Terberg Benschop News

Terbergs for Schlumberger in Russia

Thursday, March 3rd 2011

Improved oil extraction with revolutionary Terberg technology

Terberg Benschop has made two impressive special vehicles for the oil industry. The French-American company Schlumberger will use the Terbergs to improve the output of oil-wells in Russia. The concept of the two Terberg FM3000 10x8 vehicles is new to the oil industry. The trucks are equipped with a coil tubing reel for eight to twelve kilometers seamless thick-walled steel pipe. They are called Terberg Coil-Trucks.

Terberg Benschop has delivered a number of FM2000 8x8 vehicles before, which could do about the same as the five-axles will do now. The advantage of the Terberg FM3000 10x8 is more payload. The core of the novelty is that Terberg Benschop is the first one to mount a very large tubing reel on a rigid truck chassis. The structure was initially developed by Asep in Groot-Ammers (NL) but now, the superstructure is also built and assembled in the USA and Russia.

The first experiences with the Terberg four axle vehicles are so promising that now two Terberg FM3000 five axle Coil- Trucks are built. The special feature of these vehicles is that the chassis has been placed to the outside as far as possible to accommodate a tubing reel with a maximum winding capacity. A kind of a box frame was developed. Thanks to this Terberg solution the petroleum companies for the first time are able to transport the installation, with such a large reel and such a low centre of gravity, on a rigid truck. This was always done with trailers, which are very limited in their terrain abilities. The Terberg vehicles, with their excellent off-road capability, are obviously well suited to reach every drilling site in the vast Russian territory on their own, without any problems.

There, the special vehicles will clean the channel of the oil-well with a high-pressure spray nozzle which is fixed to the end of the steel pipe. For their various activities Schlumberger can wind steel pipe with a diameter ranging from 1" to 2 3/8" on the reel. The engine of the FM3000 provides the propulsion of both the reel and the hydraulic installation on the bore hole. The hydraulic drive unit comes on top of the well to move the steel pipe in the well up and down. The power required for this can be up to 188 kW (1,000 Nm at 1,800 rpm) which is much branched off power for a truck engine, but the Volvo D13 with an output of 325 kW (440 hp) has no difficulty at all doing that. Rolling out, the drive unit must push the flushing pipe downwards into the well with much force. The oil in the drilling pipe can be under a pressure of 350 bar. Once a few kilometers of pipe is pushed down, the drive unit has to decelerate. Elevating the nozzle and the pressure pipe again draws up the maximum power of the drive unit.

Complex installation

To accommodate the Terberg FM3000, with a wheelbase of 962 inches with the large reel with the lowest possible center of gravity, a lot of work has been done. The chassis was completely altered: there is no room for the usual two longitudinal beams of the chassis. Nor is there room for the driveshaft to the rear wheels. Terberg has solved that by modifying the rear axles with their input shaft high up, which allowed them to reverse assembly. The axle clearance of the input shaft is lower then, but high enough to ensure adequate ground clearance. Mounting the intermediate bearing low could very well lead to problems, but a clever solution has been found. The intermediate bearing has been mounted to the frame of the reel. With this frame the reel and the intermediate bearing can be brought up by 60 cm for adequate ground clearance or dropped to 20 cm above ground level for minimum height. In this way sufficient clearance is created between the front and rear axles for driving in hilly terrain.

The truck also features a control room. For a good view on the operations, the control room has been put on a leviable frame. From this position, the staff of Schlumberger can keep an eye on both the reel with steel pipe on the truck and on the drive unit on the well.

To give all necessarily parts a place on the truck, every inch is used. This is visible on the solution for storing the hydraulic oil supply. Lacking the well known longitudinal beams to mount a tank, Terberg has used the box-shaped structure of the box frame as the container for hydraulic oil. With vehicles like these Coil-Trucks Terberg Benschop proves to be the leading special vehicle builder, worldwide.

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