Well sites have long pulsed with the rumbling engines from the trucks traditionally required to deliver the massive quantities of sand that modern completion designs require. These vehicles get the job done, but they contribute to the top cause of recordable incidents: moving vehicles. Fortunately, a new sand transportation technology pumps that risk away. In its place: silence, safety, and a revolution in hydraulic fracturing efficiency.
For as long as the American shale revolution has existed, the industry has tirelessly driven toward better efficiency. As with everything in life, these incredible efficiency gains come with trade-offs. A modern simulfrac fleet requires upwards of a mind-blowing 200 truckloads a day of sand alone to feed the beast. That is a truckload every seven minutes. And with only hours of inventory on location, those trucks must keep coming 24 hours a day and seven days a week to prevent expensive downtime.
The relentless traffic has created a significant and growing challenge in safety and logistics. The exponential traffic growth also exposes lease roads and well pads to wear and tear well beyond what their designers envisioned, forcing operators to pay much higher maintenance and repair costs.
To accommodate sand and its carriers, well pads are getting larger. Even so, trucking is systematically and chronically operated ineffectively. And despite gargantuan efforts to minimize the amount of moving equipment on well sites, it continues to rise. A revolutionary sand transportation method solves not just a handful of these problems, but all of them in one simplified and sweeping change.
The New Approach
Instead of using trucks to carry sand from its source to its final destination, the method replaces wheels with water for the final leg of the journey. The sand arrives at the well site in a slurry that is transported by lay flat hose. The water and sand are separated, and the water returns to “pick up another load.”
This approach removes all well site traffic, preserves lease roads and shrinks pad sizes. At the same time, it expands on-site inventories and pushes reliable efficiency to new heights.
Called hydrohauling, the water-based method makes sense today partly because sourcing proppant has become a proximity game. In the Permian Basin in west Texas alone, there are more than 40 mines supplying proppant. Some of these locations sell wet sand, some sell dry sand, some sell both. Hydraulic fracturing equipment’s ability to run both types of sand on site provides operators with a tremendous cost advantage and unmatched flexibility to maneuver and retool their supply chains during disruptions.
In addition to improving uptime, that flexibility has helped wet/dry agnostic buyers reduce truck miles. The closer proppant is sourced to the well pad, the simpler last mile sand delivery becomes. With modern frac fleets pumping upward of 10 million pounds a day, normal inventory on site can shrink to barely enough to keep going for a few hours. To our knowledge, there is no other supply chain in the world that operates in such a challenging environment, with such tight tolerances and so little inventory on hand.
One of the factors that makes sand delivery challenging is how dramatically demand can seesaw from day to day. It is not uncommon for an operation to be humming along at 200-250 loads per day while pulling from a mine 65 miles away. Delivering those loads requires about 60 unique truck drivers. But the next day, a total shut down can occur, forcing those trucks to stop and sending disruptions throughout the entire last mile supply chain.
And the following day, operations can kick back up, restoring the need for 200-250 loads. Trucks can go from essential to idle to essential in the blink of an eye.
This unpredictability mandates a difficult balancing act, one that service companies perform day in, day out. Running out of proppant is unacceptable to the buyer and will earn the service company a one-way ticket back to the fence. The closer the source is to its destination, the lower the risk of downtime simply due to the exponential reductions in required drivers.
But even with proximity, there is always a possibility of something going awry. Whether we like it or not, the risk of wait time due to demand fluctuation is priced into the current proppant logistics model. That model is begging for change.
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