CALL BILL BALL AT 918-231-9698
Breakthrough Engenuity LLC
Oil and Gas Industry Focused Professional Engineering and Design Services
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Breakthrough Engenuity 2024
"Where engineering meets ingenuity!"
Our industry is blessed with ingenuity. It began in 1859 with Drake's first oil well, drilled in Titusville, PA. Drake had the ingenious idea that crude oil might replace whale oil. Whale oil had been used for centuries in oil lamps to light streets, offices, factories and homes throughout the world. Drake's well provided an alternate and inexpensive source of oil that ultimately led to the demise of the whale oil industry. By 1890, oil wells could be found from Illinois to New York. In 1898, John D. Rockefeller, owner of The Standard Oil Company, and the wealthiest man in the world, publically predicted that no oil would ever be found west of the Mississippi River. In 1901 the world's largest oil well was discovered west of the Mississippi at Spindletop, near Beaumont, Texas. It flowed 100,000 barrels of clean oil each day, and spurred a global race to find oil and broke the Standard Oil monopoly.
In those earliest days most oil wells were drilled with water well rigs called "Spudders". Ninty percent were dry holes. Then, late in the century, came the widespread use of the rotary drilling rig and Howard Hughes, famous for his tri-cone drill bit. Wells could be finally be drilled in weeks instead of months. Amerada Petroleum, dissasitified with traditionally low rates of success, developed a new seismic-wave technology ("Thumper") that improved the odds of finding new oil. Where only one in ten new wells found oil before, Amarada's ingenious technology improved the odds to 90%.
Since then, conditions have continued to change! Though vertically completed wells dominated the industry for the first 150 years, today's horizontally completed wells produce ten to fifty times as much oil and gas. And in 2024, oilfield process equipment designed before 2004 falls short of efficient separation and processing due to these prolific increases! It's a new era! It demands new thinking!
Since 2004, 21st century thinking has made the USA energy independent once again. Vertical completions are nearly a thing of the past! Long-lateral, horizontal completions, and multi-stage massive frac jobs are the order of the day. New, more prolific wells demand more attention to the details of equipment and facility design to deal with high water cuts, high GORs, high vapor pressure crudes, and the effects of frac cocktails on oil and water quality. Decades ago capital cost was the determining factor in purchasing process equipment, but today downtime is our industry's highest cost! Equipment designs must focus on eliminating downtime. Ours do! Our separators separate more. Our treaters treat more. Our "Signature Plug-N-Play" CTB (central tank battery) designs focus on minimizing long-term CAPEX while eliminating downtime by optimizing designs, swapping out larger equipment for scaled down process equipment used as wells experience their new-normal decline rates.
The bottom line is increased profit for YOU!
Breakthrough Engenuity was founded by Bill Ball. His credentials represent the culmin-
ation of a lifetime of breakthroughs and innovations. Bill's twenty-three US process equipment patents speak to this. His first patent has become an industryreal "game changer". It is the industry's first true oil-water separation "skim tank", the "HWSB". Today there are over 3,500 HWSB® skim tanks separating and capturing oil that used to be injected and lost forever. Each HWSB® captures ALL waste oil from produced water streams in hundreds of today's production facilities and nearly all new Salt Water Disposal (SWD) plants. The HWSB® makes all so-called "Gun Barrel" tanks obsolete! Another inovation is the DFSD® design complimenting the HWSB®. It's a de-sanding, de-gassing, flow splitting tank system. Both have no moving parts. Both are perfect for most tank batteries and all SWDs. In 2014, and in order to see that his technologies live on, Bill sold these and other patents to KBK Industries. KBK continues to offer these technologies to entire upstram oil industry.
Others of Bill's designs designs have been game changers for the companies like EOG, where his patented horizontal high-pressure separators and patented horizontal heater treaters were used in every Eagle Ford CTB from 2012 to 2015, helping to propel EOG to be the largest oil producer in the USA in 2014 and in 2015. Devon Energy also uses a line of process equipment designs from Breakthrough Engenuity, as doe WPX (now Devon) for its two $10 million master water treating systems in the Piceance Basin where effluent water quality had to be less than 5 ppmv. Bill also consulted with Shell Oil Company for its standardized Permian Basin SWD palnt design, and designed over 50% of all SWD plants built in the USA between 1992 to 2015.
Breakthrough Engenuity's clients benefit from these innovations. The name “Breakthrough Engenuity” says it all. It's where engineering and ingenuity come together to result in something unique, original, and very special.