Deep in Saudi Arabia’s Empty Quarter, Cat® Dealer Zahid Goes the Extra Mile

Oliver Atsu slows his service truck to a stop at the top of the 200-meter dune and peers into the distance. He points out two tiny dots eight kilometers in the distance. “There they are,” he says, “that’s where we have to get to.” ‘They’ are two Cat® D8R track-type tractors, and Oliver and his team are on the way to perform routine maintenance on them. Given the desert terrain in Saudia Arabia’s Rub Al Khali—the renowned Empty Quarter—It will take another hour before he gets there.

The D8Rs are part of a fleet of over 40 machines rented from local Cat dealer Zahid Tractor by Sinopec, a Chinese-owned survey company. Sinopec is in the Empty Quarter to pinpoint oil and gas deposits for oil company Saudi Aramco, in a sand desert almost as big as France, in temperatures in excess of 50º C. Sinopec is no stranger to the rigors of operating in Saudi Arabia, having first started working there for Saudi Aramco in 2004. The current project, centered on the south-east of the country near its borders with Oman and the United Arab Emirates, began in 2009 and is likely to last until 2014.

MAKING PROGRESS POSSIBLE IN THE DESERT
The company’s geological survey technique is made more difficult by the steep, shifting sand here. Its fleet of seismographic vehicles – Sercel Nomad 65 all-terrain vibrators powered by C13 Caterpillar engines – systematically covers the chosen survey area. Stopping every 20 meters or so, each vehicle lowers a hydrostatically-powered shaker plate. These emit vibrations that travel through the sand until they reach and reflect from the geological strata beneath. A network of sensor cables laid out on the sand picks up return signals, which are collected by the vehicles and transmitted to a remote location for analysis. The result is a picture of the underlying geology and potential areas to drill for oil.

So what role does the fleet of rented Cat D8R tracktype tractors play in this process? Because the dunes are so massive and steep, the Nomad vehicles, despite their special ‘sand tread’ tyres, cannot always follow the required survey patterns. The GPS-equipped Cat track-type tractors overcome this problem by creating drivable tracks through the dunes exactly where required, so that the Nomad vehicles can follow later.

With over 40 D8Rs rented from Zahid Tractor at work in such a remote and demanding environment, regular maintenance and servicing are critical for project progress. And that means long hours of unremitting hard work for Oliver Atsu and his resident team of four mechanics and a stores assistant. Oliver has been Zahid Tractor’s on-site service manager since the very beginning of the project, performing routine maintenance and servicing of the D8Rs every 250 hours, wherever they happen to be at the time (“we go to them, they don’t come to us,” he says).

Every three months he and his team conduct major inspections, and repair or replace parts where necessary. In order to pre-empt potential breakdown and facilitate predictive maintenance, oil samples are also collected from each machine after every 200 operating hours for analysis at Zahid Tractor’s own laboratory at the dealer’s Eastern Region facility in Dammam. “Of course, since we’re over 800 kilometers from Dammam, we have to be largely self-sufficient here, so we keep stocks of spares and renewables on-site. That includes 1,000 liter oil cubes containing filtered oil delivered direct from Dammam, so we can be absolutely certain that what we use is contaminant-free.” Freedom from contamination is important in another aspect of Oliver’s work, too.

“Saudi Aramco has some very strict rules concerning pollution of the environment that we have to keep in mind when we work,” he says. “For example, if we drop any oil at all onto the sand, we have to pick up the contaminated sand to a depth of one meter, bag it and transport it out of the area for cleaning or disposal. It’s rules like that which make us very careful indeed – and rightly so – about how we carry out our work.”

THE RENTAL OPTION A COMPLETE SOLUTION
On-site maintenance and service are an important aspect of the rental agreement between Sinopec and Cat dealer Zahid Tractor, but the benefits extend much further.

“We don’t just supply machines and make sure they’re kept up and running,” says Zahid Tractor Special Project Engineer Mohammed Gaber, involved in the project for over two years. “We take responsibility for every single aspect of machine operation. That includes the supply of all parts and consumables, such as engine and hydraulic oils and filters. Once every two months we send extra teams from Dammam to carry out comprehensive machine inspections. If it’s ever necessary to take a machine off-site for repair, we’re responsible for that too. And as part of the deal with Sinopec, we replace the machines once they’ve been operating for around 3,000 hours. We are also responsible for supplying fully trained and experienced operators for all the machines. In fact, apart from fuel, which Sinopec organizes, the responsibility for every single aspect of machine management and operation on the project is undertaken by us, leaving Sinopec completely free to concentrate on the prospecting.

“And of course,” he adds, “Sinopec is also freed from the requirement to invest considerable amounts of capital in buying machines—and that’s a big consideration when you need a fleet of over 40 track-type tractors.”

EQUIPPED FOR RESULTS
Sinopec’s Geophysical Department Operation Supervisor Yan Shizhong is in charge of the company’s prospecting activities in Saudi Arabia. “When we first started work in the country,” he says, “we had no intention of renting equipment, though we knew we wanted to work with Cat machines. We had done the research and everyone said Caterpillar was the brand to turn to, that they were best for desert conditions. We had tried a different brand of machine—a Chinese machine since we’re a Chinese company—but the weather proved to be too hot for it, and the terrain just too sandy. The Cat D8Rs supplied by Zahid, however, are specially equipped for desert operation. They are strong, powerful, and they come with good service back-up as part of the rental agreement.

“All in all, Zahid Rental has turned out to be the ideal solution for us. It means we can be flexible in the number of machines we want to use, and we avoid all the difficulties of finding enough good operators to man them – a problem we had when we first came here. Now it’s a Zahid Rental problem instead, which suits us very well! But seriously, we work well with them. We’ve developed a close relationship over the past two-and a- half years. Above all, along with providing a good financial and operational solution to meet our needs, they respond quickly when there are problems – as there always will be in the kind of conditions we face. And we always get good service. I know them, they’ve become my friends, and I’m happy about that.”