In his early years as a roughneck in the 1980s, Quinn Holtby experienced extremely dangerous workplace conditions and environmental contamination at its worst. He has the war stories and battle scars to prove it.

As he moved up the ladder in the drilling industry, he was constantly looking for methods of containing drilling fluid while protecting his crew and the environment.

He immersed himself in the study of plastics and in R&D in the early ’90s, and started introducing his products to the upstream petroleum industry in 1994 under the name Katch Kan Limited, based in Edmonton.

In less than a decade, he and his dedicated team of professionals at Katch Kan have introduced their revolutionary applications to companies in more than 25 countries on (and just off) five continents.

Quinn Holtby was honoured with a Manning Innovation Award in 2000.

“I always wanted to make things easier and safer – I knew there had to be solutions to the drilling challenges,” Holtby says. “As a rig hand, I saw many accidents and injured myself using outdated equipment. I wanted a change and knew the business would come if we could devise systems that decreased the risk of injury while improving business processes at the rigs.”

Countless hours of R&D in his garage and in the field led to the creation of an interconnecting system of Katch Kan products.

"We started out with the Kelly Kan, which replaced the old mud can originally designed in the 1930s,” Holtby explains. “That grew into a Minimum Discharge System for secondary containment of drilling fluids on all sizes of drilling and service rigs.”

Recently, Katch Kan introduced the Zero Spill System, which is very effective in offshore and other sensitive locations. The system is rapidly becoming the industry standard.

“People can spend up to a million dollars to retrofit a rig to zero spill. This is all worthless when you use a rotating head,” Holtby says.

Katch Kan’s Zero Spill System for drilling and service rigs provides a proactive method to minimize well-bore fluid discharge and reduce reclamation costs. The Zero Spill System consists of two main components:

* The Kelly Kan clamps to the string connection, redirecting the fluids down through the rotary table.

* The fluids slip into the Katch Kan where fluids are collected for re-circulation or disposal.

The application is simple, practical and, above all, effective – which explains why large companies including Pemex are retrofitting their entire fleet with Katch Kan systems.

Clients also benefit from the company’s commitment to the environment.

The origin of the Zero Spill System had more to do with safety and workplace cleanliness than environmental issues. But new environmental requirements and fiscal responsibility have converted the system from a workplace advantage into an environmental necessity.

The environmental award-winning Katch Kan Advantage, with its cradle- to-grave solutions for the upstream petroleum industry, is indeed catching on throughout the global oil and gas community.

“In essence, we deal with the operator/contractor’s pollution so they don’t have to," says Holtby. “Our family of products and systems lessens the impact that drilling/exploration and production operations have on the environment.

“However – and this is the neat thing – our products also make those same operations much more safe and efficient. We actually can save operators and contractors money while protecting the environment and making drilling and service rigs safer places to work.”

“Rig crews love our systems. They are really easy to use, and that stems in large part from our use of composites originally designed and used in airliners. It’s very light, extremely durable and resistant to chemical wear and tear.”

In next week’s edition of Business Edge, read about Katch Kan’s revolutionary blowout-prevention system and about how major oilpatch players have saved hundreds of thousands of dollars and improved efficiencies dramatically by implementing Katch Kan’s environmental and workplace applications.