IM Editorial Director Paul Moore recently spoke to David Harrington, the President of Terelion, about its evolution from Varel Mining and Industrial plus its current and future product focus
The newly named Terelion LLC comes following the divestment of Varel International Energy Services (VIES), which covered the Varel operations relating to the oil and gas industry, to a private equity firm. The mining part of the business, formerly Varel Mining and Industrial, continues under the Terelion brand, which was chosen as a combination of the Latin “terebro” for drilling and lion for the symbol of the strongest animal.
Terelion will focus on mining markets and other related markets such as HDD, water well, and construction. The new company will continue to design, manufacture, and deliver high quality drill bits and complementary products for its clients around the world. Terelion’s corporate office is based in Carrolton, Texas, USA. It remains a wholly-owned subsidiary of Sandvik AB.
Harrington told IM: “To give some background, Varel was founded by Dan Varel in 1947 and was a family business until 1998 when it was purchased in a management buy-in, then and went through several ownership changes before Sandvik acquired Varel International Energy Services in 2014. By 2018, however, it was decided that oil and gas was no longer core to its ambitions so the decision was made that Varel would be split into an oil and gas part and a mining part in preparation for divestment of the former. Varel Mining and Industrial was created with its own structure, accounting, legal entities etc which had until that point been unified in VIES.”
All those company functions for Terelion remain in Carrolton, “But having two companies with Varel in the name was likely to cause some marketplace confusion. It was determined that the Varel name therefore would stay with the oil and gas business.”
What about Varel/Terelion – what were and are its main strengths in rotary drilling? “We have always been a nimble and entrepreneurial company – that comes from our 70 plus year history. Our focus remains on highest quality technology, product and service. In terms of products, under VIES it was surface mining rotary, sometimes called roller cone, drill bits. That continues, but as Varel Mining and now Terelion we have launched a DTH line in early 2020 – our new Warrior hammer and bit line – starting with 6 in and 4 in hammers and bits which are already out in the market. These have been very well received & are showing to be very competitive. We plan to further expand the offering in 2021 with 8 in and 5 in hammers and bits about to come out.”
On rotary, Harrington said the core workhorse product remains the RIDGEBACK™ open bearing rotary drill bits, then its sealed bearing line AVENGER™ which includes both a sealed journal (AV) and sealed roller product (AVL). They target slightly different parts of the market. The AVL products provide extended bit life across a wide variety of applications. AV builds on this combining extended bearing life with high ROP cutting structures to really push down total drilling costs. The third major product is RPS, a Rotary Percussion System, which includes a percussion tool designed to run on a rotary drill. A specially modified rotary bit sits under the percussion tool and they work as a system to achieve high ROP while maintaining the versatility across fractured ground or wet conditions. Overall, Terelion products span the whole market, from small pre-split drills up to the largest 15 and 16 in bits used on blasthole drills for high tonnage applications in iron, copper, and gold mining as well as coal overburden etc. Mining aside, Terelion also still supplies other products such as HDD bits, waterwell, construction and raisebore pilot bits.
Harrington said the majority of the rotary market is still met by open bearing bits and Terelion will continue to evolve and improve technically within that. He said it will also continue to expand its higher tech AVENGER and RPS lines – these products leverage patented technologies to drive productivity gains and fleet utilisation benefits in certain geologies where you have extreme pull down, or where there is acidic groundwater present that would corrode open bearings. They are also preferred for high volume applications for safety reasons so bits aren’t having to be manually changed as often. Finally, with autonomous drilling comes a lot of ability to monitor bit performance in real time. That will make the productivity benefits of the higher tech products much clearer to customers – so AVENGER and RPS are very well suited to the emerging autonomous blasthole drill market and are already being used in these applications.
