Riverbend
The word fracking would seem entirely appropriate to describe what it can be like servicing machines and other heavy equipment the hydraulic fracturing sector uses in North America’s most unforgiving climates.
Bone-chilling winters and sweltering summers come hand-in-hand with the job for Evan Vibbert and his crew at Riverbend Machinery ND. From its shop in Hazen, North Dakota, a town of 2,500 people on the eastern fringe of the Bakken oil reserve, Riverbend maintains the most slender of fleets — one service truck and one lube truck cover a footprint stretching several hundred miles.
Hydraulic fracturing has been around since the late 1940s, but it’s neither the easiest nor the most cost-effective or accepted means of drawing oil from the ground. The process, colloquially known as fracking, is generally done by pumping water, sand and chemicals into the ground through a wellhead under high pressure to crack open the rock underneath and release trapped oil and gas.
Amidst reports of groundwater contamination and earth tremors, fracking has faced stiff opposition from environmentalists and divided some communities where it’s done or even proposed. Still, with growing demand to produce oil domestically rather than rely on imports, fracking has become a billion-dollar industry over the last half decade.
Vibbert, who manages Riverbend’s Hazen business, hasn’t seen protests locally. “I don’t hear much about it,” he explains, adding that “if they don’t do it (fracking) here they’re going to do it somewhere else.”
For service truck operators and others working in the Bakken, the main challenge is the harsh climate. Vibbert says -25 degree daytime temperatures and 25 mile an hour winds are common in winter.
Vibbert has vivid memories of a February all-nighter two years ago, soon after he arrived in North Dakota to open the Riverbend operation. “I was out at a well site where they’d lost a fuel pump,” he recalls. “It was 30 below zero and the wind was howling.”
Propane heaters aren’t allowed at fracking sites – crews even wear H2F gas detectors – so the only way to keep warm was to hop in the truck every few minutes.
“We spent six hours trouble-shooting when under normal circumstances it might have only taken about two hours,” Vibbert says.
That’s wintertime in North Dakota. Vibbert describes July as hot, humid and dusty, fall as rainy, and spring as wet from flooding with the ground still frozen.
“You’re working in standing water because these well sites don’t have drainage,” Vibbert explains. “All the water drains to the well, not away from the well, because if they have a spill it needs to be contained.”
Despite four seasons of weather extremes the subsidiary of Grand Junction, Colorado-based Riverbend Machinery keeps busy selling, renting and servicing heavy equipment made by the likes of Kawasaki and Link-Belt that’s used to build and run the oil rigs and pipelines. Vibbert says his team does everything from oil changes and hose and hydraulic repairs to solving electrical problems on equipment such as skid steers, portable light plants, excavators, cranes and wheel loaders.
Core to Riverbend’s business is a 2013 four-wheel-drive Dodge 5500, which has a 6.7-litre Cummins turbo-diesel engine and a Knapheide service box.
“We took the box off a 2002 Ford F550,” Vibbert says. “The truck was worn out but the box was still in good shape, so instead of buying a whole new service truck with a new box we took the old box and put it on a new chassis.”
Riverbend’s lube truck is a 2005 Ford F750 with a 5.9-litre Cummins turbo-diesel engine, assembled by Elliott Machine Works of Galion, Ohio.
The vehicles, including equipment, cost roughly $60,000 apiece, Vibbert says.
The investments have paid off, though. The oil boom “is bigger than anything I’ve ever seen,” Vibbert says. Business is so brisk that if a new customer calls up, service wait times can exceed a week.
Vibbert says he would expand but it’s not easy finding qualified, reliable mechanics willing to work in the often-extreme conditions.
However, the weather isn’t the only challenge. “It’s easy to get parts for Caterpillar and John Deere,” Vibbert says. “But when you start getting into some of the weird equipment it can be difficult.”
Vibbert says increased fracking is partly responsible — activity is ramping up in states as widespread as North Dakota, Colorado, Texas and Ohio. But he also blames a trend towards low inventories.
“Companies don’t stock the parts like they used to,” Vibbert explains. “We just worked on a crane out of Texas and it was one of the biggest pains in the ass to get parts for.”
Bruce Bunting, an industrial products specialist with Knapheide Manufacturing Company in Quincy, Ill., says demand for service and lube trucks was strong in the fracking states during an initial boom from 2009 through 2011. Demand then dropped but has risen again in the last year or so.
Shale gas development has almost single-handedly driven up demand for work trucks over the last five to six years, Bunting says.
“It takes a lot of support vehicles to drill one of these shale gas wells and then put it in production. It’s a very labor-intensive process.”
Some companies doing fracking maintain their own service trucks, and Bunting says one challenge for them is to correlate levels and areas of activity to equipment purchases.
“Our end users in the energy field don’t know if a well is going to be productive or dry, so they can’t say how many trucks they’re going to need to support a new sector they’re planning to develop,” Bunting explains. “If it hits, they might need 15 more trucks — and need them within hours or days, not weeks or months. So our challenge is to support our customers in a way that keeps their operations going.”
In the shale gas sector, Bunting says, companies need to service fracking and coil tubing trailers, many of which have specialized cranes and compressors. Companies also need to maintain trucks that haul sand used to do the fracking.
Bunting says Knapheide chassis come from “every truck manufacturer in the U.S. market” and the company offers after-sales support directly and through its network of distributors across the U.S. and Canada.
Bunting says he admires companies working in some of fracking’s harshest environments. “I tip my hat to them,” he adds, noting that the industry continues to expand into remote areas.
Saul Chernos is a freelance writer based on Toronto
