WaterFleet: Creating drinking water where there is no drinking water!

“What the water rig is at its core is a mobile water treatment technology, and it dramatically changed the lives of the people living on that site.”

Having clean, drinkable water is essential for everyone, no matter where they are. For some on-site workers on remote oil and gas drilling sites, this means transporting in large amounts of bottled water. The result is a large amount of plastic waste from the bottles and air pollution from the extra traffic.

WaterFleet provides an alternative solution. Their water treatment technology means that a mobile rig can be hooked up to an existing well or water storage source on site and provide people with clean potable water on tap. As the rig processes the water, it automatically and continually monitors the quality to ensure it’s safe. WateFleet also uses this technology to provide temporary water solutions to areas that have been affected by natural disasters.

Our producer Eva Ruth went to the WaterFleet headquarters in San Antonio, Texas to meet the Director of Business Intelligence, David Meyers. He explains WaterFleet’s mission statement and takes us inside one of the water rigs.

Find out more about the WaterFleet here.

Find out more about ServiceMax here.

Your host is Paul Haimes from industrial software company PTC.

Episodes are released bi-weekly. Follow us on LinkedIn and X for updates.

This is an 18Sixty production for PTC. Executive producer is Jacqui Cook. Sound design and editing by Clarissa Maycock. Location recording by Eva Ruth. Music by Rowan Bishop.

Transcript

Welcome to Third Angle, where you find us staying hydrated without a plastic water bottle in sight.

I’m your host, Paul Haimes from industrial software company PTC. In this podcast, we share the moments where digital transforms physical, and we meet the brilliant minds behind some of the most innovative products around the world, each powered by PTC technology.

Picture this: you’re in the midday heat on a drilling site in some remote part of the US. It’s time for a water break. Turning on a tap and expecting clean, drinkable water is something we all rely on. But for many of these remote sites, giving workers access to potable, or drinking, water can involve transporting in large amounts of bottled water. That’s a lot of trucks on the road – and a lot of plastic waste. Waterfleet based in Texas have come up with a solution, turning any groundwater supply into perfectly clean drinking water. A mobile unit connects to an existing well or water storage unit and processes the water whilst continually monitoring the quality to ensure it’s safe. They can even treat domestic wastewater, processing it to a reusable standard that can be used for irrigation, dust suppression, or other on-site applications. We sent our producer Eva Ruth to the Waterfleet headquarters in San Antonio, Texas to meet the director of business intelligence, David Myers. He takes us inside one of their water rigs and explains the positive effect this technology has on their clients by providing a reliable, clean water supply.

My name is David Myers. I’m the Director of Business Intelligence at Waterfleet. Gosh, I’ve been here for over seven years now. Watched the company grow and change into what it is today. We are in San Antonio, Texas. We’re at our corporate headquarters. This is where everything happens out of. We also have field offices in Midland. This is the home base for our operations, our compliance, engineering, HR, our bridge, which we’ll show you later, which is our 24/7 command centre. We also have our shopping facilities, so make ready on maintenance on our units. It’s the hub and where everything flows out of. 

You can see up here, one of our mission statements is right on the wall in huge letters. It says, “We are a solutions-based company of innovators, dedicated to the belief that clean, safe water is a basic human right – even in the most challenging situations.” We built that as a company. That wasn’t one person saying this is what we do. This was all of our ideas together. It’s a pretty powerful statement, and it’s something to fall back on. When you first get onboarded here, and our new hire classes come right through here, it’s the first thing they see when they walk in. It’s a powerful statement and our core mission. All of our solutions and technologies are built around that.

We’re walking up to a water rig to get a glass of water. Good. There was a unique problem going on in the energy space in Texas. Our CEO, Alan Pyle, was actually at a high school football game on a Friday night and he was talking to a friend of his. His friend was complaining like, “You know, Alan, I’ve got 20-30 people living on this camp. It’s in the middle of nowhere, you know, birds barely fly through this area. And we’re having to haul in non-potable water from over 100 miles away to my camp. And that non-potable water is then being used by the people on the site. They’re living there, away from their families. They’re showering in it, they’re brushing their teeth with it, they’re using it for coffee, and their skin’s itching. It’s nasty water. It’s not potable water.” And Alan scratched his head. I said, “Hey, we can fix that. I think I can use my skill sets, and I think we can design something to help you guys.” So Alan got a piece of paper, and we built this water rig. What the water rig is at its core is mobile water treatment technology. Alan, who’s retired now, and Bob Nicol rigged up the first water rig at this energy camp. And I told them, “If it works, you guys pay for it. If it doesn’t, don’t worry about it.” So they went out there and rigged it up themselves, rented a three-quarter tonne diesel truck, hauled it out to South Texas, and set it up. One day went by and it worked really well, another day went by, still working, another day went by, this is going really well. It dramatically changed the lives of people living on that site. All of a sudden, they had verified potable water, which is an incredible thing to think about. In the middle of nowhere. They deserved that, and they didn’t have that prior. So that’s what started Waterfleet, was this water rig. This blue trailer you see behind us. Bumper pull trailer. So that went well; they got some money together, built another one, built another one, and built another one. Now there’s over 150 of them. And growing and changing. They’re getting bigger. They’re changing designs, different integrations, different solutions. 

The second iteration of that was, “Well, we have all this wastewater on site that we have to haul off 100 plus miles to a wastewater treatment plant, which puts pressure on the roads, puts pressure on the communities, and puts pressure on those wastewater treatment systems for usually is really remote towns.” So that’s when we designed the Reclaimer rig. And the Reclaimer rig takes all that wastewater that the people are generating on-site and makes it reusable for dust suppression, irrigation, downhole, whatever it may be. So then, all of a sudden, you’ve eliminated all the hauling in of water, and all the hauling out of wastewater. Pretty great impact for the people living on site, their quality of life is improved, their health and safety is improved. The communities in which we operate are improving – no more big heavy trucks coming in twice a day. And then obviously, environmental wins are huge too. You’re using water that’s already on site and making it potable. And then you’re taking that wastewater and reusing it on the site. So as far as our water stewardship goes, it’s a huge deal. And it’s how it should be. And we’ve raised the status quo out there. And people don’t really tolerate hauling in non-potable water. It’s just it’s not the way to do things anymore. It’s dangerous. And it’s not the right thing to do.

Alright, let’s go in. Okay, we’re in the water rig. Looking around, there’s a lot going on in here, right? There’s a lot of technology, a lot of automation. A lot of sensors, flow meters, pressure sensors, tank level sensors, and injection pumps. All of that was very intentionally designed. So if we’re going to solve the challenge of providing potable water in a remote area when we’re not on site all the time, your systems better back it up. So, what you’re seeing here is a highly automated water treatment. The trailer can protect itself from water quality getting out of parameters that would make it not potable. So before this product, water gets to a place where it would not be safe for drinking way before it’ll shut itself down, it’ll alarm, we’ll know about it. That was challenge number one. Challenge number two was how we monitor these systems remotely. So if they’re going to be out there, 24/7 365, and we don’t have somebody on site all the time – which in the energy space, that’s the case – how can we control this unit remotely from a phone, from a computer? So technically, these systems can run for days and days without anybody needing to check on them. 

And here’s our in-house lab. Because we’re providing drinking water and wastewater services in remote areas, there’s a big need to verify that and to have a third-party lab verify the quality of water and the quality of the wastewater. So, we have an internal team that does the testing on all of it. And we also send all that away to a third-party lab to confirm our findings. So that’s a huge effort of what we do. So here’s our biotech fridge. As you can see here, there’s Reclaimer samples. That was domestic wastewater from an energy camp, meaning all of the water that came from flushing toilets, sinks, cleaning of whatever. All that went to our Reclaimer rig. And what you’re seeing here is the result of that. And I’m holding it up to the light, and you can see right through it. I mean, it’s beautiful. And every sample looks like that. So that’s the result of a lot of R&D, product development, improvement, having our field guys really learn their craft, and take pride in it. I used to help in the lab, and there are way smarter people in here these days than when I was in here. So it’s been neat to see the evolution.

We started seeing a need for these displaced communities during disasters. Hurricanes on the Gulf Coast, especially during Harvey, that’s what really started at all, all the way to firefighters and the US Forest Service. These communities get displaced, we evacuate a whole town because a hurricane is coming. After the hurricane comes through, that town’s infrastructure is pretty decimated. The wastewater treatment plants or water treatment plants can’t operate. They’ve lost power, their pumping infrastructure is down. How the heck do we have water now? And also you have all these people moving in to help repair the town – linemen, all of that. So you have all these big disaster response camps that come in, set up temporary camps to provide the essential services to get the city back up, or the town back up on its feet. Well, it makes sense to put in a water rig. We can take that compromised water source and treat it, making it potable water for the kitchen, for the people living on those sites to shower in at the end of a long day of hard work. So that grew and started going too. And from there, the construction facilities… they used to have a million bottles of water out there for 5,000 employees, well, we can treat the water out there and dispense it and get rid of your plastic bottles. And we can guarantee potable drinking water.

During Hurricane Ian in Florida, it hit the south west part of Florida in 2022. I’ll never forget, we got this phone call. I won’t say her name, but she called The Bridge and she’s like, “I just want to thank you guys,” you know, her voice getting kind of shaky. “ I saw what you guys did for our community, and what you’re doing for the people that are supporting the rebuild of our community, and I just want to say thank you.” That stuff? That’s the good stuff. I’m proud of everything we do, but when you when you can impact somebody enough that they call to thank you for what you’re doing, especially halfway across the country? Man, that’s incredible. That keeps all of us ticking.

This is what we call The Bridge. It’s our 24/7 remote operations and dispatch command centre. You have two teams for the two core functionalities that happen in this room. One is the dispatch and logistics of our people and our equipment. The other team is our remote operations team. That team is solely dedicated to the remote operation of our mobile water and wastewater treatment technology. So you can see on the board here, that’s the inside of the water rig – we can control it all remotely. Anything you can control in there, we can do remotely for all of our assets across the country. And what you’re seeing across the other six screens is what we call Sonar. Sonar is a proprietary technology we built in house that monitors the systems for us in real time and lets us know anything that’s going out of parameters, any alarm setpoint, all of that – we can see it all for all of our assets 24/7 on the screen. And all this data is being stored in a data warehouse every couple of seconds, so we can have the data to support what we say we do. In a normal world, if you’re operating over 100 wastewater systems, you would need a team of 20 people. But because we developed this technology that does all the active monitoring for us and logs the data, it allows a) the system to run more autonomously, but b) it allows our people in here in The Bridge to be able to support our customers and our people that are operating on the systems. That’s The Bridge. We had a big freeze and had 90 plus hours in West Texas that was below freezing – it’s a hard time in here to operate water and wastewater treatment systems that are mobile with exposed piping. This room was buzzing. There was a lot going on. But we got through it. And I’m really proud of all the work our teams did. But it just takes a level of intensity to keep the systems running, to communicate with the customers, and to navigate that weather.

What drives me to keep pushing forward with Waterfleet is being part of the products that impact people for good. Also, being a part of the innovation, and challenging the status quo of our technology in the places we implement it, as well as the reward of building teams to support that. Waterfleet is passionate about the environmental benefit of our products as well as the health and wellbeing and quality of life of our end user. So that guides what we do, how we do it, and how we support it. So everything we’re doing is inherently plugged into that, which is nice. It’s this thing not that we take for granted, but it’s just this thread that’s woven between all of our support staff and all of our technology, that what we do is positive for the environment – you’re getting rid of plastic single-use water bottles, you’re being a good steward of the local water supply, being able to reuse wastewater – a stream that wouldn’t have been there in the first place. So we’re being good stewards of the environmental aspect, but then also really the end user, and providing a quality product to them that can improve their quality of life, their health, lack of exposure to water-borne illnesses. It’s neat to talk about because it’s just something I get used to. Because all of our technology, you can throw it through that lens and it makes sense. It’s nice to talk about it and be reminded of that, especially during challenging days. We’re doing something good out there. We’re challenging the status quo, and hopefully other people will come to meet us there. Because we’re going to do it one way or another.

That was David Meyers from Waterfleet. As David mentions, Waterfleet are really impacting people for good by supplying clean, safe water in the most challenging situations. Now, in order to do that, they need to minimise unplanned downtime and be confident that all assets are operating correctly. This is where ServiceMax, PTC’s asset-centric Field Service Management Solution comes into play. Time to meet our expert, Sara Cerruti, who is Vice President of Customer Transformation at PTC. Sara, we’ve not spoken about ServiceMax before. Are you able to give our listeners a high level overview of what it is?

ServiceMax is an asset-centric field service management solution that allows our customers to leverage a comprehensive set of cloud-native tools and enable customer stakeholders to proactively manage, maintain, and service critical assets throughout their lifecycle. While ServiceMax obviously is designed to help service customers keep an eye on their costs, and maintain their costs, it’s also a tool that helps to drive value and value-added from service processes. We currently have about 350 customers using ServiceMax from asset-centric industries such as medical devices, industrial manufacturing, energy, and oil and gas. Just to give you a sense of scale, currently there’s about 300 million assets that are being maintained and serviced within the ServiceMax solution. And our customers leverage ServiceMax to issue at least one work order every second.

And how does critical field service keep Waterfleet’s products running in order to help people or places?

As you just heard David describe in the podcast, Waterfleet’s water and Reclaimer rigs are brought to sites where there’s no access to clean water, primarily either due to the remoteness of the location itself, or to support in the case of events triggered by natural disasters. So the Waterfleet rigs are highly automated, and they’re designed to work with human minimal intervention. So this means that the maintenance on these rigs needs to be done on time and to exacting standards in order to ensure that they’re operational when they are needed. Because it’s difficult and time-consuming to reach the remote locations where the rigs are located and maintenance needs to be done proactively whenever possible and it needs to be done right the first time, or these critical water resources that people depend on in an emergency can be interrupted. The ServiceMax asset management capability allows Waterfleet to know where their rigs are deployed, and what maintenance needs to be performed on those rigs in order that they continue to deliver clean water without interruptions. The service planners use the data in ServiceMax to ensure that they have clear line of sight to the right technicians with the right skills and the right parts to ensure that scheduled maintenance is completed on time. And even more importantly, that emergency repairs can be completed as quickly as possible to guarantee clean and safe water even in the most challenging of situations.