Oilfield services
The unsung masters of the oil industryOil firms you have never heard of are booming
Jul 21st 2012 | ABERDEEN | from the print edition
A TECHNIQUE called “directional drilling” has transformed the energy business. Fifteen years ago the best drillers could force a well-shaft into a gentle arc. These days shafts can be drilled vertically to a depth of several kilometres—then made to turn sharply and continue horizontally for up to 12km (or 7 miles). Will Grace of Schlumberger, an oilfield services company, likens it to dropping a plumb-line from the top of the Empire State Building and then guiding it through the rear and front windscreens of every car parked in the nearby streets.
Such technology vastly increases the area one rig can cover (see diagram). For an illustration, Mr Grace points to squiggles and shadings on a computer screen in one of the 34 offices Schlumberger operates in Aberdeen, a Scottish oil city. The lines show the progress of a well completed for a Canadian oil firm a few hours earlier. It is 13,000 feet (4,000 metres) deep and has been brought to a halt 6,500 feet horizontally away from the rig, within three feet of its target.
Instruments in the “drill-string”—as formerly inflexible steel drill-shafts are now called—are meanwhile transmitting dozens of additional measurements: of the radioactivity of the surrounding rock, its resistivity to electromagnetic waves, and so on. In this case, the rock gives a low radioactivity reading, which suggests that it is sand; its resistivity is high, which suggests it is oil-bearing. This is wizardry that few firms can match. And probably none is a regular oil company.
Oilfield services (OFS) firms such as Schlumberger are the unsung workhorses of the oil industry. They do most of the heavy lifting involved in finding and extracting oil and gas. They are far less well-known than the oil firms that hire them, but immensely lucrative. Schlumberger, with headquarters in Paris and Houston, earned profits of $5 billion on revenues of $40 billion last year. Its market capitalisation has risen fourfold in the past decade, to $91 billion. That is bigger than several international oil companies, including ENI ($82 billion), Statoil ($75 billion) and Conoco-Philips ($71 billion).
Schlumberger’s success highlights a shift in the balance of power between oil companies and their flunkeys. Until the 1990s OFS companies were far smaller and earned low margins on straightforward tasks, such as drilling vertical wells. That has changed dramatically.
With the price of oil so high, firms are scrambling to pump it out of ever more remote and costly crevices. Over the past decade the oil industry’s annual spending on exploration and production has increased fourfold in nominal terms, while oil production is up by only 12%. The big services companies, which invest heavily in technology (see chart), have been growing by around 10% a year. According to McKinsey, a consultancy, OFS companies grossed around $750 billion last year.
OFS firms come in three flavours. Some make and sell expensive kit for use on drilling rigs or the seabed. These include FMC, Cameron and National Oilwell Varco, all $10-billion-plus companies. Some own and lease out drill-rigs. These companies include Transocean, Seadrill, Noble and Rowan. The third group carries out most of the tasks involved in finding and extracting oil. It is dominated by four giants: Schlumberger, Halliburton, Baker Hughes, and Weatherford International.
Most of these firms were relatively small until the 1980s, when several oil companies decided that humdrum drilling chores were no longer worth doing in-house. Oil was easy then. Drilling yielded low margins that did not justify its claim on capital, so the oil majors outsourced it. This gave OFS firms space to grow.
They grew even faster in the early 1990s, when a tightening oil market drove demand for new technology. This led to breakthroughs in 3D seismology and directional drilling. These breakthroughs allow oil to be sucked economically from far beneath the ocean floor, and out of depleted and formerly abandoned wells.
But such inventions do not come cheap. Schlumberger invests roughly $1 billion a year in research and development, a level it maintained even during the slump after the 2008 financial crisis. That is as much as the mighty ExxonMobil spends; as a share of sales, five times more. The big OFS companies now probably file more patent applications than the oil majors, whose technological skills are largely interpretive. (For example, an oil major may decide where and how to drill based on geophysical data provided by an OFS firm.)
The oil business is likely to grow even more dependent on brainy OFS firms. Global production from mature oilfields is falling by between 2% and 6% a year. In the North Sea it has declined by 6% a year on average since 1999. With global demand for oil growing by 1-2% a year, there are persistent fears of a supply shock. Hence the current high oil prices: even after a 20% fall in recent months, Brent Crude is now around $100 a barrel. Oil firms are searching harder in more remote places, such as the Arctic and the deep seas off Brazil. Operating in such places will require yet more snazzy technology.
With hindsight, the oil companies’ decision to outsource the grubby bits of the job looks like an opportunity squandered. It has also left the oil firms hostage to the availability of increasingly expensive and sought-after services, from advanced drilling to deepwater rigs, which a dwindling number of OFS firms can provide.
There is, at present, still a fair amount of competition in most parts of the services industry. Each big OFS firm has different strengths, and plenty of smaller ones occupy specialised niches. Yet in some areas, especially the geographically remote ones, the demand for complex services often outstrips the supply.
Even worse for the likes of Exxon and BP, this has come at a time when state-owned oil firms have been muscling onto the stage. In the past couple of decades these national oil companies have claimed the best acreage in most old oilfields. The OFS firms have helped them to do so. Where once the state-owned giants hired oil majors to do the work, now they can manage projects themselves and hire technical help directly from the services firms. This can sometimes involve a limited sharing of risk between national and OFS firms, just as in a regular joint venture between oil companies.
Schlumberger, for example, will agree to a measure of payment-for-performance in big contracts. If it can drill more oil from a well than the contract says it must, it charges a higher fee. Other services firms have gone further, taking small equity stakes in exploration projects.
Some analysts wonder how all this might hurt the oil majors. A few decades ago national oil companies had to turn to oil majors for the technology required to get the stuff out of the ground. Today, oilfield service companies offer all the necessary technology and are increasingly willing to take on some of the same risks as an oil company, notes Marcel Brinkman of McKinsey.
Still, it would be wildly premature to bid Exxon adieu. Schlumberger’s performance-based contracts are a long way short of owning reserves—something the company says it will never do. It lacks the mammoth balance-sheet that oil firms maintain to manage the huge risks in oil exploration. It also lacks Exxon’s expertise in managing huge projects. And it is reluctant to annoy its customers by competing with them. Moreover, choosing where and how to explore (another strength of the oil majors) is trickier than you might think.
Instead, Schlumberger is planning more of what it is best at: pushing the technological boundaries of extracting the black stuff. It has recently been busy making acquisitions—including of Smith International, an American drill-bit company, for $11.3 billion—which have given it know-how in most segments of exploration and production. It now hopes to re-engineer the entire process.
The prize of increased efficiencies—delivered in barrels of money, not oil—could be vast. A big deepwater drilling rig costs half a million dollars a day to rent, and can take three months to drill a complicated well. Any OFS company that can shave a few days off that time will be in the money. Drilling is thrilling, and getting more so.
中文翻译
The unsung masters of the oil industry
石油行业的无名大师们
Oil firms you have never heard of are booming
你闻所未闻的那些石油企业正在兴起
被称为“定向钻进”的一项技术已经改变了能源行业。15年前，最好的钻井工人能把石油钻井钻成一条漂亮的抛物线。现在，人们能将钻井垂直钻下几千米深后，再突然转弯，接着沿水平方向钻出不超过12千米（或7英里）的长度。知名油田服务公司斯伦贝谢（Schlumberger）的威尔·格雷斯把这比作是从帝国大厦顶部往下做一条铅垂线，然后牵着这条线穿过停在附近街道上的每辆汽车的前后挡风玻璃。
这种技术极大地增加了一部钻探设备能覆盖到的范围。斯伦贝谢公司在苏格兰石油城市阿伯丁设有34个办公点，为加以说明，格雷斯在电脑屏幕上指出了一些分布于其中一个办公点的曲线和阴影。这些线条展示了一口油井的钻探进程，该油井为一家加拿大石油企业服务，于几小时前刚刚钻完。该油井深达13,000英尺（合4,000米），并已停止下行，又转向水平方向延伸了6,500英尺，在石油层中深入了三英尺。
同时，用于“钻柱”中的工具也使得许多附加测量手法得以传播开来（现在那些灵活性差的钢铸钻井被称为“钻柱”）：比如，测量地表岩层的放射性、对于电磁波的电阻率，等等。在这种情况下，如果地表岩层放射性较低，说明这是砂岩；如果其电阻率较高，则说明其中含有石油。这简直是一种魔法，几乎没有企业能掌握住。而且可能没有一家（掌握这种技术的企业）是常规石油公司。
像斯伦贝谢这种的油田服务（OFS）企业，正是石油行业中踏实干活的无名英雄。它们承担了绝大部分在发掘、提取石油、天然气过程中需要的大型起重服务。它们的知名度远远比不上那些雇用它们服务的石油企业，却获利丰厚。总部位于巴黎和休斯敦的斯伦贝谢公司，去年收入400亿美元，并获利50亿美元。在过去十年间，其市场总值翻了四番，达到910亿美元。这已经超过了一些包括埃尼集团（820亿美元）、挪威国家石油公司（750亿美元）、康菲石油（710亿美元）在内的国际石油公司。
斯伦贝谢公司的成功，高度反映了石油公司和其“随从”之间力量均衡的转移。直到20世纪90年代，油田服务公司的规模仍远远小于石油公司，且在诸如钻取垂直油井这种简单任务上，边际收益较低。现在这种情况已经发生了戏剧性的变化。
随着石油价格攀升得如此之高，石油企业乱作一团，争着去从更加偏远、成本更加高昂的岩层裂缝中开采石油。在过去十年中，石油行业花费在探寻、生产石油上的年均成本，按名义价值计算，已经翻了四番，但石油产量仅上升了12%。而那些大量投资于技术的大型服务公司，每年增长10%。根据咨询公司麦肯锡的结论，油田服务公司去年的总收入约为7500亿美元。
油田服务企业可以分为三种类型。有些企业制造、出售昂贵的成套工具，用于钻探设备或海床钻探，这些企业包括FMC、Cameron、美国国民油井华高公司，都是市值超过10亿的公司。有些企业持有并对外租赁钻探设备，这些企业包括越洋公司、Seadrill、来宝集团和Rowan。第三类企业承担在探寻、提取石油过程中的大部分工作，这类公司由四巨头所引领：斯伦贝谢、哈里伯顿、贝克休斯和威德福。
直到20世纪80年代，其中大部分公司的规模还相当小。但当时一些石油公司断定，单调的钻探杂活儿不再值得自己公司去做，而且当时采油还是很容易的。钻探的边际收益很低，不能匹配其要求投入的资本，因此石油大户们就该业务外包了出去。这就给油田服务企业提供了成长的空间。
在20世纪90年代早期，这些油田服务企业成长得更加迅猛，当时紧缩的石油市场驱使企业寻求新技术，进而致使在3D地震技术和定向钻进技术有所突破。这些突破使得石油能以经济低廉的手法从海底深处被吸取上来，还可以从曾被抽空并废弃的油井中抽取上来。
但搞出这些发明耗资不菲。斯伦贝谢每年对研发投入约10亿美元，即使在2008年金融危机后的经营滑坡中，该公司仍维持着这种投资水平。这种投资水平能与强悍的埃克森美孚持平；而且就（研发投资）占销售额的份额来说，前者比后者高出5倍。现在大型油田服务公司可能比石油大户们提交更多的专利申请，而且后者的大部分技术也都是解释性的（例如，一家大型石油公司可能根据油田服务公司提供的地理信息数据，来决定于何处、以何种手法进行钻探）。
石油行业的成长可能会更加依靠头脑聪明的油田服务企业。全球范围内成熟油田的产量正在以每年2%-6%的程度下滑。在北海海域，自1999年以来，成熟油田的产量平均每年下滑6%。随着全球石油需求量正在以每年1%-2%的程度增长，人们开始持续性担忧供给冲击的发生。这也就造成了目前的高昂油价：即使在最近几月中已经下跌了20%，每桶布伦特原油的价格仍高达100美元左右。在这种行业中进行经营，将需要更多吸引人眼球的技术。
事后来看，当初石油公司把采油工作中肮脏劳累的部分外包出去这一决策，看上去像是把机会拱手让人了。并且，这种决策还使得石油公司被日益昂贵、越来越吃香的服务所“绑架”，从先进钻井技术到深水钻探设备，仅有为数不多的油田服务企业能提供这些服务。
不过目前来看，在油田服务行业的大部分领域，仍存在着大量的竞争。每个大型油田服务企业拥有与众不同的优势，而大量小型企业则占据专业利基市场。然而在某些地区，尤其是那些地理位置偏远的地区，对于复杂服务的需求经常超出供给。
对于埃克森和英国石油公司来说，更为糟糕的是，国有石油企业开始登上舞台的时代已经到来。在过去20年中，这些国有石油公司已经占据了大部分老油田中最好的地域。正是油田服务企业帮助这些国有石油企业来实现这种伟业。在某些领域，国有石油企业曾经雇用大型石油企业来从事，但现在，这些国有石油企业可以自己管理项目，并直接从油田服务企业处获得技术支持。有时这种关系涉及国有石油企业和油田服务企业之间风险的分担，就像两家石油公司之间常规的的合资经营一样。
例如，斯伦贝谢将同意在大笔合同中规定的绩效回报的程度。如果斯伦贝谢钻出的石油多于合同要求的产量，它可以索要更高的服务费。其他油田服务公司的步子迈得更大，它们会从开采项目中获取小部分股权。
一些经济分析家在猜测，所有这些行为将在多大程度上伤害到大型石油公司。几十年前，国有石油公司需要向大型石油公司寻求把填充物从地下抽出来所需要的技术。麦肯锡的Marcel Brinkman注意到，现在，油田服务公司能提供所有需要的技术，并愈加愿意承担一些与石油公司相同的风险。
然而，现在就赌咒说埃克森将告别市场，这种看法非常不成熟。斯伦贝谢手中基于绩效的合同，远远比不上拥有石油储量——斯伦贝谢提出它们将绝不会去储备石油。该公司缺乏强健的财务实力，石油公司却能维持这种实力，以应对在石油探采中的巨大风险。它还缺乏埃克森在管理大型工程方面拥有的专业水准。而且，斯伦贝谢并不愿意因与客户竞争而惹恼客户。此外，选择在何处、以何种手段进行石油开采比你能想到的更为复杂棘手（而这是大型石油公司拥有的另一大优势）。
相反，斯伦贝谢正在筹划超出它目前最擅长的行动：突破提取原油的技术壁垒。最近该公司正在忙着收购其他公司——包括花113亿美元收购一家美国钻头生产企业史密斯国际公司——这些公司能为斯伦贝谢提供在石油开采、生产的大部分领域中的专有技术。现在，斯伦贝谢希望能重新设计整个流程。
为提高效率进行的花费将十分巨大，这些花费是成桶的金钱，而不是石油。一部大型深水钻探设备每年的租金为100万美元，且耗时3个月钻出一口复杂的油井。任何能削减这一消耗时间的油田服务公司就能赚到钱。钻井这行很吸引人，而且这种形势愈演愈烈。
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