Oilfield surface facilities: from the well to the battery

October 19, 2026  ·  Indumor

“You drill a well once; you operate the location for twenty years.” Any production supervisor with field time says it, and it sums up something the public never sees: the rig leaves in weeks, but what stays on the surface — piping, equipment, tanks, structures — works every day for decades, through wind, dust, cold and heat. Much of that surface is fabricated steel. Here is the oil’s path from the moment it leaves the well until it reaches the battery.

• Wellhead and production tree: the valve assembly that controls the well. A general shop does not build it, but everything around it, yes: access platforms, supports, guards and protection.
• Flowlines: the pipes carrying each well’s production. They need supports, special crossings and, often, spools prefabricated in the shop.
• The manifold: where lines from several wells meet, with valves to route each one to production or to test. It usually arrives skid-mounted, ready to connect.
• Separators: vessels that split oil, gas and water. They are pressure equipment built by specialized shops, but they need bases, platforms, stairs and pipe supports.
• Heaters: with heavy crude or in winter, they warm production so it flows and separates better.
• Production tanks: they hold oil, condensate and produced water. Small ones are shop-built to standards such as API 12F and ship complete; large ones are erected on site.
• Metering and chemical injection skids: they measure output and dose corrosion and paraffin inhibitors or biocides. Pumps, small tanks, instruments and piping, all on one frame.
• Flare and vents: the structure that burns or vents gas that cannot be used in an upset.
• Access and safety: walkways, stairs, railings, drip trays under equipment, fencing and vehicle barriers.

In unconventional plays all of that multiplies. A pad hosts several wells from the same location, so manifolds are bigger, lines longer and equipment repeats. Several pads send production to a battery, and batteries to a central processing facility where crude is brought to sales spec. At that scale, what used to be a one-off part becomes a module built in series.

Each operator also has its own standards for anything entering the location: platform heights, flooring type, pipe color coding and labeling, drip trays under any equipment that might leak, certified lifting points and nameplates with each unit’s data. Knowing them before quoting avoids the worst scenario: building something technically correct that fails receiving inspection because it ignores the house standard. For international operators bringing their own global specifications to Argentina, a fabricator who reads and follows those documents in English saves weeks of back-and-forth.

The golden rule for everything that goes to a location is to design for the weather. Wind with dust, frost, hard sun, flooding rains: coatings, galvanizing, joint design and floor drainage cannot be done any old way. What fails at a location does not get fixed the same day, and the operator who suffers it is the one standing there at three in the morning.

So the best advice we can give is simple: design every piece of equipment with that person in mind. It should be operable without climbing into odd places, maintainable without taking half the installation apart, and able to take the climate without needing paint every year.

Go deeper

The full scale of unconventional development is in Vaca Muerta and the steel it consumes; frame-mounted equipment in equipment skids; production tanks in API 12F tanks; and the general list in steel fabrication for oil and gas. At Indumor we build pipe supports, frames, platforms and tanks for well sites.

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