SPOC Automation
Automation of Lift Controls

"Rise early, work late, and strike oil,” was J. Paul Getty's formula for success. Today, however, in far-flung oil-rich fields with a sparse population, various competing service providers often times struggle to get the right staff with the right knowledge at the right place. There is a drastic need to use human resources more efficiently and “Automation fits into it perfectly,” says Ted Wilke, VP of SPOC Automation. On fathoming the market predicament, SPOC Automation has introduced a range of automation solutions that help customers increase their liability and efficiency of the equipment. “This invariably reduces the cost of ownership both in terms of downtime and repair of assets and prevents energy wastage,” explains Wilke.

SPOC Automation’s products are designed to automate well production and use artificial lifts control to reduce electricity consumption as well as increase equipment utilization. SPOC Automation has an excellent line of variable frequency drive solutions and lift controls that makes automatic adjustments to the system and enables production engineers to monitor the system in real time and a service engineer gets alerted through their smartphones to initiate faster resolution.

The company has tailored a turnkey automation and drive package—HPS series drive injection pump—that controls and monitors the speed of the pump disposing water from the oil wells to reduce wear and system failures. It also limits various system connections and human intervention during the commissioning process with a factory program that allows simple configuration of set points based on pump and well conditions instead of required engineering. The standard time to install and commission the drive is just hours and operations begin immediately compared to the traditional solutions that take months.

The ease of use functionality is also the core of Sensorless Pump-Off Control (SPOC) solution that is designed to reduce the lifting cost of beam pump and electric submersible pumps. The solution does not require any external sensors, wires, and other field devices as the software configurations for monitoring are embedded within the SPOC Automation drive.

Our equipment is exceptionally easy to use with touchscreen-based interfaces

SPOC also makes the Revelation pump-off technology which uses pump cards, a graphical representation of the pump loads and analyzes it to make decisions, run diagnostics, and optimize settings.

In the words of Wilke, “Our equipment is exceptionally easy to use with touchscreen-based interfaces. The SPOC Automation’s equipment and software walk the technicians through setup, troubleshooting, and the diagnostics process in case of a problem.” The simple solution effectively reduces the training period of the field technicians and owing to the standardization of the equipment, clients benefit from substantial cost advantage. In the wake of various compliance requirements within the market, SPOC Automation has designed the Low Harmonic Drive to be efficient and compliant with the IEEE 519 electrical standard to make field power reliable.

In an implementation highlight, an oil field in South Texas had one 75 HP motor and three 50 HP motors during the initial phase, for which the normal requirement would be to install a 250KVA generator. However, in comparison to other vendors, even without shunting power into a resistor on an up or downstroke, the SPOC drive reduced the power and energy consumption such that a 125 KVA generator was able to efficiently manage the operations. This energy savings aspect has prompted a redesign of the power outlay from 14 MW to 8 MW for the complete field electrification with a projected savings of $17 million dollars—a whopping 50 percent.

With more than two decades of experience primarily in the U.S., SPOC Automation has recently spread its business to Canada. “Our aim is to minimize the difficulty of the field agents to deal with any kind of situation effectively by making the equipment approachable and easy to use,” concludes Wilke.