Forbes Piece: SLB Rolls Out Cement Alternative At CERA Week

[Note: This story can be read in full at Forbes.com]

Cement being poured by a cement truck. GETTY

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.”