Global demand for critical minerals, essential for clean energy, technology, and defence, presents a huge opportunity for Australia’s resources industry; it also sees operators facing a dual challenge.  

They must meet surging demand while simultaneously increasing the efficiency of operations to reduce costs, satisfy environmental obligations and social licence expectations. To achieve this, companies are increasingly seeking service providers capable of delivering technical insight, more efficient operations and lower-emission solutions.

With a dedicated team of more than 700 employees and a fleet of 35 rigs, Ventia’s resources team provides specialised drilling, capital works, and operations and maintenance, servicing some of the world’s biggest resources companies. 

Executive General Manager Kyle Koziol oversees this division, leveraging the broad capability and expertise from across Ventia to tackle complex, site-specific challenges.

“The companies that we tend to be most successful with are those looking to partner with us and, in particular, coming to us with specific challenges that we have the capability to deliver solutions for,” Koziol said.

One focus across the industry is reducing the emissions profile of heavy equipment. While fully electric and battery-driven rigs represent the future of the industry, current power capacities require interim innovations. Ventia is bridging this gap by optimising existing drilling techniques and equipment use, such as targeting air compressor packages to lower fuel consumption.

Upgrading the existing fleet is another critical component of Ventia’s strategy. The company is retrofitting older equipment with programmable logic controllers (PLCs) and remote-control operations, which reduces critical risks and improves efficiency.

Sensors and telemetry equipment added to rigs and ancillary equipment are also generating live data that can be monitored by drilling engineers who can identify improvements that can make a real difference on the ground. Last year, one such upgrade successfully reduced the time needed to change out a bottom hole assembly by 30 minutes. This upgrade included automated equipment, reducing safety risk and providing substantial time and emissions savings over a multi-hole campaign.

In-house capability

Our in-house design and engineering capability, based out of their workshops in Withcott, Queensland as well as the Pilbara in Western Australia, is seen as a significant advantage for their operations.

“There’s a whole front-end design and delivery capability that we have before equipment even gets to the site, and then when we get equipment into the field, we’ve got a very capable group of operators to deliver a high-quality service.”

Here to solve your challenges

The combination of greater access to data, investment in new equipment and the in-house capability presents a compelling offer that Koziol and his team are keen to leverage.

“We really want our customers to come to us with the real challenges,” Koziol said.

“People who are looking at something that they just really struggle to solve, particularly from a capital works or drilling & well servicing perspective, come to us, put it on the table and let us work through it with you.”

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