Lloydminster– Brooks, Alta.-based manufacturer Celtic Pride Manufacturing has been fortunate enough to keep going at a time when many oilfield services manufacturers have been struggling with low orders. The company’s success is in large part due to their extensive overseas sales.
“Our main business was coil tubing units,” said Martin Gubbins, owner of Celtic Pride, during the Lloydminster Heavy Oil Show on Sept. 14. “We’ve been doing these flushbys and injectors for seven years.”
“We haven’t laid off anybody,” he said. Normally the company runs between 25 and 30 employees.
Celtic Pride bought back some old units to refurbish for when the business picks up again. This would provide staff with projects to work on in between orders. But, so far, they haven’t had to resort to that fall-back plan yet, as there has been enough business to keep active in their primary work.
“Thankfully, we haven’t had to touch them yet. We’ve been selling a lot overseas. The Canadian oil patch is slow, but overseas is still fairly busy. Two weeks ago, I was in Oman,” Gubbins said. “We’ve sent quite a bit to Oman, Mexico, Columbia, Australia, New Zealand and Romania.”
The United States is another destination.
Some of those names might not often be referred to when talking about oil, but Romania, he noted, has a very old oilfield.
In the last few years, approximately 40 per cent of Celtic Pride’s sales have been overseas. “We bid a lot of overseas work as well,” Gubbins said.
That means their equipment has to be able to handle any weather. In Canada, temperatures may drop to -40 C, but in Oman, it can hit 47 C on the plus side. In that case, they use heavy hydraulic oil. The equipment has to have lots of cooling capacity, too.
Gubbins pointed out that Oman has steam injection over there, too, as well as 1,000 metre wells, just like the Bonnyville area.
A popular product going overseas is their truck-mounted gripper. Celtic Pride has a patented injector system that uses large ball bearings in slotted channels. The spaces between the bearings allows debris to pass through and not clog up the system.
The new Endless Rod Unit (EMU) they had on display was their fourth rig for Lifting Solutions of its type. It’s a flushby with a gripper unit mounted on its derrick, eliminating the need for a separate gripper truck. The gripper is mounted on hydraulics which allow it to move away from the derrick for normal block operations, and then back into play as needed.
Gubbins explained there are normally one or two joints of normal sucker rod on the top of a string of continuous rod, the generic name for “Endless Rod,” a brand name. There’s also an additional one or two joints of normal sucker rod on the bottom of the string. In normal operations, the crew would have to rig out, then rig in, then rig out the gripper, also known as the injector. But with this new setup, the gripper simply moves out of the way while still attached to the derrick.
