Drilling For Oil: How Heavy Equipment Rental Can Reduce Your Costs
The current demand for oil by the U.S. is helping create jobs in Canada and a demand for Canadian oil. Because it has less distance to travel than oil from the Middle East and because Canada is not at odds or at war with the U.S., Canadian oil makes for a much cheaper source of fuel. If you have several hundred acres of land and a surveyor and a geologist both tell you you could get oil from your land, you may want to start drilling as soon as possible. To do that, you need a lot of heavy construction equipment, but you want to keep the costs down. Here is how oil drilling equipment rentals can help.
Cranes and Excavators
Cranes and excavators are some of the most expensive construction trucks around. Unless you plan to make a go of it and sell every last drop of oil you find (which will need to be quite a lot if you buy equipment), buying this equipment is just not an option. However, renting heavy duty cranes that can erect tall oil drilling rigs and excavators that get the rig sites started can reduce your costs by tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars. This is based on the current fair market value and purchase price of a single excavator and a single crane.
Oil Drilling Bits
Renting an oil drilling bit cuts your operational costs too. Buying the oil drilling bit costs thousands of dollars, while the rental price is a fraction of the purchase price per day. As long as you are able to dig an exploratory hole every couple of days and eventally strike oil, the rental price is fair. Additionally, if you never strike oil no matter how many holes you drill or what the geologists tell you, you can always give the rented equipment (including the drilling bit) back to the rental company. Most oil drilling companies are in hock for hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars when they borrow the money to buy equipment and fail to produce oil.
Equipment from Oilfield Equipment Rental Companies
Thankfully there are a handful of professional companies in Canada that currently offer oilfield equipment rentals. A company might even give you a discount for renting all of your equipment needs exclusively from their company. This further reduces your costs and makes it easier to budget the gas needed to bring the equipment to your land and then return it to the company when you are done.