Drillmec is an international leader in design, manufacturing and distribution of drilling and workover rigs for onshore and offshore applications, as well as a wide range of drilling equipment.
Challenge
To meet the growing demand for carbon capture and storage/CCS, the company needed to make drilling ingress points for carbon capture faster, safer and more cost efficient. CCS involves trapping carbon at the point of emission, for example in a factory, and then pumping it to a suitable underground storage facility where it is permanently stored, preventing it from being released into the atmosphere. Creating new ingress points for CCS facilities involves precision drilling into complex rock strata. The work can be labour intensive and the more staff there are on site, the greater the health and safety risks. Drilling the ingress points involved the use of heavy machinery, but also had to be very precise to avoid rework and control costs.
Drillmec needed to minimise the cost, risk and need for expensive rework in any drilling operations. To achieve this, it had to find a way to improve the precision, ease of operation and cost effectiveness of its drilling system. As the electric system for the drilling platform is powered by the national power grid, a low harmonic factor needed to be ensured. This was necessary to keep the total harmonic distortion (THD) within 5%.
Solution
Drillmec chose Allen‑Bradley PowerFlex 755TL AC drives to improve the precision of its automated CCS drilling system, adding them to the control systems for its technology’s solids-handling pumps. The company worked with Rockwell Automation to integrate, test and deploy the drives as part of its operational technology on site.
Result
Using Rockwell’s PowerFlex drives with Active Front End technology, Drillmec ensured that the harmonic distortion factor of the system was kept within proper limits. This improved the precision and accuracy of its drilling technology, allowing the company to drill faster, with fewer staff on site. Improving operations helped Drillmec control costs, and reducing the number of site visits required contributed to improved safety.
By minimising wear and tear, the company expects to increase mean time between failure for relevant components of the system. Not only will this reduce maintenance costs, it will also help to keep the technology in operation longer, with less downtime. This improves utilisation rates and enables Drillmec to drill more ingress points during any given time frame.
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