Musings - Tuesday, August 5, 2008 16:36 - Comments

How the energy-rich rely on Schlumberger

Fairly good FT article on SLB which I’m passing on but won’t comment ;-)

Andrew Gould is quietly becoming one of the most powerful men in the oil industry, so much so that he feels compelled to reassure the world’s biggest energy groups that he has no intention of making them redundant. “We do not, cannot and would not replace what oil companies do with things we can’t do,” says the chief executive of Schlumberger, the world’s largest oil services group, in a rare interview.

Yet the list of things Schlumberger cannot do has shrunk so dramatically that many national oil companies (NOCs) can now forgo the costly and politically tricky step of forming partnerships with international oil companies to tap their own oilfields. For the likes of ExxonMobil, BP and Royal Dutch Shell, that means losing the most lucrative part of their business – the part they have relied on to achieve growth in production, revenue and reserves for much of their existence.

Source: FT.com / Comment & analysis / Analysis - Nationals’ champion: How the energy-rich rely on Schlumberger