Company uses old chopper engines for fracking wells

Fuel Fix:

Deep in the swamplands of Louisiana, out of a clearing in the dense foliage that covers this coastal stretch, the roar of jet engines echoes across the landscape.

It is the sound of military aircraft — an escalating hum that evokes images of acceleration, takeoff and things on the move.

But these engines — which once transported troops in Iraq and Afghanistan — now move water. Millions of gallons of water.

They are a part of what two Louisiana companies believe will be the next step in the high-powered, fuel-intensive business of hydraulic fracturing — the technique that has created an American oil and gas boom.

Using retired military helicopter engines, Green Field Energy Services and Turbine Power Technology are building pressure pump systems that are key to that most important service in modern oil and gas drilling while doing what no competing pumps can: Run completely on low-cost natural gas.

Their products have added to an intensifying engineering race among several companies vying to offer oil field machines that can use natural gas instead of diesel.

The key to the effort lies at the heart of the companies’ Louisiana plant, where stacks of green, steel canisters hold powerful battlefield engines that came from the mountains of Afghanistan and deserts of Iraq to this land of alligators and shrimp boats on the nation’s southern edge.

The turbine engines — compact cylindrical packages of high-grade steel — once powered massive Chinook and Huey helicopters. But in a flourish of innovation, Turbine Power Technologies has turned the old engines, formerly destined for scrap, into oil field machines.

“We basically take one man’s junk and turn it into treasure,” said Ted McIntyre, CEO of Turbine Power Technology, an engine company that he co-owns with Green Field Energy Services.

A team that includes more than a dozen military veterans works at the Louisiana plant to restore the worn engines. Some tinker with the delicate steel blades that help move air through the turbines at hundreds of miles per hour to generate power. They also tweak the machines so that they can burn diesel and natural gas, in addition to jet fuel.

Others in the plant load the engines into large, orange frames and configure them to drive pumps that can blast millions of gallons of water, sand and chemicals into underground rocks to free up oil and gas.

The novel use of turbines has drawn the interest of industry players including Shell, Apache Corp. and GE, each of which has partnered with Green Field or used its services. It also has turned heads at engine manufacturing icon Caterpillar, which makes both conventional diesel engines and turbines for other uses.
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There is more including a video of the operation.

This is an interesting idea.  The fuel savings by using natural gas to run the engines is significant.  If they used "field" gas from the site of the drilling operations it is estimated the savings to the industry could be $1.67 billion.   That is a good incentive to take a look at the process.