Corporate Profile
With locations 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. The Company is a joint venture, 60% owned by Smith International, Inc. (Smith), and affiliated companies, and 40% owned by Schlumberger Limited (Schlumberger) and affiliated companies. Today, M-I SWACO employs approximately 13,000 persons in over 400 service locations around the world.
The joint venture between Smith and Schlumberger consolidated more than 60 years of leadership and service to the global exploration and production industry, including the industry-defining contribution of two pioneers in the drilling fluids industry - Magcobar (a subsidiary of Dresser Industries) and Imco Services (a subsidiary of the Halliburton Company), coupled with the complementary technologies and services of Dresser Industries’ SWACO business unit, the industry leader in solids and pressure control equipment. In 1986, Dresser and Halliburton formed a joint venture between its two drilling fluid companies, known as M-I Drilling Fluids, LLC. Smith purchased the Dresser share of the M-I joint venture in 1994, and in 1999, Schlumberger contributed its non-U.S. Dowell drilling fluid operations to become the joint venture’s minority partner. Since that time, M-I SWACO has acquired the talents and capabilities of a number of companies to enhance and broaden its solutions offering across the drilling and production spectrum.
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 client’s specific 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, and recognized rig-site 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 solution 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 solution offering focuses on the full range of domains encountered in production operations – from injection wells, where bacterial plugging, debris, and gas entrapment are the critical issues, to the downhole environment, where scale and paraffin plugging and tubing corrosion are paramount, to 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.
The remediation of produced water and production waste is part of our Environmental Solutions offering, which 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, to which M-I SWACO offers customized production waste management programs, pneumatic conveyance technologies, automatic tank cleaning, and site remediation.
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 to the market though our Geographical Business Unit (GBU) organizational structure, which includes the North American and South American Business Units, as well as two business units in the Eastern Hemisphere: Eastern Hemisphere North, which includes the North Sea, Mainland Europe, and countries of the former Soviet Union, and Eastern Hemisphere South, which includes North and Sub-Sahara Africa, as well as the Middle East and the Asia Pacific regions. These business units offer our clients a single point of contact at the local level for field operations. Within the same organization, a similar contact, linked to a specific Solutions segment, acts as the customer interface for technology deployment. The GBU, then, is a powerful conduit through which information and know-how flow to the customer in the form of products, services and solutions. The proximity of the GBU to the customer aids in the development of locally applicable solutions based on global expertise.
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 skill sets to manage this natural grouping represented a significant opportunity to create and deliver value for our clients in the drilling industry, allowing us to advance conventional engineering practices to jointly address our client’s environmental, production, and drilling requirements -- as well as to develop new fluids and waste management 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 – featured the integration planning and delivery of fluid systems and fluid waste management equipment, and a commercial business model based upon the capture of cost savings realized through higher levels of performance. The integrated approach to service delivery also demanded an organizational alignment that allowed operational managers to have both fluid and fluid-related equipment and services under their control, so that clear lines of communication and accountability were established.
With the new organizational structure, the IFE concept was broadened beyond a specialized implementation and 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.
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. More recently, 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.
Going forward, M-I SWACO will continue to develop or acquire technologies that enhance its solutions offering, leveraging our understanding of the natural groupings that exist in the application and management of fluids and fluid-related waste, and creating greater value for our clients through that insight.
