As a leader in drill rig technology, Ensign’s automated drilling rigs (ADR), such as the ADR 500, are able to move in quickly on a very tight drilling location, saving its clients time and money.

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Ensign United States Drilling Inc. quickly worked its way up in the oil and gas industry. Founded in 1989 as Caza Drilling Inc. from 1992 until 2005, Ensign has grown into the third-largest land drilling contractor in North America. The company changed its name in 2005 to Ensign to better reflect its role as part of Ensign Energy Services Inc., its parent company.

Jim McCathron, area manager of Ensign, says its growth was due to building up its fleet and adding rigs over the years, as well as growth through acquisition. Ensign United States Drilling is headquartered in Denver and is a subsidiary of Ensign Energy Services, which is headquartered in Calgary, Alberta, Canada.

Ensign says it is the premier drilling contractor operating in the Rocky Mountain and California production regions. It operates in nine western states with main office locations in Denver and Bakersfield, Calif.

“Through the various cycles in the oil and gas industry, Ensign, since its inception, has grown to a point where we have earned significant market share in the producing oil and gas basins where we are focused,” says Will Matthews, vice president of marketing.

He adds Ensign will enter into the Fort Worth basin by the first quarter of next year, and the company will also take part in an expansion in the Piceance basin of Colorado. “These opportunities enhance our ability to contribute to the success for our customer drilling programs with our new-generation, high-efficiency drilling rigs,” Matthews says. These include automated drilling rigs, such as the ADR 500.

Even More High-Tech
Ensign provides equipment and services for drilling oil and gas wells on either a day-work, turnkey or integrated-service basis. It has more than 70 drilling rigs and 14 well-servicing rigs operating in the United States. “It’s safe to say one of our strategies is vertical diversification,” Matthews says. “Unlike a lot of drilling contractors, we really have a lot of other services we provide.”

These services include coil tubing drilling, underbalanced drilling units, coring rigs, oilfield equipment rentals, well services rigs, directional drilling services and camp and catering servicing, he notes. The equipment Ensign uses includes:

• Automated drilling rigs (ADRs) – “The ADRs are able to move in quickly on a very tight drilling location, saving valuable time and money,” Ensign says. “This technology eliminates the need for a crew member to be in the derrick or on the rig floor. “Coil tubing can be added to the package, depending on customer requirements,” the company adds. “We continue to add ADRs to our fleet in order to better meet customer needs.”
• Self-walking rigs – These are ideal for pad and directional drilling work, the company notes. Rigs are equipped with top drives and can move from well to well with pipe in the derrick.
• Specialized equipment – “Depending on the need, we have a full range of specialized equipment available including top drives, iron roughnecks, camps, BOPs, heavyweight drill pipe and drill collars, rotating heads, gas busters, forklifts, hydraulic chokes, mud motors and mud cleaning equipment,” Ensign says. “In order to have more control over the time it takes to move rigs from one location to another or from one customer’s location to another customer’s location, we own and operate our own fleet of trucks in the DJ Basin of Colorado, southwest Wyoming and in California."
• New fabrication – If none of Ensign’s existing rigs meets a customer’s specific requirement, its engineering staff works with the customer to build a rig that fits its drilling need.

“We start from scratch and custom-design all the capabilities and features [customers] require into a newly fabricated rig,” the company asserts. “Over the last several months, new generations of high-tech rigs and ADRs have been developed and deployed successfully in Wyoming,” McCathron says.

Improving Safety
The advancement of ADR technology will also help improve employees’ safety, Matthews adds. “We have made big advancements in safety when it comes to operating drilling rigs,” he says. “Normally, adding new joints of pipe to the drill string requires a lot of interaction between the crew and heavy equipment. With the technology and advanced equipment available on the ADR 500, we’ve eliminated many of the potential dangers by automating the pipe handling process.

“This really helps take people out of harm’s way; we’ve eliminated the need for people to be in the pipe baskets and catwalk area or in the derrick during connection or tripping operations.

“The thing about working on drilling rigs is most everything is heavy and hard to move,” he states. “With the ADR 500, the drilling industry can now take advantage of the advancements available through computerization.”

Drilling Faster
“Not deploying this technology would be a waste of resources,” Matthews states. “In the last few years, we’ve been able to incorporate technology in our drilling process and, as a result, we’ve been able to reduce location size, operate more safely and drill faster, which is great in environmentally sensitive areas.”

In addition, “Operators are striving to reduce the cost and time required for rig mobilization. The design of our new-generation rigs helps operators achieve that objective, in part because of the reduced number of loads and axle-mounted equipment.”

Ensign never relaxes its stance on safety, even though the new high-tech equipment does minimize many of the traditional safety challenges, McCathron says. Safety training is taken very seriously, and Ensign provides each employee with 20 days of training per year. In addition, employees undergo a series of tests before being hired.

“We are one of the only companies in the U.S. that I’m aware of that requires a hair test, which is a more comprehensive drug test,” McCathron says. “Our goal is to attract the people who want to work in a drug-free and safe manner.”

‘Driving’ Goals
The company’s goal with Driving to Zero is to have one complete year without accidents, injuries or lost man-hours due to accidents or injuries.

“At Ensign, we are committed to ‘driving to zero’ incidents and injuries,” Matthews says. “We believe that each and every incident and injury is preventable. Over the last two years, we have focused fully on implementing new and existing safety processes on geographical groups of rigs in an attempt to quantify their effectiveness in reducing incidents and injuries.

“These rigs have decreased their incidents and injuries as a group well below industry benchmarks, as expected,” he adds. “The side benefit of this reduction in incidents and injuries has been a reduction in drilling times, which means that operators are saving money. These processes are now being spread across the fleet. Our lowered incident and injury rates are just another stepping stone on our way to zero.”

Partnerships Help the Labor Pool
Ensign has long-term partnerships with vendors that stem from its founding in 1989. The company is also constantly looking for new relationships, McCathron adds. “We work with people we’ve worked with for a long time, who are willing to step up to the plate to provide us with goods and services that we need,” McCathron says.

“We require a lot of equipment, so we’re constantly furthering our vendor list to make sure we have all the components that we need for production.”

“This is an exciting time in this business because with all the opportunities the new technology has brought, our partners that supply us have also helped us to initiate some of our ideas, “allowing us to create and make tangible our ideas,” Matthews says. “It is critical in any business to be in partnership with top-shelf providers.”

For example, when the company builds rigs in Colorado, it is able to take advantage of consistent, reliable providers, Matthews says, because of the company’s experience and relationships.

Ensign also can make its ideas happen because of the high quality of its work force, Matthews notes. “Partnerships are critical because they know us and we know them, and they are able to find us high-quality people for projects,” he explains. “In the last few years, there has been an unbelievable demand for quality workers.

“That’s where a partnership can help us out. If we were an unknown company, we might not garner the same support as a known entity with a proven track record.”

Even with Ensign’s partnerships to help it out, the labor pool is still tight. But, with the high-tech rigs, drilling operations require fewer people. “Because we’re always striving to have the best people in place for our customers, new employees receive extensive on-the-job training prior to working for our customers,” he says.