'World’s First’ Digital Completions Tech Delivers Real-Time Results

A “world’s first” digital completions technology by fracking software company Cold Bore Technology Inc. is helping to save shale operators time and money, according to Brett Chell, the company’s president.

To overcome a pattern of blind decision making off of limited data—what Chell described as one of the biggest obstacles operators face with completions—Cold Bore’s SmartPAD platform is helping to provide companies in shale plays throughout North America greater visibility in their operations plus more.

“A couple of the biggest problems with completions right now is that the operators are now asking for remote access to all their data, visibility from their RTOCs (real-time operations centers) and the ability to have a centralized operating system where all their services on location are communicating on the same platform,” Chell said in an interview with HartEnergy.com.

As a universal operating system of completions, the SmartPAD platform connects all services from field operations—which are traditionally collected by a manual, divide and conquer method—to allow full, remote visibility of that data. In effect, Chell said SmartPAD allots informed decision-making with all the raw service data in the contextual relevancy of the operations.

“We realized that the biggest dataset that’s being missed right now is someone tracking the actual operations and the only way to do that is to put sensors on the frac trees themselves,” he said.

In phase one, SmartPAD was deployed by a Montney producer across six pads in Northern Alberta. Today, however, the technology is well into the commercial adoption process across the Duvernay, Permian Basin, Marcellus and Montney shale plays. The company is currently working with about nine supermajors and two of the largest service and frac companies in the world, according to Chell.

So far, operators utilizing SmartPAD have yielded positive results in key areas of operations like a 20%-25% pickup in wireline speed and the execution of more stages per day.

“Once you have remote visibility on the frac tree you can pick up a lot of efficiency because you have [eyes] on all the services like wireline, coil, frac, etc. Operators are getting 25% to 30% efficiency gains in some spots operator-specific because they’re able to coordinate their operations with much more efficacy,” he said.

The application, he added, contrasts from other SaaS (software as a service) models that are in the industry because SmartPAD “requires a service company, hardware and men.”

“We outfit all of the other wellheads that are owned by different wellhead companies with universal sensors and we digitize them,” he said. “From there, we actually track the operation itself and give that dataset to the operators so that we can check all of the service data that we are receiving to see if it’s correct or not.”

Chell said previous methods of data capture have been very arduous and service-centric, “meaning frac is responsible for their data, wireline is responsible for their data, coil is responsible for their data and then they all send it into the operator.”

The operator’s onsite representatives are then responsible for tracking the time log down before translating it to excel format and emailing it out. In the end, the operator is tasked with making sense of all the service data in different formats from that manual time stamp.

“The advancements with ours is that we’re taking the manual capture of that time log away from the responsibility of the company men and allowing sensors and automation to do it directly from frac trees,” he said. “Then, our edge server grabs the rest of the service data on location and stitches that all together so that it’s all contextually relevant before it leaves location.”

That way anybody catching it after the fact inside the company, he said, gets much more relevant high resolution data and it moves through the company automatically.

“We are one of the only companies that have an edge server on location and we do this because we’re organizing all service data as well as the data we capture from the frac tree,” he said. “That data is then sorted and we choose to send most of the relevant visual data up to AWS (Amazon Web Services).”

Digital representation also provides another measure of safety by indicating problems with the equipment like trapped pressure, leaking valves and hot zone wells.

“The visibility on the equipment is starting to change the safety aspect of operations quite a bit, but it will take another step in the future when we automate this process,” he said.

To build on the technology, he said the next step for the companies he’s working with is to implement electric hydraulic frac tree control systems now that remote visibility has been achieved.

These systems, hooked up with an operating system like SmartPAD, will unlock complete autonomous, remote control over the frac trees. And, in the near future, eliminate men from the hot zone all together, according to Chell.

In September, Cold Bore, headquartered in Calgary, Alberta, secured a second round of strategic growth funding from Rice Investment Group (RIG). Though the investment size was not disclosed, Cold Bore said proceeds would be used to scale the company’s teams and technology to meet a “considerable market demand” for its SmartPAD platform.