When the bottom dropped out of forestry in 2008, heavy equipment maker Tycrop Manufacturing Ltd. lost the mainstay of its business almost overnight.
The company, which started out making forage trailers for dairy farmers in the late 1970s and is based in Chilliwack’s Rosedale area, had diversified into making wood-chip trailers for sawmills and pulp mills.
When that business went south, the company accelerated a move it had planned to make anyway into the oil and gas sector.
It started making hydraulic fracturing pumps, and has since developed several innovations, including SandStorm, a mobile sand-handling system for fracking that dramatically increases setup speed, reduces energy consumption and manpower requirements and addresses an occupational health hazard: silicosis.
Since diversifying into oil and gas, the company’s head count has tripled, to 320 today from 110 in 2008, and it has passed the $100 million revenue mark.
“In three years, our revenues went over five times what they were,” said Tycrop president and CEO Scott Mason.
He added that about 70% of the company’s sales now come from the equipment for the oil and gas sector.
“The interesting thing about Tycrop is that they’ve been able to slide from one sector to the other,” said Kevin Davis, director of memberships for the B.C. chapter of the Canadian Manufacturers and Exporters. “As one opportunity has diminished, they’ve looked to another one.”
One of its innovations is SandStorm, which solves several problems for well service companies working in the fracking fields.
“How the equipment was being operated was with anywhere from six to nine workers with headsets and masks and radios all talking over walkie-talkies,” Mason said. “We tackled that issue by creating a control system that could be run off of, say, an iPad. The icing on the cake is that we gave the customer the ability to run the entire system with one worker as opposed to eight.”
Hydraulic fracturing involves pumping a mix of proppant (treated sand or ceramic materials), water and chemicals underground at high pressure to fracture shale and release trapped gas.
Traditional systems are open and use conveyor systems to move the sand, which can result in sand dust at the well site. Workers exposed to sand dust can develop a lung disease called silicosis. Tycrop’s innovation was to do away with the motors and conveyor systems and use gravity to move the sand.
Looking a bit like a Patriot missile launcher, each SandStorm unit has three long, rectangular “gravity boxes” where the sand is stored. It is moved into place, and when the sand needs to be moved, hydraulics lift the boxes up and gravity does most of the work.
A typical well site might have two to four of these systems, for a total of six to 12 gravity boxes. The systems sell for $1.5 million to $3.5 million each, depending on the scale of the operation.
Because the sand is fully contained, it reduces sand dust at the well site. It also has a smaller carbon footprint, because instead of having each container powered by its own generator and motor (as is the case in more traditional setups), it has a mobile power-motor Hydrabear system that can be moved around by remote control.
“As opposed to, say, six units having their own motors, we’ll only have one,” Mason said. “It reduces the number of engines that are spewing out exhaust and running through fuel, so it has a far lower carbon footprint.”
Tycrop has sold more than a dozen SandStorm systems to date to well service companies in Alberta, Texas, Colorado, Pennsylvania and northeastern B.C. •
