Episode 115 | Powered Pumpers | Evolution Well Services
My first frack pad I ever visited was March 2011. It was on Ross Perot's land in Tarrant, County, Texas, a few miles south of Texas Motor Speedway. I remember the pressure pumping units most vividly, a dozen red trailers at the center of the pad roaring and puffing diesel exhaust.
Houston-based Evolution Well Services is one of the few companies offering "e-fleets," electrically-driven pumping units. Rather than diesel, these trailers are fed from an on-site microturbine fueled by natural gas. Many times the gas is fed from nearby formations, ("field gas" or "associated gas").
Nick Ruppelt, Evolution's sales director, says e-fleets are part of a growing trend across industries to electrify. The oilfield sector is not limited to e-fleets. Compressor stations are another segment. But at 20-30 MW per fleet, pressure pumpers likely have the largest draw of any group in Oil & Gas.
Nick says he believes their fleets could also draw from line power from utilities, though the drastic swings in consumption between fracks stages may be difficult for utilities to handle. He says the solution may be to partially draw from line power similar to a peaking plant.
Evolution got its start in Canada, Nick says they were developed around 2011 as part of a project to deliver "game-changing" technologies. Though that shale play never took off, e-fleets still held promise. Evolution began its first operations in the U.S. in 2016 and run seven fleets at the time of this episode.
Nick says their fleets offer more precision than the diesel-powered variety. Whereas diesel units are all operated by transmissions independently at each trailer, e-fleet pumps are variable speed drive, and can more easily adjust pumping speeds. A single diesel fleet can consume about 15M gallons of fuel annually and require "hot fueling," or fueling during operations. Accidents in the past have set entire fleets on fire at a pad.
I asked Nick about the value proposition these fleets hold at the time of this episode, where oil prices are still recovering. Despite the benefits of e-fleets, does price still win contracts? While Nick says they have tried to be competitive with their diesel counterparts, he says, "[Low margins] make for challenging investments in markets like this," adding that "Innovation needs to continue happening so that the industry can keep pushing forward."
Nick says the last 24 months have seen a significant shift in policy perspectives from the oilfield sector, who haven't felt the same social pressures from Twitter as other industries.
"What the overall industry is seeing is, we need to focus on producing oil and natural gas in a profitable way," he says, "but also in a responsible way."
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