The napkin that changed the face of drilling
One of the biggest drilling innovations of the young century began with a sketch on the back of a napkin at a restaurant in Houston. Here’s how it happened.
MD Cowan President Mike Cowan never forgot his childhood image of a drilling rig, obtained from accompanying his father to drill sites. It would affect his thinking and fire his creativity decades later in the development of the now-legendary Super Single drilling rig.
“I just remember these great big giant rigs that would go on location and stay there six months drilling one hole,” he recalls. “It was kind of a slow process, dangerous. A lot of guys on the (rig) floor had fingers missing (from) throwing a chain and stuff.” For years, visions of those dangers and missing digits made the young Cowan want to avoid drilling rigs—which now seems ironic considering that he is president of a drilling rig company.
A lawyer friend introduced Cowan to engineer Anson Parker in Houston. As Cowan and Parker talked, Cowan saw that Parker, an engineer, was both creative and experienced in the drilling field. So Cowan grabbed a napkin and a pencil and sketched out his idea of a safe and mobile drilling rig.
Parker was working for a company that was having difficulty paying Parker his expense money, so Cowan offered him job at MD Cowan, where Parker completed the details of what became known as the Super Single.
“I really couldn’t have done it without him because, you draw something on a napkin, he’s the guy that can take it from the napkin to actual blueprints,” Cowan said. Mobility was one of the keys because, in Cowan’s view, rigs will need to move faster and operate more safely in order to be competitive.
The Super Single dramatically boosts safety because it does not require rig hands to manually connect and disconnect drill pipe—that’s all done mechanically. More workers now go home still able to count to ten on their hands.
Single rigs existed before this, but they would only drill to 5,000’, too shallow for the newer wells. So Cowan designed his to reach 12,000’. To achieve those greater depths, the Super Single required designers to develop hydraulics that would hold up under higher pressures than any had done before.
“It’s a versatile rig,” Cowan explained. “We can tweak this from the base rig. It can be an AC rig, it can be a mechanical rig, it can skid—where you can drill presets—which lends itself really well (to meeting drillers’ needs to economize).”
Because of the rig’s speed, many drillers use it to drill the 9,000’ vertical hole, with water, then bring in the bigger rigs to drill the laterals using mud. Because of the Super Single’s speed, Cowan says this is very economical, especially if the operator is paying for the rig by the day.
The rig is also speedy when it’s time to move to another site. While other AC rigs take up to five days to move, Cowan reports that the Super Single can move in eight hours because it doesn’t require any cranes for setup or teardown. “When margins are down, you’re not going to be making any money while you’re moving your rig,” he says.
The next rig innovation may not involve any napkins, but it’s already in the design phase. Always ready to push the envelope, Cowan is looking to build a 1500 horse AC rig with automation capability land other engineering innovations.
“I’ve looked at one rig that has a continuous cycle. As the pipe comes out, it never stops as you’re laying it down. There’s a lot of moving parts in that rig, and if you built it today, it’s $24 million. I need to build a 1500 horse AC rig for $14 million. That’s our target.” Today’s lower margins require lower cost rigs, in Cowan’s view.
One way MD Cowan stays on the cutting edge is by using outside engineering and electrical firms instead of limiting its design to in-house people. “There’s a lot of talent out there that we use—I don’t have any engineers here,” he notes. He uses a firm in Houston that also provides economic advantages. “They don’t cost me anything if I’m not using them.”
Here’s where the innovator, the gambler, the envelope-pusher comes out. “The people who’ve hired their own engineers, they get inside a box sometimes. They stick with what’s worked before. We need to know what’s going to work in the future.”
On the one hand, Mike Cowan is indeed a gambler, an entrepreneur, an innovator. But there’s a flip side to him that’s kept the company afloat through booms and busts since the early 1980s. You can read about that in the next issue of Oil and Gas The Industry.
