Lloydminster – With the now-two year crash in oil prices, not many oilfield services companies have been building and deploying new equipment. Lifting Solutions, however, bucked that trend, and had their fourth new rig of this year present at their booth in the Lloydminster Heavy Oil Show Sept. 14-15.
Incorporated in October 2014, Lifting Solutions is based out of Edmonton.
“We are a manufacturer of Endless Rod and a service provider of the same. We are a manufacturer of variable frequency drives. We also have several research and development projects on the go. We’re dealing with coatings and sucker rods and continuous sucker rod, carbon fibre and such,” Rowan said.
Endless Rod is Lifting Solutions’ brand name for continuous rod.
Lifting Solutions is an evolution of several companies working with continuous rod. Back in 2008, Rowan was displaying continuous rod solutions for Tierra Alta. “Tierra Alta was merged into Apex Advance Solutions about five years ago. Lifting Solutions acquired Apex Solutions in 2014 along with several other related companies,” Rowan said.
He described their new equipment, known as “Endless Rod Units,” as “a flushby with a gripper on the derrick for servicing continuous rod.”
A spool unit would sit adjacent to the rig, with guides feeding the continuous rod from the spool truck to the flushby and then into the well.
It combined what would otherwise be two separate units, a flushby and a gripper, thus saving the client the expense of two units travelling and having two units on site. The staffing is still the same, however, with three people working on the unit.
It is also capable of doing conventional flushby work without dealing with continuous rod.
“It’s a fairly significant savings based on a combined rate that’s very competitive,” Rowan said.
“This is the fourth rig that we’ve released this year, brand new, like this,” Rowan said.
“Lifting Solutions is focused on building our fleet in the downturn. We want to be prepared for when the industry comes back.”
“This equipment is very specialized and fit for purpose, focused around Endless Rod.”
They have tandem steering and tri-drive.
He said a lot of the enhancements are focused around safety. Since the gripper is mounted to the derrick, there’s no handoff between a gripper unit to the flushby. The controls located near the workfloor and on the workfloor eliminates climbing for the purposes of running the controls. The entire workfloor is on hydraulics so it can be moved up and down easily.
“This floor, we can adjust to the proper height using hydraulics,” Rowan said, noting many units are pinned and thus not as adjustable.
Lifting Solutions has refurbished a number of its older gripper units and has put them back on the road. They also have a rod rig in Swift Current. There are three grippers in Swift Current, two in Lloydminster, and one in Medicine Hat.
As for the new Endless Rod units, two are now based in Lloydminster, one is in Bonnyville, and the fourth has just rolled out of the factory.
Asked about demand for the new machines, Rowan replied, “Our utilization on these units is fairly decent, about 60 to 70 per cent at the moment.”
