As many of you know we’ve been down in Texas this past week helping with the freezing crisis. I just wanted to give an update on what we were specifically helping with this week.

When we arrived in Midland Texas with equipment it was already in the mid-teens. I don’t need to rehash what was going on or why as there’s plenty of news outlets already doing that and I’m sure there will be more to come out in the coming days and weeks.

As far as Certek is concerned, we’ve been hired by several companies to help the oil and gas sector keep working. Our workers have been putting in long hours and we always protect the identity of our clients unless told otherwise so we don’t have many pictures, but this can give you a taste of what we are doing.

This hose in the picture has a liquid flowing through it called polypropylene glycol. It’s basically a food grade, extremely safe heat transfer fluid. Because that hose is in a loop connected to our machines, we can heat that liquid up to 180 degrees F. or about 82 C for our Canadian friends.

So, you can see we’ve basically got a coil of 180 degrees surrounding all this piping. This helps it thaw out quickly, and we’re doing this all over these sites. We can put about 5,000 feet of this half inch hose on one of our Kodiak units which is almost a mile of hose.

Typically, you set up a job site like this in the fall so that as winter and cold temperatures come, you’re never having to thaw anything out because your equipment never froze in the first place. You just leave this type of freeze prevention in place the entire winter and your project never skips a beat. But in regions like Texas where cold like this is rare, you end up having to thaw things out because the weather set in so fast and was so unexpected. This particular project depicted was thawed out and performing again in about 2 hours of having heat applied to it.

In the background you can see that orange box. We actually called that a Hot Orange. We have several sizes. This one happens to be rated for 250 thousand BTUs, but we have them from 50 thousand all the way up to 500 thousand and you can mix and match them until you top out a Kodiak machine. For those of you who don’t know, a BTU stands for British Thermal Unit and basically that’s just a unit for measuring heat. Technically, it’s the energy needed to move one pound of water up one degree Fahrenheit.

Anyway, a hot orange really is basically just a metal box with a radiator and a fan inside it. So that hose with the glycol in it, plugs into the radiator inside and the fan blows out up to 180-degree air. They are thermostatically controlled so you can lower or raise the temperature to heat up a tent or a tarp or a building or whatever you want. In this picture you can see we are using it to heat up a separator. Again, in a non-emergency situation it’s ideal to cover or tarp it or do something so the air isn’t just going out in the atmosphere, but even so this got the job done relatively quickly.

Luckily, it looks like the worst of the storm is over with temperatures jumping back up to the 50s and 60s again, but it’s been an honor to help in the ways we have been able to do so down there.

As more updates come in from our projects down there I’ll be sure to post so you can better understand the role we’re playing. If you have any questions or think we may be of service to you please look us up at our website at www.certekheat.com or call us toll free at 1-888-9-CERTEK