Weatherford is no stranger to the Russian and CIS market where it has been providing “bread and butter” services for years. Some examples are:
• Tubular running services (TRS). Weatherford provides TRS generally in all of Russia’s offshore regions: Sakhalin and the Caspian, Baltic and Barents Seas. On Sakhalin, Weatherford controls 80 percent of the TRS business through contracts with Sakhalin Energy, Parker Drilling, ExxonMobil and KCA Deutag. Significant onshore TRS contracts are in place as well for VCNG-BP, Rusia Petroleum, Total, Achimgaz and Integra.
Sergei Raikhert, Regional Manager, Tubular Running Services, joined Weatherford in 2004 and today manages a team of 60 people, including eight field crews who service four main contracts with TNK-BP and Gazprom. Weatherford provides TRS in traditional Western Siberia brownfield areas as well as greenfield sites in Eastern Siberia, near Lake Baikal. The company’s TRS business has grown tenfold from three years ago and is expected to almost double by the end of 2007.
To support such tremendous growth in the region, the company is now organizing two maintenance, repair and training facilities – one 19 miles (30 kilometers) north of Moscow and a second in Murmansk for offshore training.
The Moscow-area site was previously occupied by a state machine tools institute. By early 2008 it will have been transformed into a TRS training facility with two refurbished derricks, renovated workshop, equipment warehouse and trainee dormitory.
“We have been asked by Gazprom’s drilling contractor, Gazflot, to establish a similar training facility in Murmansk,” says Raikhert. The facility will train personnel for work offshore in the Barents Sea. Raikhert sees big potential for TRS in Southern Russia in Karsnodar, Astrakhan and Orenberg. Ukraine offers opportunities both onshore and offshore.
• Fishing, re-entry and sidetracking services. Commenting on another traditional business, Weatherford’s Country Manager for Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, Gleb Usynin, says that a decision a year and a half ago to enter Russia’s workover market with fishing, re-entry and sidetracking services is paying off.
“As the market has matured, we’ve evolved our perspective to keep pace with growing client requirements. We see tremendous untapped potential, particularly in the area of workovers. And we are willing to go into business segments where our competitors are not.”
And that billion-dollar market is growing. Russian companies understand that they must invest more into services to get the same value per barrel that they did five years ago. Usynin expects this trend to continue. “Russia remains the market that will attract the most new technologies,” he says. “We want to be recognized as a Western-Russian company that offers a mixture of Russian and Western technologies.
• Solid expandable systems. As for higher technology, in Azerbaijan, the company recently saved BP millions of dollars with a solid expandables job. Through a long-standing collaboration with the operator, a solution was developed to avoid a costly workover and streamline the drilling process for a leaky, shut-in well needing remediation. The field’s extreme pressure and temperature variances presented a significant challenge. The potential for formation damage and the time required to kill the well and pull the completion made a full workover operationally and economically unattractive.
Using the MetalSkin® cased-hole liner, BP was able to restore production in one of the world’s most prolific gas fields. “The MetalSkin patch helped the operator secure production benefits without the risk and time loss of a de-completion,” says Zakirov. “Proving this technology in the region is an excellent step toward overcoming some key barriers to adoption.”
