MORE than 40 Cat D8R machines are currently working deep in Rub Al Khali, Saudi Arabia’s renowned Empty Quarter, as part of a fleet being used by Sinopec on an oil and gas prospecting project for oil company Saudi Aramco.

These track-type tractors have been rented from local Cat dealer Zahid Tractor by the Chinese-owned survey company to pinpoint oil and gas deposits in a sand desert almost as big as France, in temperatures in excess of 50 deg C.

Sinopec’s fleet of seismographic vehicles – Sercel Nomad 65 all-terrain vibrators powered by C13 Caterpillar engines – systematically covers the chosen survey area. Because the dunes are so massive and steep, the Nomad vehicles – despite their special ‘sand tread’ tyres – cannot always follow the required survey patterns, according to a spokesman for Caterpillar. “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,” he says.

Some 40 D8R track-type tractors work at Sinopec’s project in the Empty Quarter.

But with the 40 D8R machines at work in such a remote and demanding environment, regular maintenance and servicing is 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 store assistant.

Atsu 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 Province facility in Dammam.

“Of course, since we’re over 800 km from Dammam, we have to be largely self-sufficient here. So we keep stocks of spares and renewables on-site. That includes 1,000-litre oil cubes containing filtered oil delivered direct from Dammam, so we can be absolutely certain that what we use is contaminant-free,” he says.

Preventing contamination is another important aspect of Atsu’s work. “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 metre, bag it and transport it out of the area for cleaning or disposal. It is rules like these that keep us on our toes – and rightly so – about how we carry out our work.”

Sinopec is no stranger to the rigours of operating in Saudi Arabia, having first started working there for Saudi Aramco in 2004. The current project, centred on the southeast of the country near its borders with Oman and the UAE, began in 2009 and is likely to last until 2014.

Regular maintenance and servicing ... critical for the D8R machines.

The company’s geophysical department operation supervisor Yan Shizhong, who is in charge of its prospecting activities in Saudi Arabia, says: “When we first started work in the country, 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.”

He says they had tried a different brand of machine before going for the Cats. “We tried 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,” he says.

“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!” he adds.

Sinopec has developed a close relationship over the past two-and-a-half years with the dealer. “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,” Shizhong says.

Zahid Tractor special project engineer Mohammed Gaber says on-site maintenance and service are an important aspect of the rental agreement between Sinopec and Zahid Tractor, but the benefits extend much further.

“We don’t just supply machines and make sure they’re kept up and running. 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.

Zahid Tractor’s laboratory in Dammam ... analysing oil samples collected from each machine.

If it’s ever necessary to take a machine off-site for repair, we’re responsible for that too,” says Gaber, who has been involved in the project for over two years.

And as part of the deal with Sinopec, Zahid Tractor replaces 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 organises, 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,” he says.

“And of course, Sinopec also does not need 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,” Gaber concludes.