American Oil and Gas Reporter - August 2018 - 76

SpecialReport: Hydraulic Fracturing Technology

RFID Improves Flow Iron Management
By Joshua Hedrick
JANE LEW, W.V.-In hydraulic fracturing operations, an extremely large
amount of flow iron is needed to connect
pressure pumping equipment to the wellhead. Pressure pumping sites typically
have 900 pieces of iron, and all of the individual segments must be tracked daily.
While much of the well operator's
onsite attention is rightfully focused on
treatment design, proppant delivery, fluid
supply and numerous other issues, the
maze of iron that delivers that proppant
and fluid down hole is critical to ensuring
safe and efficient well stimulation operations. As the Northeast region iron supervisor for a frac fleet operator, it is
imperative that I know exactly how much
iron is available at any given time to
minimize downtime and avoid unnecessary costs.
Tasked with coordinating iron needs
per fleet as well as tracking iron per
fleet, failed iron per fleet, and cost per
fleet, accuracy is absolutely essential in
my role. Variances in the flow iron inventory can be the difference between
being able to rig up immediately or ex-

perience significant delays. And as producers and frac fleet operators both know,
time is money in the field.
The manual method of tracking iron
that has been used historically is not sufficient to provide the real-time information
that is necessary to optimize uptime and
minimize costs. Tracking 900 pieces of
iron manually requires the efforts of at
least three employees working only on
tracking for three-four days. This is not
only expensive from a labor cost standpoint, but it is notoriously prone to human
error because numbers easily can be transposed or missed.
Errors tend to happen because physically viewing the serial number on a
piece of iron often is not easy on a frac
job site. Many times, a piece of equipment's serial number is covered in mud
or inaccessible because of its orientation
in the field. With the manual method, it
might be necessary to move pallet after
pallet of equipment to be able to read
and write down serial numbers.
Adding to this difficult scenario, certificates must be kept for every piece of
iron for safety and compliance. Those
certificates must be produced immediately

RFID technology allows the oil and gas operator to make last-minute changes and onthe-ﬂy adjustments to a well stimulation program by giving the pressure pumping service provider conﬁdence that the needed ﬂow iron is available. By making the information
available through smart phones and tablets, accurate iron inventories are available to
ﬁeld personnel to avoid delays that otherwise may be caused by waiting on iron to accommodate changes on location.

76 THE AMERICAN OIL & GAS REPORTER

when requested, and failing to do so
brings a job to a halt until the certificate
is presented. With the manual tracking
method, our team maintained many binders
of paper certificates. As one can imagine,
it is easy for binders to experience wear
and tear or damage in the field, so they
typically would be kept in the office,
which might be several hours away from
a job site.
Whenever a technician would be asked
to present certificates on site, someone
would have to make a trip to the office
to retrieve the appropriate binders, find
the appropriate certificate for a specific
element of iron, and then make the return
trip back to the site to provide the required
documentation to the inspector. That
kind of downtime is not only frustrating
to all involved, but more importantly, is
highly inefficient and impacts bottomline profitability.
Because the manual process is so labor-intensive, tracking typically is not
performed as often or as regularly as it
should be. That makes it extremely difficult to truly track where and when
equipment is being used and to know
what is currently in inventory. Not being
able to instantly see which pieces of
equipment are available often leads to
making redundant iron purchases. This
also makes it hard to be flexible in the
field. All of these factors result in lost
uptime and lost dollars.
RFID Technology
Given the frustrations and inefficiencies
manual tracking creates, U.S. Well Services
Northeast U.S. team made the switch to
tracking iron with Weir Oil & Gas' radio
frequency identification technology and
an accompanying RFID mobile application. We have been using this solution
for a year and it has redefined how we
track iron, enabling us to reduce labor
costs, minimize downtime and even take
on more jobs at a moment's notice.
Tracking iron now takes my team
only two-three hours to record 900 serial
numbers. Because the RFID process is
so easy, the iron inventory is tracked
every week to let us know where each
piece of iron is and what is in use. With
this technology in place, hard copy certificate binders have been eliminated.
Now all those certificates are in the RFID
app, making them accessible in seconds

American Oil and Gas Reporter - August 2018

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