In late 2020, a drilling superintendent told me something I half wanted to believe: Schlumberger services are finally priced like everyone else's.
I'm not a petroleum engineer. I can't speak to wireline tool tolerances or the best way to complete a specific interval. What I can speak to, from a purchasing side, is what the Schlumberger layoffs 2020 did to the value behind the invoices. It didn't show up on the rate sheet. It showed up later, in non-productive time and in the quality of remote decisions.
In seven years as a cost controller, I have watched about $2.1 million in oilfield services move through our procurement system. I have compared vendors, audited invoices, and made more than one mistake that cost us more than the difference between two bids.
The surface problem: choosing by day rate
In most downturns, service buyers reduce the conversation to one number: the day rate. The Schlumberger layoffs 2020 came right after a collapse in oilfield activity, and a wave of price discounts made that number more attractive. By late 2020, the U.S. rig count had fallen from roughly 800 at the beginning of the year to about 350, based on Baker Hughes public rig count data from the period. That tells you what happened to utilization. When utilization falls, every service company becomes negotiable.
So the surface problem was not that Schlumberger services were too expensive. It was that a buyer could look at the discounted price and forget what actually makes a service effective.
What the layoffs changed: experience continuity
I don't have internal restructuring numbers from Schlumberger, and I won't pretend otherwise. Public statements around the period reported tens of thousands of roles eliminated across the broader oilfield services industry. More important than the total was who left. In many cases, the field experience built through the shale years dispersed to other companies, to consulting, or into retirement.
That matters because service delivery is still a human process. There is always a digital oilfield layer now, but the judgment call—the decision to stop because the data looks wrong—is still made by people. When a company goes through a large layoff, the average experience on location does not stay the same. This was the hidden cost in 2021 bids. Some crews were strong. Some crews were learning on the job at full rate.
I am not saying every Schlumberger job after 2020 lost quality. The company also invested in remote operations. What I am saying is that a buyer who did not change how they evaluated crews was flying blind. The brand name alone no longer promised the same delivery profile.
The peanut butter test
Here is a quick analogy from drilling fluids. Operators often call a high-viscosity sweep a peanut butter pill because it is thick, sticky, and carries cuttings out of the hole. It is a small line in the mud program, but if you cheapen the recipe too much, the sweep stops doing its job and the wellbore starts loading up with cuttings. You then spend hours circulating or make an extra wiper trip. The surface saving disappears below the rig floor.
I saw the same logic when evaluation services were bid out. The low price looked like a great peanut butter recipe on paper. In practice, the job had a junior crew, a less experienced engineer on remote support, and an older tool that required more logging passes. None of that cost appeared in the original quote.
Two years ago, I compared two bids for a wireline campaign. One was about 14 percent below the other. The lower bid's execution plan assumed the work could be done in nine days. The higher bid had a more experienced supervisor and better local support, but cost more. I chose the lower bid because I told myself we could manage the risk. After ten days, we were still logging, and the crew had burned through three different tool strings. The actual job took sixteen days. The invoice ended up higher than the quote we had rejected.
That is not an argument against competitive bidding. It is an argument for comparing total cost rather than sticker price.
First congress, second congress: the names I give to uncomfortable meetings
What is the first congress? I get asked that question a lot after using the phrase in a planning session. The first congress I refer to had nothing to do with the historic Continental Congress. It was the first meeting where our drilling, finance, and procurement teams sat together and defined success before signing a master service agreement. We wrote down which outcomes we expected, which risks were acceptable, and how downtime would be allocated.
The second congress happened after the 2020 layoffs and the first post-pandemic tenders. We looked at our old vendor scorecard and realized it was built for a world that no longer existed. The second congress forced us to add indicators that are not visible in a rate card: crew continuity, local decision autonomy, and the real cost of escalation.
Procurement checks I use now
Here is what the process looks like after that experience:
1. Calculate the cost of one non-productive day before comparing vendors. Your operations team already has an approximate rig and spread cost. Put that number in the same spreadsheet as the day rate. A day-rate difference of a few thousand dollars becomes insignificant when one avoidable stuck pipe event costs you two days.
2. Ask to meet the people who would actually run your job. If the provider cannot put you in touch with a specific crew or supervisor, it means they are planning to staff you from a pool at the last minute. That is not automatically bad, but it deserves to be priced as a risk.
3. Compare the support system, not only the logo. Schlumberger services include a substantial digital infrastructure, but the value depends on how the contract integrates with your workflows. If you cannot access clean data quickly, you will pay for it later in engineering time.
4. Separate price negotiation from quality evaluation. Negotiation should happen after you know the job is technically sound. If I negotiate before defining quality, I always end up buying something I don't fully understand.
Bottom line
The Schlumberger layoffs 2020 changed cost expectations across the oilfield services market. It also changed the distribution of experience. For buyers, that is a reason to be more rigorous, not a reason to default to a name or a low quote.
I still believe in competitive procurement. I do not recommend marrying one service company. But I do recommend taking the time to understand the experience embedded in your supply chain, measuring the total cost of a good job, and being suspicious of any recipe that makes peanut butter cheaper without telling you what was removed.