Harvie Andre, a globetrotting veteran of four decades in the intertwined worlds of industry and politics, sees clear signs on the supply and demand sides of energy markets alike. He says the numbers in oil price forecasts are guaranteed to be wrong. But he predicts two trends. “We’re wedded to the petroleum economy for quite a while.” And, “we’re going to see a recovery in energy prices. It won’t be a long thing. It won’t be as slow as it was in the 1990s.”

On the energy supply side as an engineer and president of Wenzel Downhole Tools Ltd., Andre leads 200 employees in Edmonton, Calgary, Texas, Wyoming and Oklahoma who prove Alberta technology has international legs. His drilling equipment firm’s 2008 foreign sales grew by 70 per cent, helping to power a 32 per cent revenue increase and a five-fold leap in net earnings compared to the previous year.

On the energy demand side, the former Conservative Member of Parliament and cabinet minister has a seat on an international advisory committee to Wuhan, a city of nine million in central China halfway between Hong Kong and Beijing. There Andre sees enduring need – and potentially surging hunger – for the end products of his firm’s machines. Energy consumption growth, for both personal and industrial use, is too strong to stay bottled up for long by a Wall Street financial crisis.

“The changes are so spectacular that every time I see what they’re doing, it’s just mind-boggling.” Andre marvels at a revolutionary pace of economic change in China, such as the transformation, in just 36 months, of a swampy pasture into a Wuhan industrial park making Hondas by the hundreds of thousands.

Far from all the vehicles are for export to North America or Japan. “There were roads everywhere there were no roads three years before. It makes Calgary look slow. It just blows you away,” Andre reports.

“Man, when they move, they move,” he adds. He tells how Wuhan carried out – also in less than three years – a recommendation by its international advisory group to turn a disused strip of tumbledown river bank buildings into an inner-city park.

Andre is not alone in having wide horizons that inspire higher spirits than the glum current norm for supply and service firms dedicated solely to oil and nat-ural gas fields in Western Canada. “To have something positive going on in this environment is pretty exciting,” says Xtreme Coil Drilling Corp. president Rod Uchytil.

International markets for Alberta expertise and technology buoy up his 345-employee firm amid a drop in Canadian drilling this year, brought on by a natural gas price low, to less than half the 20,000-plus wells chalked up in the 2004-06 high. “It’s pretty rare for the same cycles to occur everywhere in the world at the same time,” Uchytil says.

Xtreme won the new exporter trophy at the inaugural Alberta Export Awards, a spring event held in Edmonton by the province’s chapter of the Canadian Manufacturers and Exporters. At the same time, the Peters & Co. energy investment boutique gave a “sector outperform” recommendation to the four-year-old company’s shares.

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