Henry-Pump Transforms Oilfield Services on Industrial IoT

When oil prices peaked at over $100 per barrel, it was difficult for the oil and gas industry to talk about new technology or the industrial Internet of Things. Now, the industry may be faced with long-term prospects of sustained stresses of over-supply and significant cost management in the production operations. Henry-Pump, a private oilfield services company owned by Jim and David Henry, decided to leverage technology and remote services to transform production to be more competitive in this difficult market. Henry-Pump was initially created to service sister companies Henry Resources and Henry Petroleum and service production operations in the Permian Basin in the Texas region. Now with a fully developed remote service offering called POCloud, Henry-Pump provides services for other oil producers along with other products.

Many assets in this industry are geographically separated by several miles and characterized by many to be 4D facilities - dull, distant, dirty and dangerous. Henry-Pump realized there was significant cost saving opportunity realized by remotely connecting oilfield assets and that there were other higher value activities that workers could be performing. Maintenance services for these assets were often reactive in nature and involved an engineer or pumper technician driving considerable distances to maintain these sprawling assets.

Henry-Pump has differentiated their oilfield services by providing a Pump-Off Optimization solution using an Industrial IoT Analytics platform by Meshify. The Meshify architecture makes use of some readily available and cost-effective technologies, which include cellular communications and cloud services. Initially, the engineers at Henry-Pump attempted to build a home-grown solution to service their own wells but soon realized the Meshify IoT platform would satisfy their specific requirements.  The most interesting part of the Henry-Pump solution is not in its ability to provide static dashboards and alerts of equipment failures like many solutions today on the market, but rather in its ability to build on an IoT platform that could read time-series data and diagnostic analytics compared to both surface cards and downhole cards.

The dynamometer card has been the industry standard for more than 80 years and plots surface load versus position for both surface equipment and the downhole pump.  Henry-pump developed an unique algorithm using real-time diagnostic analytics, to predict pump stroke and other failures by comparing this to the shape of 12 standard downhole and surface cards.  This algorithm can detect a variety of problems with the well can be determined such as bad plunger, split in the barrel, etc. Depending on the outcome of this real-time analysis, the Henry-Pump controller is capable of adjusting pump operation automatically. Smart logic built into the system can either start-stop or slow-down pump stroke autonomously.  The cost to pull rods that may occur with a failure can be higher than $15K while pulling and servicing tubing can be $30K.

Predicting failures and changing operations in real-time are now table-stakes for an industry that is already stressed by low oil prices. ARC expects the survivors in the oil and gas industry to follow the lead of Henry-Pump and make use of IoT Analytics Platforms. In fact, according to Meshify representatives, the Industrial  IoT platform is fully commercialized, and other customers now include Sierra Resources, Tyco Gas & Flame Detection and Lubrizol, to name a few.