At 20, he was dousing oil-well fires in Kuwait, while gingerly side- stepping surface land mines strategically placed by departing invaders from Iraq.

Today, at 30, he’s boss of an innovative pipeline servicing company that doesn’t so much open new technological doors as kick them down.

They should start calling Jared Sayers, president of Red Flame Hot Tap Services Ltd., the Fast Track Kid. For the uninitiated, hot tapping bears no resemblance to hot wiring and/or wiretapping.

It’s a 50-year-old technique for installing branch connections from oil and gas wells to existing pipelines, without shutting down the line or reducing pressure of the flow.

“If you did shut it down, the line could be out of commission for two or three days,” said the Fast Track Kid, spelling things out for a neophyte.

Carla Victor, for Business Edge
Jared Sayers, president of Red Flame Hot Tap Services, says tying wells into live pipelines isn’t as risky as many think.

“It’s quite a process. You’d have to cold-cut the pipeline, purge it and clean it before you could safely weld on the new line.”

In short, an expensive proposition.

“But when a client calls us, we’ll go in under full pressure. We weld on our piece, drill in the pipe, add the new valve and we’re away,” Sayers said with a grin, making the job sound as simple as flipping on a light switch.

It isn’t. Which is why clients – major clients – do call, Schlumberger Oilfield Services and Alliance Pipeline among them.

The fact is, this Red Deer company’s 28 engineers, technicians and machinists are in the process of cornering the market in this highly specialized niche.

“We don’t really HAVE direct competitors, in terms of our range of services. We do our own R&D, we design, manufacture and test our own tools and fittings under one roof, not to mention our field services,” said Sayers.

Red Flame Hot Tap Services performed the procedure 362 times in 2001, almost once a day. This year, they’ll top out over 400.

Oilfield service pros have known for years that hot- tapping is the most cost-effective method of tying a well into a pipeline. But the risk involved has been a traditional stumbling block.

“But we’ve proven, via our research and engineering, that it’s actually very safe,” said Sayers. “We’ve shown that hot tapping is a viable option. That’s probably why our biggest marketing tool is education.”

Carla Victor, for Business Edge
Jared Sayers

An education is exactly what this precocious over-achiever absorbed at his father’s elbow. Jared served his practicum battling well fires in the Middle East with dad Bob and older brother Rob.

The name Bob Sayers, who founded the original Red Flame Oil Well Firefighters and Blowout Specialists in the late 1970s, may not resonate as loudly as those of Red Adair, or Mike Miller of Safety Boss. But he was there beside them when Kuwait’s oilfields (736 wells) were ablaze during the Gulf War.

The year before, Sayers Sr. and his professional staff – including young Jared – had travelled to Iran to put a lid on one of the biggest wildcat blowouts in global history.

Jared’s dad also claims credit for being first to control a well fire by freezing the head with liquid nitrogen, now a common practice. Another Sayers innovation was a fire-control technique that involved hot-tapping into the blazing well head.

Then came Iran and Kuwait.

“It wasn’t that difficult to put out the fires,” Jared remembered. “It’s a lot tougher to deal with the gas or oil coming out of the ground.”

For six months, the team drove through minefields every day and waded through lakes of spilled oil at the well sites.

Maybe the Fast Track Kid was too young to be scared. “I was with my dad and my brother,” he grinned. “And they really knew what they were doing.”

Now that he’s a full-time hot-tapper, not much has changed.

Jared Sayers still relishes a challenge. And when oilpatch giant Schlumberger recently asked the impossible, he didn’t flinch.

“They wanted a system allowing them to clamp a line onto the main pipeline without welding. But they wanted the equipment to withstand 5,000 psi. That was unprecedented for a bolt-on unit. It’s tough to create a seal at such high pressure,” Sayers explained.

He’s still not sure why he promised to deliver. But he did. Red Flame called in outside consultants and finally hired a U.S. aerospace manufacturer to create a seal powerful enough to withstand the pressure.

Within three months, the 5,000-psi system had been delivered – designed and manufactured from scratch, in-house.

No surprise. The Fast Track Kid has always done his best work under pressure.