Corporate Profile
With over 13,000 employees in more than 75 countries around the world, M-I SWACO is a vital part of the world’s hydrocarbon exploration and production industry. We are the leading supplier of drilling fluid systems engineered to improve drilling performance by anticipating fluids-related problems, fluid systems and specialty tools designed to optimize wellbore productivity, production technology solutions to maximize production rates, and environmental solutions that safely manage waste volumes generated in both drilling and production operations.
In August 2010, M-I SWACO became part of Schlumberger through its merger with Smith International. The primary driver behind this merger is drilling optimization. In order to sustain and increase world oil and gas production, higher levels of drilling will be necessary in increasingly challenging and complex environments. This means wells with longer and more complex profiles. Understanding the technical challenges and mitigating the consequent risk in advance of a drilling program can mean major cost savings and well performance improvement for our customers. M-I SWACO will play a critical part in meeting these challenges.
Solutions Offerings
From its earliest roots, M-I SWACO recognized that it best served its clients, not by delivering drilling fluid products to the client’s location, but by anticipating and planning for how those products would behave in the downhole environment, both to optimize drilling performance and to minimize the risk associated with fluids-related problems.
The Drilling Solutions offering, customized to a specific client application and location, involves a company expertise focused on fluids-related issues such as differential sticking, lost circulation, hole-cleaning, and well control. It also entails an overall understanding of how these issues contribute to the client’s goals to maximize rate-of-penetration, eliminate non-productive time (NPT), achieve QHSE performance objectives, and obtain quality data from the wellbore. This understanding is strengthened by providing regionally- and globally-based experts to support the application of M-I SWACO technology, and by developing new technology and process solutions to optimize client results.
The Wellbore Productivity offering is comprised of a suite of products, services, and technical support focused on safeguarding well completions and formation stability by assuring the optimal quality of the wellbore and fluid systems. As with Drilling Solutions, this solutions offering is focused first on establishing the well plan and contingencies using advanced fluid planning and simulation software, then achieving the surface-, formation-, and completion-related requirements defined by the client, employing:
- fluid conditioning expertise to achieve desired fluid properties
- compatibility testing and non-damaging brines to minimize formation damage
- specialized tools to optimize completion assembly installation and removal
- recognized rigsite and project engineering expertise to minimize NPT and produce a clean wellbore.
Products and services that contribute to this customized solution include the application of Smart* reservoir drill-in fluids, clear brine fluid systems, filtration equipment and services, specialty tools designed for wellbore cleanout, spacer and displacement chemical systems, and vessel-cleaning technologies to eliminate cross-contamination of fluids at the surface.
Our Production Technologies offering moves beyond the drilling and completion phases, allowing M-I SWACO to apply our expertise in fluids planning and application to the hydrocarbon production environment. This offering focuses on the full range of domains encountered in production operations:
- injection wells where bacterial plugging, debris, and gas entrapment are the critical issues
- the downhole environment, where scale and paraffin plugging and tubing corrosion are paramount
- the surface environment where oily-water, drag reduction, and flow-line corrosion issues dominate.
Our solutions also address the remediation of produced water, including oil, water, and gas separation via the Epcon* Compact Flotation Unit (CFU), and the management of waste generated during production operations, including complex waste pit emulsions, oily sludge and slop oils.
Our Environmental Solutions offering focuses on the best approach to safely managing waste volumes produced during the drilling, completion, and production operations in a way that allows our clients to achieve their environmental performance standards. With the diversity of available technologies, client requirements and governmental guidelines, the planning and design of the optimal solution is critical, frequently involving a “fit for purpose” approach to equipment design and application. Solutions are designed for the primary recovery of drilling waste for optimal drilling performance, the secondary recovery of waste for remediation and potential reuse, and the permanent disposal of waste through such treatment programs as dewatering, cuttings reinjection, and thermal desorption. Rig, tank and site clean-up are also critical issues in the management of fluid waste, for which M-I SWACO offers customized production waste management programs, pneumatic conveyance technologies, automatic tank cleaning, and site remediation.
Integrated Fluids Engineering
The geographic growth of M-I SWACO and our expanded solutions offering reflect the company’s recognition of a natural grouping of products and services related to the fluids cycle, including the design and execution of a fluids plan, the primary recovery of fluids at the rigsite, and the management of fluid-related waste to its final disposition. The ability to develop the technology and skills to manage this natural grouping enables us to create and deliver value for our clients, allowing us to jointly address their environmental, production and drilling requirements, while developing new technologies that can have a more fundamental impact on these performance measures in the future. With this strategic vision, M-I SWACO has engaged in a concerted effort since 1995 to build the company’s drilling waste management capabilities, including the acquisition and internal development of such technologies as premium screens, vacuum systems, cuttings treatment services, pneumatic transfer, cuttings reinjection services, and thermal desorption services, as well as the expansion of our completion brines and reservoir drill-in fluid capabilities.
These efforts culminated in the introduction of an innovative product/service offering known as Integrated Fluids Engineering* (IFE*) which, unlike more conventional approaches, features the integrated planning and delivery of fluid systems and fluid waste management equipment. IFE will deliver the highest performance from your well at the lowest total project cost.
In time, the IFE concept was broadened beyond a specialized implementation and the concept of a team” approach by fluids and fluids equipment personnel became a core philosophy within the company. This philosophy was formalized in 2003, when the company brought together its two brands, M-I and SWACO, communicating to our clients our commitment to designing solutions from the M-I SWACO suite of products and services to achieve their drilling and environmental performance goals.
A Business Focused Organization
The M-I SWACO solutions offering blends an understanding of technology, application and service to enable our clients to achieve their project-specific goals. Operationally, these solutions are delivered through our GeoMarket organization, which covers the following areas: North America, Latin America, Europe and Africa, Russia, Middle East and Asia. This organizational structure enables us to offer our clients a single point of contact at the local level for field operations, while maintaining geographically-focused teams that can leverage global expertise to meet local needs and deliver customized solutions. Within the organization, a dedicated M-I SWACO contact, linked to a specific Solutions segment, acts as the customer interface for technology deployment. The GeoMarket organization is a powerful conduit through which information and know-how flow to the customer in the form of products, services and solutions, with technological synergies maximized.
Building for the Future
By 2005, the company began to expand its solutions offering beyond the fluids cycle, moving into the production arena with the acquisition of Dynea Oilfield Services, predominantly engaged in providing oilfield production chemicals, and Epcon Offshore A/S. Both acquisitions complemented the M-I SWACO purchase of Sulfatreat* in 2002, providing a range of specialty chemicals designed to remove hydrogen sulfide from gas, oil and water streams. In 2009, M-I SWACO acquired Cyclotech*, adding state-of-the-art sand separation capabilities to its repertoire of produced water treating systems. By melding the unique Epcon capabilities with those of Cyclotech, M-I SWACO made produced water and sand management a significantly more efficient and cost-effective operation, thereby helping protect the economic viability of maturing wells.
Additionally, M-I SWACO has begun to develop an integrated solution around the pre-completion phase of a well’s construction, bringing our unique reservoir drill-in fluid and completion fluid technologies, displacement chemistries, and filtration equipment together with specialty tools designed to clean up the wellbore prior to running the completion assembly. Like IFE, this solution focuses on the joint performance of products and services in the critical pre-completion phases, utilizing M-I SWACO tools to design and execute a fluids plan customized to the client’s completion objectives.
M-I SWACO will continue to develop or acquire technologies that enhance its solutions offering. As part of Schlumberger, a host of new growth opportunities become possible. The result will be greater value for our clients.
* Mark of M-I l.l.c.
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