vendredi 27 février 2015

An Overview Of Oil And Gas Service Companies

By Olivia Cross


There are a number of businesses involved in the petroleum industry and these firms make a lot of profits every year. Though some of the oil and gas service companies in Houston TX are integrated, others are not. This notwithstanding, all these service providers, as they are usually referred to in the industry, carry out their operations based on the way they are place strategically in the industry. These firms make their profits at the exploration, drilling, completion, production or abandonment stage.

It will help if you are aware of the fact that these providers divide their line of operation into different categories. The activities are either at the upstream sector or downstream sector. It is possible for a provider to be involved in all of the categories or be selective. Actually, that decision will be based on the capital at hand, the technological know-how and the experience of the provider involved.

The oil and gas integrated firms that are involved in upstream business always specialize in exploration and production of the end products. While those that are in the downstream business are known to deal with marketing of the products and refine process of the end product before it hits the market. Note that there are companies that do their business both upstream and downstream.

There is something that you will always note about most of the integrated players that operate in the oil and gas industry. Most of them are counter-intuitive are do do automatically react to the market forces. For example, when the prices of oil and gas products rise, this does not mean that their profit margins will increase. In many cases, the margin remains pretty the same.

There are some issues and challenges that these firms always face and this is reason they are moving to automation or semi-automation of most tasks. Some of the challenges include; safety and health issues, performance of most complicated tasks, innovation, environmental issues, and of course performance. In all cases, technology in this sector is saving more money and time.

The technological advancement has made it possible for many of these firms to automate their activities. The automation is very visible in the area of data collection and analysis. This is the main reason why room for errors in dangerous areas and tasks are currently minimized leading to effective operation. As a result, overhead and its associated costs when running these operations, are reduced drastically.

Maintenance using automation has moved to different level and has improved the level of exploration drilling and production. At the moment, implementation of radio frequency in addition to using other related sensors has made tracking activities easier. This is the reason why it is possible for these firm to monitor activities anywhere with ease. They normally use simple techniques to keep equipments running without hiccups.

There are top oil companies that rake in profits from all over the world. These firms are from different countries and operate globally. Some of the big ones are from USA, Russia, Italy, Canada, France and other continents like Asia. There're literally thousands of companies that are integrated and are performing creditably in the petroleum industry.




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