How big is the well intervention market?

We get that call a few times per year and we never know how to answer it.  This is because pretty much everything to do to a well is an intervention, particularly if you are installing a tool or removing a tool from the well.  Tripping pipe… is that an intervention? If tubing, yes, if drill pipe, it depends. What about coiled tubing – is that intervention?

And wireline services – openhole, cased hole, slickline.  Are those well intervention?  

I was thinking about well intervention while looking at one of our market research papers this week – wireline, written by our colleague, David Otte, who is himself a lifelong wireline hand, from running trucks to running companies.  Here’s a chart from that report:

If you chop this global wireline market into its geographic pieces, the US land piece would be about a third and the remaining two-thirds of the market would be heavily biased to offshore international (plus the Gulf of Mexico).  Most of the US land wireline market is cased hole plug & perf work, and that part is falling in 2020 because fewer wells are being drilled.  

So if one-third (US land) of the global market is falling, but the total market around the world is nevertheless rising 6% in 2020, that means the international offshore part of the wireline market must be doing quite well.  Why yes, as a matter of fact, it is. And who is the biggest international offshore wireline logging company? Schlumberger.

Those oilfield service companies who provide offshore international intervention services – wireline, for example – will see above average growth in 2020 and those companies are (BKR, HAL and SLB).