AN opportunity to modify its existing pump technology to meet the growing needs of the coal seam gas sector proved too good an offer to refuse for Airwell Pumps and its managing director, Alan Brown.
Five years ago, Airwell was approached by an experimental coal seam gas operator who had issues with de-liquefying gas wells. Mr Brown soon recognised the positive displacement pumps the company had been manufacturing for more than 20 years could be modified to suit the greater depths the client needed.
Several million dollars of the company’s own research and development money later, Airwell Pump subsidiary Airwell Oil and Gas is just about to sign a deal with one of Canada’s largest gas suppliers, Husky Energy, to install a 32 gas-well pilot trial of the technology.
Mr Brown said the deal had come at the right time for the Airwell, which opened an office in Texas a couple of years ago so it could have better access to the US and Canadian oil and gas markets.
“Naturally everyone seems to think they’ve come up with a good idea and it’s not until you’ve spent enough of your own money to actually prove that in fact you ... do have a good idea that you can expect to get any sort of independently funded trials,” Mr Brown told WA Business News.
Husky Energy has about 32,000 wells and at least a further 800 wells on the lease where the 32 pumps are being installed, and Mr Brown believes the new deal could be the start of much bigger orders for the company.
Mr Brown founded Airwell Pumps in Bruce Rock in the Wheatbelt in the mid 1980s, manu-facturing pumping systems for agricultural water supplies.
Now based in Malaga, the company is run by Mr Brown, his son, and their wives and employs 16 people in WA and two in Texas.
Mr Brown said the nearly 30 years of experience in manufacturing pumps for waste recovery applications in mining, pollution recovery and agriculture had made him a pocket greenie.
“If you look back over the entire history of Airwell Pumps, probably 70 per cent of everything that we’ve ever done ... is in some way environmental. Putting pumps under oil refineries for petrochemical plants to recover spilt fuel, naturally that’s direct pollution recovery,” he said.
We’ve got systems operating under all manner of environmental clean up around Australia and some in Asia, recovering all sorts of pollution out of the ground.”
Airwell Pumps’ move to the US came about after 18 months of successful trials in Margaret River for Westralian Gas and Power (now Titan Energy), when the company took its technology to Westralian Gas and Power’s Kentucky-based crude oil wells.
Mr Brown had envisaged there would be a huge market for Airwell’s pumps in the US from the many oil producers there beset by the problem of ‘liquid loading’ – where wells drown with too much water build-up.
To his surprise, Mr Brown found that the US businesses were not open to new technologies, which led him to focus on the interest coming out of Canada.
“Even though there are 460,000 stripper oil wells in the US that produce less than 10 barrels of oil a day, which we thought was this unbelievably large market and ideally suited to us, what we didn’t bank on was a total lack of willingness by the industry to accept such a radical change,” Mr Brown said.
“So we thought we’d just buy a couple of our own leases and set [the pumps] up and run field days, thinking that once people see the pumps use a fraction of the electricity and run unattended, can be run over the internet from home, and the likelihood of polluting the environment is a fraction of what the traditional methods offer ....
“That sort of approach to oil pumping didn’t get accepted at all and we pushed it for quite some time; we found it was almost an immovable market.”
Thankfully, the gas industry is quite different to that, according to Mr Brown.
He said while the stripper oil well industry was, to a large extent, run by the ‘ma and pa’ operators, “by definition you’re not in the gas industry unless you’re a fairly big company”.
“Therefore their willingness to pursue newer ways of doing things is so much more aggressive, they’ll adopt new things,” Mr Brown said.
Low gas prices and reduced gas production due to liquid loading has deterred many Canadian companies from investing in technology, but Mr Brown said Airwell had had discussions with companies that constituted at least 50 per cent of the wells in Canada.
He said there was also a potentially captive market within the 80,000 Canadian wells requiring technology that could pump mud and not just water.
“You’re pumping water, which is anything up to 30 per cent solids, so that’s extremely abrasive; the ball valve technology we’ve been developing over many years can handle that,” Mr Brown said.
