GEAR MAKING
on dry land that is not yet producing. This includes the cost for professional personnel (engineers, geologists, etc.); labor to run the rig; normal maintenance; and land rents, fees and taxes.
• Offshore rigs are even more costly. Floating deep-water drill ships can run from $258,000– $519,000 per day, according to
Rigzone.com, a Web site that provides oil & gas industry news and information, includ- ing offshore rig data. Jack-up rigs, ones that are jacked up on “stilts” in order to operate in shal- lower water (130 m or less), run $60,000–$182,000 per day. And whether by land or by sea, the cost of a rig and the logistics of getting it to a site is added on top of these per- day expenses.
Quality Equates to Longevity “If gears are manufactured poorly
they don’t last as long as people expect,” said Fred Young, CEO of For- est City Gear (Roscoe, IL). Forest City manufactures fine and medium pitch cylindrical gears for a wide variety of industries, from aerospace to medical, including oil & gas.
Facing high monetary risks and
rewards, oil & gas producers jealously protect anything that can conceivably be considered a competitive advantage. And that includes gears.
“Often we sign nondisclosure agree- ments with our customers,” Young said, “so we don’t always know what the application is, but I do know for a fact that we have done gears for the fracking industry, gas compressors and drilling. “When you have equipment contain- ing gears that is buried underground and you spend a lot of money getting it,” he added, “then you darn well better expect that it’s going to function prop-
See us at HOUSTEX Booth #243 February 2015 |
AdvancedManufacturing.org 79
erly and that it’s going to last for a while. There are a number of defects that can occur during the manufacturing process and a lot of those go back to the tooling and the fixturing, and the expertise of the gear manufacturer.”
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