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PETROLEUM DIRECTORY: Providing essential supplies and services on the North Slope Colville plays a critical role in keeping industry and communities operating Alan Bailey Petroleum Directory Contributing Writer
Blowing snow, near-zero visibility and frigid temperatures can all make delivering fuel or collecting waste on Alaska’s North Slope a challenging proposition. The demanding Arctic conditions require knowledge, experience and specialized equipment.
Deadhorse-based Colville Inc. has established decades of experience of servicing the North Slope. The company supplies bulk fuel in the Prudhoe Bay area, collects solid waste on the slope west of the Kuparuk River and supplies a wide variety of materials and parts for the oil industry.
Although the company’s history goes back 50 years, the present-day form of the company emerged when President Jeff Helmericks started a fuel supply business in 1985, Keith Silver, Colville’s vice president of finance, told Petroleum News recently. This fuel delivery service has been the backbone of the company as it has grown and expanded its operations throughout the years.
In 1990, with the evolution of the business, the company changed its name from Colville Environmental Services to Colville, Inc., Silver said.
In 2000, the company established a solid waste division and purchased Brooks Range Supply — Brooks Range Supply is a major provider of commodities and parts on the slope (see “A Far North niche” in the June 22, 2003 edition of Petroleum News). Fuel delivery Colville’s specialized knowledge of how to handle and deliver bulk fuel in the Arctic has enabled the company to expand and consolidate its business over the years. The company builds its own custom-designed fuel trucks and employs a cadre of truck operators with years of experience of driving in Arctic conditions.
As well as supplying fuel anywhere on the road system on the North Slope, Colville delivers a variety of fuels, including Jet-A and Arctic heating fuel, to Everts Air Fuel for transportation to remote villages.
“We provide fuel to Everts Air Fuel ... they fly fuel out to the villages,” Silver said. “We provide fuel to them of whatever type they need.”
Colville’s expertise in fuel handling has also enabled the company to land a contract to supply fuel for Alaska Division of Forestry aircraft in Alaska. The company’s careful attention to quality control proved a critical factor in winning this Forestry contract. For example, Colville technicians test all aviation fuel for contaminants and specific gravity — if fuel doesn’t meet its specifications the company refuses to accept it.
“When a truck comes in those guys have to go out and spend a fair amount of time checking out the truck to make sure that there’s no water in the fuel and no other contaminates,” Silver said. Solid waste services Colville’s solid waste services division deploys hook trucks to pick up dumpsters from customer sites. The use of this type of truck enables the company to minimize travel time by moving three dumpsters in one trip.
Currently the company only provides solid waste services west of the Kuparuk River but the company hopes to extend its services to locations on the Dalton Highway in the future.
“We’ve received permission to expand the area of our operations down the Dalton Highway,” Silver said.
Although the company delivers material such as kitchen waste and construction debris to the North Slope Borough’s landfill in Deadhorse, recycling has become a major focus — the company picks up recyclable material such as used tires and metal from locations all across the North Slope road system.
Good tires go back to one of the tire manufacturers, Silver said. “Then we have places for the tires that are not so hot, that can use them to be recycled into, say, road material,” he said. Metal goes to Fairbanks “We’re working with the BP metal recycling program and sending all that to a place in Fairbanks that recycles metal,” Silver said.
Colville has found a novel way of dealing with recyclable oily material such as oily rags.
“Recyclable oily material ... is all shipped to Spokane and put into a waste to energy plant,” Silver said, “... they generate electricity that powers the city.” Silver would like to see a similar plant in Alaska. Integrating Brooks Range Supply The purchase of Brooks Range Supply in 2000 has given Colville the opportunity to streamline and improve its services. For example, the two businesses can rationalize their product inventories between their facilities in Deadhorse — the two facilities are close together in town.
“We (in the Colville facility) are going to keep everything that you would normally forklift, like steel, pipes, barrels of oil ... large stuff, while Brooks Range will have the smaller things like the fittings and the batteries,” Silver said.
At the same time, integration between the two businesses has led to a seamless service for customers. For example, there’s an identical product list at either location — the company has installed data network and computer technology between the two locations to enable information and data processing to be shared.
“If somebody comes in wanting to buy something from Brooks and I happen to be here (in Colville) ... we can do the whole invoice here and they’ll pick it up there (in Brooks),” Silver said.
Silver also commented that the use of the Brooks Range Supply’s ordering and purchasing system has ratcheted up the quality of the services for the whole of Colville Inc.
“Brooks Range Supply has always done a very good job from the initial order to creating a purchase order, sending the purchase order out and tracking the whole transaction all the way through to paying the bill to the vendor,” Silver said.
A mature oil province Faced with the challenges of making money in a mature oil province, Colville is constantly seeking ways to improve its efficiency.
“It’s easy to make money in a growing oilfield,” Silver said. “In a declining oilfield they’re really concerned about cost.”
It’s all a question of creating more revenue by generating more business without significant cost increases — working out how to do more work with the same number of people.
“And that’s kind of what we’re trying to do,” Silver said, “to challenge our people to find new and creative ways to do their jobs in less time ... be more efficient without sacrificing quality.”
Although efficiency improvements have already resulted in some parts of the company making more money than ever before, the company has recently hired a new manager to further expand the business and streamline operations.
“We’ve hired ... Smokey Norton and he is our vice president of operations,” Silver said. “He’s to take us to the next level.” However, experience in dealing with the North Slope conditions remains one of the keys to Colville’s success. The company’s seasoned truck operators, for example, know how to judge the weather conditions.
“When you see these old hands hunker down and have a cup of coffee instead of going out, you know it’s got to be pretty bad,” Silver said. And Silver remembers one miserable winter day when a drilling rig in Deadhorse needed refueling. The visibility was so bad that a spotter had to walk in front of the fuel truck.
“It took them about four hours to get back here from about a mile and a half away,” Silver said. “But they went because they had a customer who was going to go dry on fuel.”
That’s what Colville Inc. means by customer service.
Editor’s note: Alan Bailey owns Badger Productions in Anchorage, Alaska
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