Cameron – Schlumberger JV Shifts Subsea Currents

Cameron and Schlumberger announced this morning the formation of OneSubsea, a 60/40 joint venture partnership that will focus on manufacturing and developing subsea products and services worldwide. Cameron will contribute its existing subsea division and receive $600 million from Schlumberger. It will also act as operator. For its part, Schlumberger will contribute its Framo, Surveillance, …

Oilfield Equipment: Let Gaps Guide Investment

In the 1980s and 1990s, the oilfield equipment sector, for all intents and purposes, neglected the customer.  Since then, a select group of companies have successfully kept the focus of their efforts on satisfying  customers with dependable products.  They have coupled this with responsive service. The results are impressive. In fact, they’ve played critical roles …

Schlumberger Angles for Growth with Bid for Cameron

Changes in the outlook for the upstream oil and gas industry have led Schlumberger to launch a convincing bid for Houston-based oilfield equipment supplier and current joint-venture partner Cameron Int’l. The richly valued deal implies a price for Cameron’s stock of just over $66 per share, a 56% premium over its pre-announcement close.  With the …

FMC Technologies An Oil Equipment Company To Watch

FMC Technologies, a leading oil equipment company, consistently outranks its peer-group average in EnergyPoint Research’s customer satisfaction surveys. The company has grown into a dominant player over the years partly on the strength of a vigorous research and development program that began bearing fruit in time for today’s exuberant revival of subsea drilling and development. …

Cameron Int’l Making Its Way To New Depths

Conceptualizing, fabricating and installing the labyrinth of integrated systems and equipment required for today’s massive subsea projects are some of the most complex tasks in the oil and gas industry. Without question, the daunting challenges at these depths contribute to the historically low customer satisfaction ratings for subsea products we have observed in our surveys …

Schlumberger Adjusts Its Aim

As a capable giant in the oilfield, Schlumberger’s tentacles of services, manpower and ingenuity stretch into just about every major facet of exploration and production. Yet from the purview of customer satisfaction, the company can, in certain ways, appear surprisingly unremarkable.

New Tests Challenge Schlumberger

As a capable giant in the oilfield, Schlumberger’s tentacles of services, manpower and ingenuity stretch into almost every major facet of exploration and production. Yet, from the purview of overall customer satisfaction, the company can appear more like a straw in a haystack. To be sure, Schlumberger’s customer satisfaction ratings remain quite strong in the …

FMC Technologies Makes a Play in Shale

With the impending purchase of Canada’s Pure Energy Services, Houston-based FMC Technologies adds frac flowback treatment and cleanup services to its portfolio of offerings. In doing so, the company enters the service-side of the fracking game more as waterboy than as athlete, more satisfied to clean up after the segment’s higher-profile stars than to challenge …

Wellheads & Trees: Consistency a Virtue, Reliability a Requirement

The father of modern scientific method, Sir Francis Bacon, believed consistency to be “the foundation of virtue.” Dramatist and poet Oscar Wilde, on the other hand, saw consistency as the “last refuge of the unimaginative.” While we do not wish in any way to diminish Wilde’s esteemed position in literary circles, we do suppose it’s …

A Sea of Discontent

The wisdom of the masses is a concept that contends information gathered from a group is generally more reliable than information gathered from any single individual within that group.  If so, what is the industry saying en masse about the products used to develop offshore wells—particularly those at greater depths—in light of the Deepwater Horizon incident? …