If you were looking for a rotary steerable system (RSS), where would you go? Would you look in Houston, Aberdeen, or Edmonton? You probably wouldn’t look in Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire, England, which is about 55 km (35 miles) from the border of Wales. But that is where Weatherford International just opened a 3,716-sq-m (40,000-sq-ft) manufacturing, repair, and maintenance facility. It is also where Schlumberger and Halliburton have RSS facilities within 40 km (25 miles) of Tewkesbury.

“Entrepreneurial engineers” is the reason Daryl Stroud, director of R&D and engineering for RSS at Weatherford, gave E&P for the concentration of RSS in Tewkesbury. As he noted, Gloucestershire was a hotbed for engineers before World War II. During the war, the first jet-powered aircraft was built there. In the 1960s and 1970s, a couple of entrepreneurial engineers started up businesses related to the oil field.

The large engineering infrastructure is what brought companies there originally. The infrastructure and large potential workforce are what keep the companies there today. Stroud joined Weatherford in late 2000. The company’s RSS business has grown from two employees then to about 110 employees. The RSS group is based there because of the workforce and the supply chain locally. Virtually everything needed for the RSS can be manufactured within a 3.2-km (2-mile) radius of its new plant.

There are some surprising benefits for having manufacturing in the UK. The biggest advantage is that it is less expensive to manufacture equipment there. “For example, a lot of the equipment we manufacture here in the UK you couldn’t make for the same price in Houston. When we set this enterprise up, our expectation was that our regional repair and maintenance centers would be self-sufficient in terms of spares. But it is actually cheaper to buy from us. We find ourselves now managing all the spares for RSS for those centers,” Stroud explained.

The business plan for Tewkesbury originally was to develop a continual stream of new RSS products for Weatherford. “At the moment, we are building all the new equipment for the global Weatherford RSS,” he said. “For R&D, about 40% of the 110 employees are involved in engineering, whether it is R&D or sustaining engineering.”

The key point for having the facility in Tewkesbury is the people. “We’ve been very successful in getting engineers from local universities and developing them into engineers of the future,” he added.

The future for RSS is indeed bright. RSS can drill faster and cheaper wells. Over the last couple of years, records were achieved in places like the Eagle Ford and Marcellus shales. “I don’t think we’ve reached the limit in terms of what we can actually drill yet,” Stroud said.

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