By Jeff Sanford
Alida, Saskatchewan — September 6, 2016 — In the late 1990s and early 2000s many assumed that the extensively drilled North American reservoirs were headed for depletion. Reservoirs like the Bakken formation in southern Saskatchewan, found back in the 1950s, were undrillable because the oil was trapped tightly in impermeable and non-porous rocks.
But then companies began using the new hydro-fracking technologies that see drillers force chemicals and water down wells under pressure. Doing so breaks up and fractures the rock, allowing the oil to flow up through the well. Reservoirs like the Bakken, considered un-drillablejust two decades ago, are now home to a huge boom in drilling. These tight shale deposits(another is the Eagle Ford in the US) are responsible for the remarkable turnaround in American production of crude oil, which has recovered from a rate of just six million barrels a day in 2005 to current levels of more than nine million barrels a day. The new production has surprised many. The boom in production helped knock down the high oil prices of the mid-2000s. The advance in technology has also been good for a couple of collision repair facilities out west.
Western Paint & Body Works is a heavy truck facility located outside of Calgary. The company has recently made a decision to focus on RV collision repair, but the company has also benefited from the boom in fracking according to Steve Ray, the shop’s General Manager.
Ray says the company got into heavy equipment repair for a couple of years. The company had been looking to service companies that carry their own insurance programs as a way of avoiding DRP programs. That search led them to the heavy equipment space, where they ended up doing contract work for the energy sector.
“We ended up in a fleet situation. These are self-insured long-haul companies that have warehouses, oil equipment transport companies and the oil companies themselves. They needed our services,” says Ray.
The jobs turned out to be extremely labour intensive. The shop ended up doing final preparation and painting for a fleet of trailers used to carry the equipment used to do hydro-fracking. To force the pressurized liquids down the well, the companies needed huge devices installed and painted on large 55-ft. heavy truck trailers. Western Paint & Body Works would have the parts delivered to the shop on a pallet, where they did final construction and painting.
“We painted a huge number of frack pumps, 42 of them,” says Ray. “It’s a very challenging bit of work in terms of equipment. The physical exertion by the workers is extreme.”
Pallet upon pallet of loose parts arrived in the shop and had to be painted. The shop began running four booth cycles a day.
“These are not just 55-ft. truck trailers. There are radiator units on them, huge diesel engines, a giant rad enclosure,” says Ray. The engines are six feet high, twelve feet long and had to be hand-prepped before going through a tri-stage painting process. “There were a lot of little parts around. We were putting in 240 hours on single units, and were turning them around in a week and a half,” he says.
The shop came up with a strict process for painting. “We systematized everything. When the loose parts were being sandblasted, the trailer was being prepped. When the trailer went in the booth, hand prepping begins on the loose parts,” he says.
The trailers went into the largest of the shop’s three paint booths, a 64-by-14 foot monster that is 12 feet high (the shop also has 45 and 27-ft. booths). The shop itself is a large one. The facility is equipped to handle a massive amount of refinishing, but the high volume frack work was “really hard on the equipment,” says Ray. “Our breathable air systems do ten times the work of what an average shop would. I looked at the cost of maintaining the facility … it’s a grind. You’re going all the time. We had two shifts coming in. We were bringing the paint in by the pallet, hundreds of litres at a time.”
Working on the heavy rigs that come out of the oil patch is also hard work. Modern trucks now have “fluid systems” on their diesel exhaust. This is an urea injection system that treats exhaust fumes, producing nitrogen and water. The system can take four hours to remove.
“It’s really tricky to work with. It’s finicky,” says Ray. When the contract was completed Western assessed the opportunities and the costs. “We said it’s not panning out like we want. The costs are so high. We began to look at changing our direction. Doing this work is just extremely strenuous. It’s tough to be a body man in this industry. It’s hard on the body men. You’re on ladders all day. You’re up and down, and so finding people who can do this and do it well is hard.” The company eventually decided to shift to the RV sector.
But other heavy truck collision repairers in the west have found profitable niches doing heavy equipment repair as well. One of the traits of hydro-fracked wells is that they tend to deplete fairly fast. Once drilled, production rates fall fairly quickly over just a couple years, and so it often doesn’t make economic sense to build pipelines to move the oil. Instead, oil harvested through these wells is often moved by truck to an oil train bound for the refinery. As well, the oil that comes up from these wells is often mixed with saltwater and other fracking fluids, which makes the oil corrosive to the inside of tanks.
Earlier this year it was reported that a southern Saskatchewan heavy truck collision repair centre, Three Star Trucking, began offering a tanker reconditioning service that received Saskatchewan General Insurance (SGI) accreditation in the spring of 2014.
The company began offering this service to other trucking companies as a way of expanding its business and reports that it is doing huge amounts of glass repair as well.
The wells in the Bakken reservoir that are being drilled are located in remote regions. The fleets moving this oil are rumbling along distant, rural, barely-there gravel roads. Three Star Trucking finds that its techs have been fixing a lot of damaged hoods and fuel tanks as well. That is to say, the boom in hydro-fracking has been a boon for more than just the oil companies.
