.
SIMATIC programmable logic controllers (PLCs) (Fig. 4), for automation and control, specifically a redundant pair of high-availability, fault-tolerant S7-400H PLCs, set for immediate, hot standby and fail-over resiliency. They are programmed via STEP 7 function library and feature remote diagnostics and programming.
RESULTS: Time- and cost-savings, greater reliability and availability, more customer speed, asset utilization and capital efficiency. Standardization has saved Current Power engineers time and effort, translating into cost savings and margin improvements for the labor required to design, engineer, program and build the e-houses and driller’s cabins. “The modular Siemens components are more highly compact, interoperable, and price-competitive…” says Vader. “Their size enables us to maximize the interior space in the e-houses and cabins,” he adds, Fig. 5. “And they’re much easier to program. If we need support, Siemens forums are quite helpful and, should an escalation be needed, its experts are just a phone call away.”
Vader reports that another benefit of standardization is repeatability, which eventually saved the company weeks of time over the build-out of e-house and driller-cabin sets for Scandrill’s seven new rigs.
“On the first rig we did, after we got the parameters set and programmed for its dual-motor top drive, especially the motor torque, which is fairly difficult to tune, we could copy and load them into the programming for the second and subsequent rigs,” he says. “And, when we found areas where we can improve performance of a rig system, it was easy to build on what we had.”
Ensuring customer satisfaction. Reliability of the Siemens components and diagnostics have been important when troubleshooting issues. “Siemens products are all extremely high-quality, so we don’t have to deal with many failures, which helps minimize our warranty costs and boosts customer satisfaction,” Vader says. “Plus, the diagnostic capabilities on the Siemens components are five times better than another brand.”
For Scandrill, the standardization on Siemens provides flexibility in adapting e-house and driller’s cabin specifications for different rigs. “On the last few rigs, we had the houses and all the associated electrical gear in place for our 1,600-hp mud pumps, then decided at the last minute to upgrade them to 2,200 hp,” Ward recalls. “We were able to pull the lower-horsepower parts out and plug in the higher-horsepower ones, including bigger drives, and did it all without added delay or extra cost.”
Consistency across rigs. Standardization also has meant Scandrill is using the same software platform across all rigs, so operator training is easier. In addition, Ward says even though all the newer AC rigs aren’t identical, common Siemens components have enabled Current Power to provide a big value-added service: stocking parts for Scandrill, so they don’t have to tie up hundreds of thousands of dollars in capital.
“If we need a part, we can get it quickly,” he says. “But not having to keep a spare parts inventory means we can keep our capital deployed doing what we do best, which is drilling wells.”
Finally, the literal plug-and-play modularization of the Current Power e-houses and driller’s cabins helps Scandrill minimize the time it takes to set up and tear down rigs. “Everything has a plug panel on the back, which all the motors, drives, blowers and different devices plug into,” Ward says.
“So, there's no real wiring to do; you just plug in. Everything's well-labeled and color-coded, which speeds things up a lot and is so very important to our agility as a company and strategic drilling partner to our customers.” WO
JOHN MEYER is the Marketing Communications manager for Motion Control at Siemens. He has 25 years in service to Siemens, handling various marcom duties related to the myriad motion control products, equipment and communications systems offered by his group. A native of Germany, Mr. Meyer graduated from the University of Wisconsin and is based at the Siemens facility in Elk Grove Village, near Chicago.