You can’t afford not to use highly engineered mud motor technology

August 2, 2023
Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

Reliability + performance = peace of mind

Drilling is the first step in your process, but what happens when your drilling schedule is thrown off as a result of unreliable downhole motor technology? The non-productive time can last a few hours at best, a few weeks at worst, costing your organization hundreds of thousands of dollars. In addition, when your drilling schedule is off track, your entire operation gets derailed, taking longer for you to achieve a return on investment. 

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In order to ensure your directional drilling operations go as planned — or even exceed expectations — it’s important to use the right mud motor technology. While there are plenty of options available on the market, many of them are not engineered for reliability or performance. However, with the high costs of NPT and the negative implications towards well profitability, operators can’t afford not to go with highly engineered mud motor equipment for directional drilling. 

ProDirectional is a leader in directional drilling mud motor design and development, utilizing dominant power sections together with rugged lower-end design — maintained and repaired according to stringent quality standards. This leads to lower non-productive time, higher drilling performance, and faster achievement of ROI.

The difference application engineering makes in mud motor design

At ProDirectional, we take great pride in making our equipment the best it can be. Sometimes, this involves designing and engineering each drilling mud motor component from scratch, while other times it involves sourcing the best components available on the market and combining them with our own proprietary technology.

Mud Motor Design

When it comes to our downhole drilling motors, this is the approach we have taken. We source the industry’s most powerful and trusted power sections — the sheer force is industry leading. However, if you combine this amount of power with an “off-the-shelf” driveline, the results will not produce ideal outcomes, with high potential for reliability issues or even mechanical failures that leave parts of the motor downhole.

Industry-leading mud motor design

We combine these industry-leading power sections with our proprietary transmission and lower-end mud motor design that has been developed by our engineering team. Reliability is a core focus of everything we do, which is why we have spent countless hours on the development of our downhole motor technology. Drilling rigs, motor power sections, and drill bits continue to get stronger. So, the design of the downhole mud motor transmission and lower end needs to be able to harness all of this power and energy without components breaking down when in use. 

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We understand that if a mud motor comes apart downhole, our clients endure unplanned expenditures from NPT, in some cases upwards of a quarter of a million dollars, leaving them further from their goal. That’s simply not something we’re going to let happen. We know what reliability is worth.

Our proprietary and highly engineered downhole drilling motor designs are capable of delivering upwards of 40,000 pounds of torque, while often subjected to 100 times the force of gravity (100 g), in temperatures up to 380 degrees Fahrenheit. The amount of engineering that goes into this quality of steerable motor technology is unmatched, and something we have taken great care to develop for our customers.

Cradle-to-grave lifecycle management

While many service providers outsource their repair and maintenance procedures, it is a critical part of our mud motor program at ProDirectional. Here’s what our cradle-to-grave lifecycle management looks like:

  • We own all of our downole motor assets
  • We engineer them in house
  • We guide operators how to use our equipment in the field
  • We maintain and repair each component

This kind of full-circle lifecycle management of our steerable motor technology leads to incredible performance results for our customers.

Instead of hourly based maintenance like the rest of the industry, where downhole mud motor components are maintained based on the amount of hours they are used, we take a condition-based maintenance approach. Why? Because one hundred hours of use in the Permian isn’t the same as one hundred hours of use in the Haynesville area. In order to properly maintain and repair our mud motor technology, it’s imperative that we consider how it has been used in the field and under what conditions.

Digital mud motor technology logs

To take our quality control standards one step further, we also electronically log every usage, maintenance, and repair for each drilling motor component in our proprietary digital assessment management technology platform, which helps us determine when a component needs to be retired or further repaired.

Drilling mud motor diagram

With an application engineering team in house, our engineers consider any issues our mud motor technology sees in the field and how those issues can be prevented in the future. They re-design and re-work components as needed to ensure the best possible performance, which means we are continuously evolving and improving our technology.

Through these stringent quality control measures, we offer the highest level of reliability for our mud motors, coupled with the highest level of performance.

What are reliability and performance worth to you?

What does your organization look for when evaluating mud motor oil and gas equipment for directional or downhole drilling? It’s likely reliability and performance are your top two criteria. In order to get the level of reliability and performance you’re aiming for, it’s important to look for technology that is properly engineered. Without that, you simply won’t get a level of reliability of performance you can trust — leading to costly non-productive time.

Get in touch with ProDirectional today to learn more about industry-leading downhole motor technology and how it can support your operations, ensuring drilling goes according to schedule so you can reach a faster return on investment.

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