Jim van der Sloot, the head of EnerStar rentals, speaks in his downtown Medicine Hat office about a new deal for his company to offer Starlink satellite communications to oil rigs and remote business sties across North America.--News Photo Collin Gallant
cgallant@medicinehatnews.com@CollinGallant
A Medicine Hat firm will begin hooking up fleets of oil rigs across North America to Elon Musk’s Starlink communications network after securing one of the first deals of its kind with the Space-X company.
EnerStar Solutions has provided accommodation and other rentals in the oil and gas exploration and service sector since 2010, and now has rights to provide higher bandwidth to remote locations via Starlink’s satellite network.
The deal is one of three agreements the Musk-controlled company has announced in the past three weeks, including one for marine vessels and another in Australia.
“In a world where data is the most important thing for your business, this is a game changer,” said EnerStar president Jim Van der Sloot, speaking in his office in downtown Medicine Hat.
“That’s what we’ve got (to offer) and what we’re asking companies to do now, is to think about what they would do differently if they had, say, five times the amount of bandwidth.”
The privately held company is actively supplying service companies throughout the U.S. – from Texas to North Dakota to Pennsylvania – with accommodation, power and communications facilities.
It expects delivery of the first 1,000 data terminals from Starlink this month, and will deploy them immediately to customers operating rigs, mainly in Texas, but EnerStar sees major growth potential throughout the U.S.
It holds continental rights to rent the terminals which connect to satellite, and can offer all levels of contracts.
That will lead EnerStar to plan to offer service packages to Canadian operators, and other remote businesses could be in place by early 2023.
Initially, Van der Sloot said, the move will help the increasingly technological process of operating and directing a drilling rig.
It is now common for engineers, geologists and even some operational personnel to attend and monitor work remotely via the internet, but with so much data being transferred, the size and capacity of the connection becomes critical.
The new service provides several factors of increased speed to industrial customers using Starlink’s network of satellites compared to its existing smaller-scale hookups.
“Everyone has access to Starlink residential or business-wise services right now,” he said. “We believe we’re the third reseller in the world right now, and the other two are basically maritime companies – cruise ships, yachts, shipping.”
Rural communities, ranchers and farm operators have been clamouring for the higher capacity satellite service to help improve download speeds and increase business opportunities that are increasingly data-dependent.
In the oil patch, the sector mimics shipping to some degree, with wide expanses without physical telecom infrastructure and highly mobile operations which now rely on ground-based repeater signal towers.
EnerStar will initially work with has so-called “nomadic” rigs, connecting them to satellites no matter their location, but holds also “non-nomadic” rights for large scale stationary operations, like sawmills, mines, agricultural processing, or even more urban operations with limited fibre optic access.
That will lead EnerStar to develop a sliding suite of service levels for data-intensive exploration, then completions, production and monitoring over the whole life of the well.
From that, said Van der Sloot, his company will provide a general business package for a host of companies in smaller communities where fibre optic ground cable is inaccessible or costly to install, or have needs greater than general 4G broadband levels, like those found in cell towers.
“It’s an open door for us, which is exciting because any place of business that needs prioritized data, needs rates that are above LTE rates,” said Van der Sloot.
