Interview on drilling with Halliburton M.E. VP

Drilling efficiently, Hugentobler says, covers everything from ensuring safety to preventing damage to the reservoir.

The company’s vice president for the Middle East and Eurasia is in good spirits thanks to another year of robust growth (third quarter financials reported in October show the company’s Middle Eastern revenues grew 3% year on year), but also because he believes his whole geographical remit is fertile ground for the advanced technologies and applications that fall within Halliburton’s arsenal.

Hugentobler returned to the Middle East from his Moscow posting in April of this year and says the footprint he’s responsible for now is as dynamic and exciting an upstream landscape as anyone could hope for.

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“I spent a few years based in Russia and overseeing the CIS region. That was a really exciting environment. That whole region is going to blossom someday.

They just can’t continue to produce at levels they are happy with without bringing in the technical expertise of companies like Halliburton. They have been effective so far, but the coming decades will certainly be an exciting time, particularly for us, there,” he says.

The trends driving the demand for more advanced exploration and production techniques and technologies vary from region to region, but certain themes are underpinning the increased spending across the board.

“Although we are seeing production capacity increases and more intensive drilling programmes all over the world, that’s not necessarily tightly correlated with our growth per se,” he explains.

“We’ve always seen our value proposition in the technology and know-how side of the business, so technology adoption is the key for us.

A lot of people assume that growth and business is tied to the rig count, but we are doing a lot of rigless work here, including interventions to prolong the life of a field and working closely with the operators to develop fields more efficiently.”

The efficiency theme is also, Hugentobler says, key to what the company brings to the table. “Drilling effectively and efficiently really are two completely different things. By approaching a programme efficiently we are talking about everything from bringing down drilling times, improving safety right through to ensuring we do not damage the reservoir.

One of the advantages we have over smaller firms is the strength and robustness of our management systems which ensure the whole gamut of the programme is optimised,” he says.

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