HYDROVOLVE: Real, Tangible Energy Technology Innovation
HydroVolve technology promises a new era of performance for operators and contractors who require the world’s best. This claim is the result of 14 years of innovation and pioneering thinking from a business that wants to skip incremental steps and take giant leaps forward. Dr Peter Moyes tells Energy Focus about the latest product ideas for a quickly changing energy industry.
Innovation in the energy sector rarely arrives as a single breakthrough. More often, it builds quietly under pressure from ageing infrastructure, complex engineering problems, and an industry forced to do more with less. For HydroVolve, that pressure has become the space where its identity has taken shape, evolving from a specialist in vibrational tools into a broader engineering innovator focused on solving persistent downhole problems across drilling, completion, and abandonment.
Since 2024, when the company told Energy Focus about new product lines, evolution has accelerated, but not in a rushed or reactive way. It has been guided by a consistent philosophy that places utility above novelty. As Chairman Dr Peter Moyes puts it: “There has been a lot of development at HydroVolve and that has been very exciting. Our raison d’être is our technology innovation – we like to develop groundbreaking enabling technologies to allow people to do things very differently. But we don’t do this simply for the sake of conceiving new tools – the technology must bring a definable value for the market. It must have real purpose and real value.”
That focus on real-world value has shaped how the company moves through the industry. Rather than chasing isolated product ideas, HydroVolve has increasingly followed the friction points in field operations, particularly where established methods struggle to keep up with changing well designs and rising operational demands.
Originally, the company’s work centred on replacing long-established drilling jars with high-frequency, high-impact devices designed to improve performance in tough drilling conditions. That early focus set the foundation for what came next, but it did not define the limits of the technology.
P&A SHIFT
As HydroVolve’s tools were introduced into the field, their application began to shift naturally towards plug and abandonment operations, where equipment removal is often complicated by corrosion, cement, debris and long-term well integrity issues. The HydroVolve HAMMER and PolyVolve SWIVEL products were already recognised by operators, and in P&A the technology started to prove its adaptability, not just its power.
Moyes describes that transition as something driven by opportunity rather than intention: “With the industry winds of change, we took the vibrating technology that had been invented over a decade and deployed it as the alternative to drilling jar, but turbo-boosted its capabilities to allow it to be deployed in the P&A space, pulling out much bigger and heavier bits of kit, wellbore materials, and subsea infrastructure.”
But field performance rarely behaves exactly as planned. In practice, the challenge was not only lifting or vibrating materials loose, but breaking the bonds that had formed over years underground. Rust, cement and debris created resistance that pure impact could not always overcome.
That limitation led to a second layer of development. Instead of replacing the original concept, HydroVolve extended it.
“We developed a complementary tool – our QUAKE tool. That uses the same impacting action and sends it out sideways so that any infrastructure in the wellbore (tubing, casing, trees etc) gets a directed impulse force, breaking the bonds and the cement, mobilising, and allowing extraction to be much easier.”
When combined with the original HAMMER system, the approach became more complete, addressing both release and extraction in a single operational flow. That combination quickly gained traction in the P&A sector, where efficiency and certainty carry significant commercial weight.
PARTNERSHIP PATH
As demand grew, HydroVolve faced a familiar inflection point for scaling technology companies in the energy sector: whether to build global reach internally or align with established industrial networks.
“After investigating, we decided it was best to take the package to a licensed partnership, with someone who has a network and infrastructure in all the right places,” admits Moyes.
That decision ultimately led to a strategic alignment with Titan Energies, bringing together complementary technologies and established distribution channels. The collaboration also created a broader system-level approach to well intervention, rather than standalone tools operating in isolation.
Titan’s existing perforation technology, combined with HydroVolve’s QUAKE and HAMMER systems, created a linked operational sequence that addressed multiple stages of well intervention and abandonment. The partnership also opened access to established infrastructure networks through Baker Hughes, strengthening global reach without requiring HydroVolve to become a large-scale service operator.
By March 2025, the transaction was complete, formalising a structure that positioned HydroVolve within a wider international delivery ecosystem while preserving its focus on technology development. The emphasis remained on innovation rather than expansion for its own sake.
GEOTHERMAL PUSH
Alongside its established work in P&A, HydroVolve has also reconfirmed its intentions in the geothermal energy market, where technical barriers remain one of the key constraints to growth. Deep, hot, hard rock formations continue to challenge drilling efficiency, with slow penetration rates and rapid tool wear limiting commercial viability across many projects.
This is where HydroVolve has begun applying its percussive drilling technology, originally developed in oil and gas environments, to a different but related set of constraints.
“We identified a very strong market for deep, hot, hard rock, geothermal drilling, and we developed the technology before taking it to trial in 2024,” Moyes recalls.
Early results showed strong potential, particularly in improving penetration rates and reducing wear on drilling components, both of which are critical cost drivers in geothermal operations.
“We had some strong successes and a great indication that the performance could be enhanced quite significantly. We more than doubled the rate of penetration and tripled the life of the bit by reducing abrasive wear,” he says.
However, field testing also highlighted operational issues that required refinement before commercial deployment could continue. Rather than pushing forward prematurely, the company chose to step back and rework the design.
“We withdrew the product from the market to identify issues, and we believe we have resolved them.”
Work is now focused on the next iteration of the technology, with bench testing underway and performance improvements being validated ahead of field deployment. The intention is to reintroduce a more robust version to market once reliability is proven.
DEPLOYMENT EDGE
While new energy applications continue to develop, HydroVolve is also addressing a more immediate operational challenge in existing oil and gas wells: deployment efficiency. As wells become deeper and more complex, friction and weight transfer limitations increasingly affect the ability to run completions and liners to target depth.
To address this, the company has developed a suite of tools built around its PolyVolve SWIVEL-based system, designed to improve downhole movement and reduce resistance during deployment.
“It is a suite of deployment enhancement tools which allows operators to get a massively improved weight transfer and friction reduction to the liner to allow them to successfully deploy that on the bottom,” Moyes highlights.
In operational terms, the results have been significant, with the system achieving a high number of successful deployments and consistent performance in the field. In an environment where failure can be extremely costly, that reliability is a key differentiator.
Together, HydroVolve’s portfolio reflects a company that is not defined by a single technology, but by a continuous cycle of development, testing and refinement. It moves between drilling, abandonment, geothermal innovation and deployment optimisation with a consistent focus on practical outcomes rather than theoretical advancement.
That mindset has also been reinforced by its partnership strategy, which has allowed it to maintain a lean development focus while leveraging external networks for scale. As Moyes notes: “We have other products in the pipeline that we hope to bring to market soon, but this year is all about percussive drilling technology and growing on the commercial success of last year with the deployment enhancement tech.”
The result is a company operating in a constant state of evolution, where each solution feeds into the next challenge. It’s an industry defined by complexity and cost pressure, and HydroVolve’s approach is less about reinventing the system and more about improving how it works with technology, one problem at a time.