Schlumberger buys university spinoff
Services giant covets unique technology
The world’s largest oilfield services company has acquired a Calgary technology firm that started in a university lab.
Houston-based Schlumberger Ltd. says it can better serve its exploration and production customers after buying Gushor Inc., a University of Calgary spinoff company whose technologies help clients better understand reservoir characteristics and develop strategies to recover oil.
Gushor, which has 17 employees, already had a global reach before the Schlumberger acquisition, having completed 400 projects on every continent except Antarctica since it was founded in 2006.
“The main interest for us was that when you’re a small company you just don’t have the resources or the skills needed to develop some of the technologies you’re trying to work on,” said Steve Larter, who was CEO before the purchase.
“Schlumberger, they are the biggest technology developer in the oil and gas industry, so they have all the engineering and scaling that we don’t have. It’s pretty exciting.”
Gushor’s shareholders were mostly from the University of Calgary but a third were business investors, said Larter, who will remain in the company as a geochemistry adviser.
Gushor was not actively looking for a buyer, but its long-term strategy had always been to sell, he said. No purchase price was released.
Schlumberger declined to comment on the acquisition Wednesday, but it said in a recent release that Gushor’s products would complement its own portfolio of fluids and rocks technology.
Larter, the Canada research chair in Petroleum Geology, led a research team at the University of Calgary that developed a device called the plunger. It squeezes oil from core samples to get accurate readings of its viscosity (how easily the product flows).
Understanding the depths and locations at which oil most easily flows helps operators place wells where they can best recover the oil, Larger said.
“One of the problems with the oilsands is the stuff is so crappy, it’s hard to get it out of the core without adding solvent or heating it. And if you add solvent, you change the oil, then the viscosity measurement wouldn’t be as good,” he said.
“The plunger is a device that lets you get a represen-
They have all the engineering and scaling that we don’t have STEVER LARTER
tative sample of the bitumen with the least possible changes, and that allows you to get an accurate viscosity reading.”
Schlumberger, which employs 120,000 people in 85 countries, was interested in Gushor’s plunger, but it was especially keen to acquire the smaller company’s unique geochemical analysis of crude oil, Larter said. Its technology helps companies discover whether there are barriers, such as shale, that would block oil from being extracted from the ground.
“The big thing that stops efficient production is you’ve usually got barriers, faults or shales, so your reservoir is not one big tank; it’s a whole set of disconnected tanks,” Larter said.
“Geochemistry lets you essentially make measurements by comparing the oil above and below, so you can decide if that shale was a barrier or not,” he said.
Gushor moved out of the university to the Franklin Industrial Park in northeast Calgary in 2011, but not before receiving accolades for its work.
At the Alberta Science and Technology Leadership Foundation gala in 2009, the company won an outstanding commercial achievement award for companies with gross sales of fewer than $25 million.
Larter said the Schlumberger acquisition was another exciting milestone in the company.
“We will be able to do things that we would not have been able to do as a small company,” he said.