Estevan – When things were at their darkest during this oil downturn, one company decided it was the right time to open a new location in Estevan. They’ve grown since then.
Great North Wellhead and Frac is part of the Redco Group of companies.
Brendon Grube is the Estevan branch manager. He literally grew up in the business, starting at the age of 16 in another wellhead business his father was a partner in. Now Grube is running his own operation, located on the west side of Estevan.
“There’s six of us here at the moment,” he said on Nov. 30. “We’re definitely looking to add a couple in the New Year.”
The long-term view is to continue to expand the business, Grube added.
Great North has locations in Swift Current, Kindersley and Estevan within Saskatchewan, as well as Brooks, Red Deer, Bonnyville, Grande Prairie, Edmonton and a sales office in Calgary.
The Estevan location opened in January 2016, right in the depths of the downturn, when oil prices were plumbing below US$30 per barrel for WTI.
“When the downturn started to hit, we got together as a group and looked at it as opportunity,” Grube said, crediting a positive mindset for allowing them to actually grow during that time. They expanded by four branches during the downturn.
During that time the company acquired Amity Industrial and opened Redco International.
Grube said they have the ability to provide quality product at a very competitive and sustainable price.
“We do surface isolation equipment, from surface casing bowl to production wellhead. We can take care of everything from the surface, up,” he said.
This includes new and remanufactured wellhead equipment. Grube noted that remanufactured is important, due to its price point.
Service is the heart and soul of what makes us successful. Having our service techs that have a wealth of experience and knowledge in the wellhead business has gone a long way for us to ensure quality service.”
In Estevan they have three fully operating field service trucks, each with a knuckle-boom picker.
When things slow down in Saskatchewan due to spring breakup, they send staff to multi-well frac projects in northern Alberta and British Columbia.
On the frac side of the business, Great North provides a full line of rental frac equipment, from two-inch to seven-inch, and up to 15,000 psi. This includes rentals of frac trees, the complex piping and valve system that is the key component connecting all the frac equipment to the wellbore.
“The frac side of the business is just something we’ve started to get into in the southeast,” Grube said. In 2018 they will have a full line of four-inch, 10,000 psi frac heads.
He noted a lot of companies have turned to injection conversion for waterfloods. They carry Teflon and ENC-coated injection wellheads for that purpose.
For a typical wellhead, their first time on the lease follows the drilling rig move. At that point they install the production wellhead. “We install the frac tree before the frac crew gets there,” he said. “We lubricate a four-inch back pressure valve (BPV) to safely removed the frac head with full well control.”
Then the frac head comes off once the frac crew is done and gone. The service rig puts the wellhead back together.
The business is closely tied to drilling, but customers are also constantly doing workovers. As a result, roughly 80 per cent of their work is for new drills, while 20 per cent is for workovers and injection conversions.
