What Does Schlumberger Company Do? Answers About SLB and HiWAY

I've been handling completion service orders for eight years. In 2017, my first year, I made the classic mistake of assuming the service company's default frac design was already optimized for our well. It wasn't. Since then, I've personally made (and documented) 14 significant mistakes, totaling roughly $2.3 million in wasted budget. Now I maintain our team's pre-job checklist, so this FAQ is not from a brochure. It's from the side of the desk where the invoices get challenged.

What Does Schlumberger Company Do?

The short answer: they provide oilfield services and technology to the companies that actually produce oil and gas. They don't own reserves. They don't usually take the commodity price risk. They sell the expertise, equipment, and software that help E&P operators drill wells, evaluate formations, complete them, and optimize production.

SLB (the brand they've used since 2022) is probably the closest thing the service industry has to a global technology player. I've watched their equipment go from basic logging units to fully connected digital platforms. The scope is broad, and the budgets are bigger than most people expect. That's why I keep a checklist before every service contract.

Is Schlumberger an Oil Company?

No. This is one of the most common confusions. A company like ExxonMobil or Shell explores, drills, owns reserves, and sells produced hydrocarbons. Schlumberger doesn't do that. It's a service company. If you call to ask if they can sell you a gas field, they'll politely redirect you to an operator. In B2B terms, they're the vendor; the operator is the client.

This matters because people evaluate Schlumberger like it's an E&P company. That's like comparing a printing press manufacturer with a newspaper. They're both in media, but their economics are different.

What Is Schlumberger HiWAY?

HiWAY is SLB's channel fracturing service. Instead of pumping a continuous full volume of proppant at one concentration the way a conventional frac job does, HiWAY sends pulses of proppant and fiber-laden fluid down the well. The pulses create proppant pillars inside the fracture. Between those pillars, open channels stay connected. The pillars support the rock; the channels carry the hydrocarbons back to the wellbore.

The result, in theory, is a more conductive fracture with less proppant and less water.

According to SLB's published material (slb.com), HiWAY has been used in thousands of stages globally. The exact production uplift depends on geology, completion design, and how the offset wells performed.

If you're in completions, HiWAY is not just a new frac technique. It changes the economics: less proppant, less fluid, faster cleanup, and potentially higher effective fracture conductivity. But it also changes operational risk. That's where most of my mistakes have happened.

HiWAY vs Conventional Fracturing: Which Is Actually Better?

The conventional wisdom is that the premium service should outperform the base case. Everything I'd read said HiWAY gives better production. In practice, for our specific low-permeability, water-sensitive wells, the extra cost made sense on some stages and didn't on others.

In March 2023, we had a stage screenout on a conventional design we picked to save money. The cleanout cost more than the HiWAY premium. That changed how I think about completion technology comparisons.

I don't have hard data on industry-wide production uplift from HiWAY. What I can say anecdotally is that 'better' depends on your definition. If you compare only first-month oil production, HiWAY often wins. If you compare fully allocated cost per barrel from a multi-well pad, sometimes a simpler design wins. That's not an anti-HiWAY statement. It's a warning against comparing only the line item that makes a case look good.

One thing I wish I had tracked more carefully is the 'white stats' behind the claims. I don't mean fake numbers. I mean the white-paper statistics that get quoted without baseline context. A 30% uplift sounds great until you learn the offset well was choked back for mechanical reasons.

What Does Schlumberger HiWAY Cost?

If you ask for an exact price on HiWAY, I can't give you a universal figure. Don't hold me to this, but from the proposals I've reviewed in the last two years, a HiWAY stage usually carries a premium of 15-35% over a conventional engineered stage in the same area. The variance is huge because of depth, temperature, expected treating pressure, proppant logistics, and how many days the frac spread will sit on location.

But the unit cost per stage is only the starting point. The total cost thinking is where the real difference shows up. A 'more expensive' HiWAY job can be cheaper if it reduces:

• Water volumes, which means fewer trucks and less disposal cost.
• Proppant volumes, which means less supply-chain pressure and less cost.
• Cleanout risk, which means less rig time.
• Fracture cleanup time, which means faster flowback and earlier production.
• Conductivity damage over the life of the well.

The $500 quote versus $800 example applies everywhere in oilfield services. I once watched a team approve a cheaper conventional design and then spend weeks dealing with screenouts and slow flowback. The 'cheap' job ended up costing more than the HiWAY bid we submitted.

What Should I Ask Before Approving a HiWAY Job?

After the $2.3 million worth of mistakes I've documented over the years, I made a pre-check list. If you're an operator evaluating HiWAY, ask these questions before anyone signs a service order:

1. Do we have offset wells that used channel fracturing and conventional fracturing in the same formation?
2. What was the actual proppant concentration, pump schedule, and fluid system on those offset wells?
3. What diagnostics will prove the channels stayed open? Microseismic, tracer logs, pressure falloff, or production logs?
4. What's the contingency if the well screens out mid-stage? Who pays for extra materials?
5. What are the water-source and disposal costs? Include them in the comparison.
6. Does 'white stats' in the proposal match the range of outcomes in the field, or only the median of the best wells?

This last one came from my friend Trevor, a completions engineer who spent a decade on service company pads before moving to an operator. He calls it the 'white vs magic' test: you can show a client the white-paper stats and sell the magic of a perfect job. But the budget should be based on the realistic range, not the magic point. Trevor watched too many operators get burned by choosing a service based on a single figure in a glossy PDF.

Is HiWAY the Reason Schlumberger Is Better Than Other Service Companies?

I'm not going to claim HiWAY makes SLB better than Halliburton or Baker Hughes. I've seen good and bad jobs from every major service company. What Schlumberger does differently, in my experience, is invest heavily in modeling software and integrated workflows. HiWAY is a good example: it's not just a pumping service; it's a design platform combined with a specialized pumping schedule. That integration can be hard to replicate.

But 'better' should be measured in your well's economics, not in brand prestige. I've seen conventional plug-and-perf completions outperform channel fracturing when the entire system wasn't designed consistently. I've also seen HiWAY save an operator from an impossible high-water-cut situation. There is no universal winner. There is only the service that fits your formation, your risk tolerance, and your total budget.

Final question: What does Schlumberger do today that should matter to you?

Today, SLB operates in more than 100 countries and covers drilling, reservoir characterization, completions, production, and digital solutions. If a well needs a wireline truck, a drill plan, a mud logger, a formation tester, a frac spread, or a production optimization platform, Schlumberger can be involved in almost any part of it. HiWAY is one of their completions technologies, but it's not the whole company.

The biggest misconception I see in procurement is treating Schlumberger as just another equipment vendor. They're a technology integrator. That's valuable, but it also means you have to manage scope carefully. You're not buying a widget; you're buying a service outcome, and the contract details determine whether you get the outcome or just the widget.

As of Q4 2024, this is still how I view it. The market changes fast, so verify current service offerings and pricing before making a budget decision. I'm not going to promise any technology, including HiWAY, will increase your production. But I can promise that if you only compare the per-stage price, you're missing the bigger cost story.