Where Did Our Passion for MWD Begin?
Early on in his career, Ken Miller struggled to find his calling and passion until he discovered MWD. Petroleum Engineering and subsequently MWD really sparked the passion that created Erdos Miller today. “What I love about MWD is that it’s highly digital.” Ken states. The deployment of MWD tools is a factor that he took great interest in. For example, Ken refers to a satellite analogy where it is deployed into to space and we can communicate with it while it’s miles away from earth. The process of preparing the satellite into space is like sending our drilling tools downhole. Although they are not the same, the common theme is that your team has one chance to make sure everything is set for the tool to succeed.
We believe MWD is not limited to just the Oil and Gas Industry
MWD is commonly associated with the Oil and Gas Industry, however we believe it to be much broader than that. We believe that MWD can be valued in many other industries by expanding knowledge through cross training or finding some overlap within other adjacent industries such as mining, geothermal, and Horizontal Directional Drilling (HDD). When we can tackle challenges in each industry, we find that many times we are able to share solutions between markets that we would have missed had we been hyper focused on Oil & Gas alone!
A case study in our approach to MWD in Oil & Gas
Prior to creating Eclipse there were a lot of systems in the industry that we believe were incumbent and weren’t changing quickly. There were a lot of new and upcoming systems, in our opinion that were missing the mark to be sufficient. We saw them as either doing too much or not truly addressing the customer problems. We saw an opportunity for a system in the future that could maintain the economics of the incumbent tools but also bring what we aspire for the industry.
Keeping with our passion to push technology forward continuously. We began designing Eclipse. Eclipse is a platform created where innovation within the next 10-15 years will be built upon. When starting our design, we asked ourselves “Where will the industry be in 10 years?” rather than simply solving the issue of today. We forecasted the future of the industry, and settled on several important themes, health, safety, and environment (HSE) and reliability. These two themes are constantly re-iterated by operators of all sizes. The natural question then remains, how do you improve HSE with an MWD tool? The answer, design a system that does not require specialized personnel to be added to the rig site to operate. Design the MWD to be so simple that it can be operated by anyone. As for the second theme, reliability, how do you make an MWD tool more reliable? Start by building tools in a clean shop environment with automated testers to validate a tool build.
We believe drilling consistency and reliability starts at taking extra precautions when building our tools. It allows us to ensure that every tool is built consistently from mechanical to assembly to the programming set up. Our team produces our tools in a safe and clean environment to maintain that product consistency. This guarantees that your tool is delivered upon you with world class service.
