Industry Insight
Wells are getting deeper, more deviated, and more complex. That means rod lift systems are being pushed into ranges they weren’t designed for. The plan may look fine on paper, but once you throw in friction, bending, and side loads, the rods start failing faster than any design software predicted.
Part of the issue is the limits of the data itself; operators simply don’t have access to the level of data they need to properly account for these types of well conditions. MWD only gives you a reading every 95–100 feet. A gyro survey can get you more—and better—data, but that level of resolution comes at a high cost. The result is guesswork in the string design, working off assumptions that don’t fully capture the forces acting on rods in high-deviation profiles. Operators save money on capex by drilling faster, but they pay it all back in opex when their wells eat through rods and drive lifting costs through the roof.
This is why conventional rod strings look fine in the simulator but fail in the field. The forces of bending and friction simply aren’t calculated with enough accuracy. And every failure means another six-figure workover bill and more lost production.
TRC Services has spent more than a decade running rods through hundreds of millions of fatigue cycles in the lab. The result is a shot peening process that increases stress capacity by about 25% at constant fatigue life. That means that rods peened with MPACT can operate safely at higher alternating loads without burning through their service life.
Think of it this way: Every rod has a finite number of cycles before failure. Conventional rods reach that number faster when exposed to side-loading in deviated wells. MPACT-treated rods hold up longer under the same conditions, buying you more productive hours without changing the rest of your system. It’s a material shift in how string design can be approached.
Let’s look at the performance difference side by side: A conventional KD rod hits its wall under a given loading condition. But if we look at the same design run through MPACT, we’ll see that the edges of the modified Goodman diagram have changed, leaving you room to run your operations at higher rates in deeper wells with higher deviation angles, all without sacrificing rod longevity.
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In fatigue testing, MPACT rods lasted 64% longer than untreated equivalents. On S-N curves, you see the separation clearly: The next best performing rods drop off quickly, while the MPACT-treated rods keep cycling. It’s proof that the compressive stress layer from advanced or engineered peening isn’t just marketing fluff.
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What does this mean when you’re in the field designing for a deviated well? It means you’ve got options that didn’t exist before.
Consider a well approaching a steep deviation. Conventional design tells you to step up to higher-strength rods, which tend to be more brittle, more expensive, and more prone to corrosion issues. With MPACT, you can stick with a softer, more ductile grade that’s tougher under corrosion-fatigue and still carry the load with a better balance of cost, performance, and risk.
It also affects safety factors. Instead of operating at the edge of the Goodman diagram, MPACT moves the margin. That margin matters. It’s the difference between a string that dies in six months and one that runs 18 months or longer. And when you expand your design envelope with MPACT, you can often downsize pumping units, reduce surface equipment wear, and still keep production rates up. That’s a ripple effect of efficiency and performance that most operators can’t afford to ignore.
We’ve already seen it proven in the field. In one problem well, MPACT-treated rods stretched the run time to nearly two years in the well, with 6 to 9 months average mean time between failures.
If you’re designing rod strings for deviated wells, you know the math only takes you so far. Software models don’t capture the real-world forces, and standard rods don’t hold up under the strain. MPACT expands your design window with proven lab data and field results, giving you about 25% more load capacity at the same fatigue life. This isn’t about selling rods. It’s about giving you the ability to design confidently in wells that would have been labeled “problem wells” a few years ago.
Want to see how your string design stacks up against MPACT-treated rods? We’re building tools that make the comparison easier, but the fastest way is to talk with someone who’s already done it.
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