Powerful bed truck allows oilfield contractor to move big loads in small spaces around well pads.
The large haul trucks and trailers that carry huge pieces of oil-drilling rigs from one well pad to another can easily deliver the goods on the open road. But at crowded and congested well pads, it’s a totally different story – which is why Mitchell’s Oil Field Service bought a 2013 Kenworth C500 tandem-steer bed truck.
The Kenworth literally picks up where the haul trucks leave off. The haul trucks are too big to maneuver easily around well pads, so they offload the rig sections on the perimeter. Then bed trucks pick up the pieces and set them where they need to be, explains Victor Mitchell, operations manager of the Mitchell’s facility in Glendive, Mont.
“Since there’s no trailer involved, there are no turn points on it,” Mitchell points out, explaining why the bed truck – which is plenty big at almost 10 feet wide and nearly 49 feet long – is still more maneuverable than a haul truck. “And the twin-steering gives it a much shorter turning radius.
“Haul trucks are 75 feet long, and once you get on a well site, it’s too congested for a truck that long to do a lot of backing up and turning,” he adds. “Since the bed trucks can get into tight spots a lot faster, they increase our productivity by decreasing setup time.
“Without a bed truck, or some sort of truck like it, it probably would take us a lot longer to do a typical job,” he says. “And in some situations, we couldn’t even do it at all.”
A Wood Group company that’s headquartered in Sidney, Mont., Mitchell’s operates eight facilities in western North Dakota and eastern Montana, offering roustabout, trucking, crane, well supervision, pipeline and other services. This particular Kenworth truck works mostly on re-entry and clean-out drilling rigs on oil wells in North Dakota.
The truck features a Cummins ISX 550 hp diesel engine, a six-speed automatic transmission made by Allison Transmission and a Spicer four-speed auxiliary transmission from Dana Limited. “Basically, when you put it in low range [with the auxiliary transmission], you’ve still got all your gears, but at a lower gear ratio, which gives you the extra traction required for heavy loads
in soft ground,” Mitchell says. Bessemer Enterprises installed the truck’s bed and winches.
Mitchell also lauds the Kenworth’s powerful winches, which can pull giant pumps and large sections of rig buildings. The main winch can pull 130,000 pounds and the secondary winch, which is used primarily at a 90-degree angle off the back or side of the bed, maxes out at 100,000 pounds.
“The secondary winch is used when we have to do something like move the front of a rig building over six inches – square things up,” Mitchell explains.
The bed truck’s power reflects an industry trend toward bigger and bigger pieces of rig equipment. About 10 years ago, for example, large pumps on service rigs weighed about 35,000 pounds. Now they weigh around 80,000 pounds, he notes.
“Years ago, the heaviest pieces of drilling rigs weighed around 80,000 pounds,” Mitchell says. “Now they weigh up to 130,000 pounds. The equipment gets bigger and heavier over the years, so we need bigger equipment to handle it.”
The Kenworth, which costs roughly $560,000, also offers operators more safety features, such as front- and rear-mounted video cameras. When the truck is in forward gear, the in-cab monitor displays split-screen views from both cameras; in reverse, it shows just the rear-camera view. Moreover, to aid drivers while backing up, which is tricky with such a long truck, the camera system superimposes a progression of green, yellow and red bar graph-like lines on the screen that indicate the truck’s distance from an object.
“The noses of these trucks are so big and so high that when you come up to a stop light, you can’t see that there might be a pickup truck 3 feet in front of you,” Mitchell says, noting that the top of the truck’s radiator stands about 8 feet off the ground and that drivers need to use a ladder to get in and out of the cab. “The back camera also includes audio, so you can hear things better over all the noise that occurs on a well pad.”
Hydraulic winches also offer a big improvement over older chain winches. The hydraulic winches are designed to work within their limits, which makes them much safer, Mitchell says.
“We couldn’t do what we do without this truck,” he says. “It’ll pay for itself in the long run.”
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