The Oilfield Maze

As I related in my earlier post, The Girl with Oil in Her Veins, I absolutely loved growing up in the oil patch of Artesia, New Mexico spending my free time rampaging around my granddad’s operations at Hanson Energy.

As I got older, I began to see the oilfield as less a place to hunt rattlesnakes and more an opportunity to drive my granddad’s truck. Every summer, I continued to accompany him on his daily rounds, just as I had when I was younger. But as I got older, I had an ulterior motive.

One summer, when I was fourteen years old, I gathered up enough courage to ask if I could drive him to all of the wells he had to visit that day. Much to my surprise, he said yes! My granddad was either a brave man, or an incredibly stupid one.

With all the confidence in the world, I jumped into the driver seat and waited for him to give me directions to the first well. His gruff directions sounded something like, “Go straight for a good while, turn right at the shrub, and it’s the seventh pump jack on the left.”

About halfway through that day’s rounds, while my granddad was busy looking at paperwork, I must have missed the “boulder that looks like Johnny Cash” right turn I was supposed to make. As I was cruising down the dirt road pretending to be Dale Earnhardt, he looked up and yelled “Stop!” I slammed on the brakes, thinking I was about to be told my driving days were over at the ripe old age of fourteen. My granddad got out of the truck, did a couple of 360 degree turns, then got back in and told me he needed a few minutes to get his bearings. I had gotten us lost, REALLY lost, in the middle of the oilfield.

Thankfully, it did not take my granddad long to find a marker that he recognized – a particularly meaningful shrub that led us back on track. And within minutes, we were on our way to our well.

The same cannot be said, however, for someone who has not spent years in a particular oilfield like my granddad had. Drivers for oilfield service companies are faced with the dangerous task of navigating the “oilfield maze” on their own every day. The time and money wasted every time a driver gets lost is substantial. Lost drivers also increase the risk of safety incidents, and cause deliveries to be late, adding more downtime and frustrating customers.

With Geoforce’s Track and Trace technology, the chaos of the oilfield maze can be solved. By using Geoforce’s mobile application, drivers can receive turn by turn directions to quickly arrive at each piece of equipment. Geoforce’s Driver Focused Metrics product helps companies monitor the driving behavior of their drivers, and enforces safe habits to help keep everyone safe.

My granddad may have known the New Mexico oilfield like the back of his hand, but if Geoforce had been available to him, I would have gotten in some more Earnhardt time and the accurate directions provided to his drivers would have led to higher profits for Hanson Energy, and bigger Christmas presents for me.