Perth businessman Simon Ashton's ProX recently financed the purchase of the remains of WellDog through Qtec after the Brisbane service company had gone into administration and receivership.

 

Ashton now runs Qteq with Adam Fitz-Henry, who manages the primary operation in Toowoomba, and managing director Ewan Meldrum, who was with WellDog until September last year.

 

Meldrum told Energy News that while almost all WellDog's revenue was from work on Santos, Origin Energy, Arrow Energy and Shell CSG fields, the company had mapped out expansion plans having already grown the Queensland business in the number of orders and employees even while in receivership. 

 

While the company has expertise in-house that it could supply into shale gas fields if the industry develops in the Northern Territory, Qteq's WellDog predecessor had already made inroads into WA by installing all the instrumentation on the wells for Duet Group's Tubridgi gas storage project.

 

That work also represented a step-change for the company in developing a fibre-optic capability which it brings in from overseas and adapts for the local market.

 

Qteq ran fibre optic for both QGC and Tubridgi. 

 

"That's where we're looking at getting our expansion from, is to get into these other markets," Meldrum told Energy News.

 

 

Yet there is still plenty of work ahead helping Queensland's CSG-LNG operators fill their trains with gas, particularly given the challenging geological nature of coal seams.

 

"One of the biggest challenges with CSG wells is they don't produce a huge amount of gas separately, and you have hundreds of thousands of them to produce enough gas to fill the LNG trains," Meldrum told Energy News.

 

"The only way they can do that, and how we help them, is using our instrumentation to get the pumps to last longer and do less workovers which means less downtime, which allows us to help them be more efficient and get the gas quicker."

 

Aside from that, Qteq is placing itself as a water solutions company, helping the CSG companies dewater wells and carry out instrumentation and water monitoring applications to help them meet the compliance arrangements for the aquifers.

 

Qteq also offers standard downhole pressure temperature monitoring in places like the Cooper Basin, having recently provided systems for Strike Energy over the last two months.

 

"One of the key things we do is stay abreast of technology that's available around the globe and re-size, modify and make it suitable to get it to the right price point for the CSG markets,  because if you try to take high-end oil field technology to CSG it just doesn't work," Meldrum said.

 

"We've really got be almost think like the miners do in trying to get the costs as low as we possibly can.

 

"So we target high-volume and try to get prices down through the volume application."

 

An example of this was taking pressure monitoring systems from overseas and making them affordable to the CSG companies who were running a sensor on just a fraction of their wells when WellDog started.

 

Now, Qteq has made it affordable enough for the CSG companies to run one system in every well.