SLB Rolls Out Cement Alternative At CERA Week

As the annual CERAWeek conference kicked off Monday morning, international energy service technology company SLB (formerly Schlumberger) made news with an announcement about a new cement alternative it will now offer to its customers in the oilfield and other industries. The company says its new system, called EcoShield™, has the potential to eliminate as much as 85% of embodied carbon emissions when compared with conventional well cementing systems currently in use.

“Decarbonizing the well construction process while ensuring safety and performance standards is critical to our industry’s pathway to net zero,” said Jesus Lamas, SLB’s president of Well Construction, said in the company’s release. “The cement-free EcoShield system is a breakthrough that delivers industry-standard zonal isolation capabilities while significantly minimizing impact from upstream oil and gas production.”

All told, if widely adopted, SLB says EcoShield “has the potential to avoid up to 5 million metric tons of CO₂ emissions annually—the equivalent of removing 1.1 million cars from the road each year.”

The cement industry is one of the largest man-made sources of carbon emissions each year, making any solution that dramatically lowers its use very attractive to companies focused on improving their annual ESG metrics. SLB notes that it has run a pilot project in the Permian Basin in recent months with Texas-based Pioneer Natural ResourcesPXD
involving 18 wells.

Noting that Pioneer continues with use of the system following the field test, SLB says that the pilot “validated the ability of the technology to fit within standard oilfield cementing workflows without major changes to the design process, onsite execution, or post-job evaluation.”

In an interview conducted last week, SLB President, Americas Land James R. MacDonald told me the company is developing and introducing a variety of innovative technologies designed to drive down carbon footprints and and improve ESG metrics for customers. He emphasizes that the company’s efforts in this regard are not solely focuses on oil and gas.

“We’re playing in the drilling space, we’re playing in the completions space, we’re playing in the carbon capture and storage space, we’re playing in the energy transition space.” MacDonald says. “We’re playing to our customers’ needs, we’re creating new customers and broadening outside the industry all at the same time.”

Regarding EcoShield, the company’s announcement also emphasizes the fact that the system uses locally sourced industrial waste streams and natural materials in its composition, enabling it to cut down on transportation-related emissions that occur from manufacture to deployment. Importantly, the system has applications throughout various phases of a well’s life-cycle, including abandonment, when operators are required to plug the wellbore with cement.

Outside of oil and gas, an alternative to cement could create emissions-reducing impacts for other forms of energy. Wind towers and turbines, for example, are constructed atop huge cement pads as their base. Anyone who has ever visited a nuclear energy site is immediately struck by the enormous volume of cement that is used in its construction. Solar farms also make copious use of cement as a base material.

Bottom Line: Technology innovations like this one will likely have the impact of making the oil and gas industry generally more sustainable as time goes on. That will come as unwelcome news to fossil fuels opponents, but with global demand for both oil and natural gas projected to reach new record highs in 2023, it is the kind of advance that must continue to take place for the global community to have any real hope of achieving the carbon reduction goals announced at the UN’s annual COP conferences.

Every conversation I’ve had with leaders in the energy space this year reveals a growing consensus that the energy transition has fallen far behind the ambitious timetables announced by governments in the developed world. There is a pressing need for many more such technological advancements if the transition is to ever hope to get back on track.