As the Canadian rig fleet languished at employment rates below 50 per cent and cut workers’ wages, Peters analysts predicted that more than half of Xtreme’s equipment would stay busy with long-term contracts. The secret of the firm’s success is a breakthrough into a Mexican haven of robust drilling.

State-owned Petróleos Mexicanos is scrambling to replace its aging mainstay Cantarell oilfield offshore in the Gulf of Mexico, where First Energy Capital Corp. estimates production has dropped by 63 per cent to 740,000 barrels a day from a two-million-barrel peak hit in 2004. The replacement is a field on land called Chicontepec where Pemex has a US$37.5-billion development plan for the next 20 years. Xtreme’s made-in-Alberta system for rapidly drilling multiple deep and angled wells into relatively small targets in complex geology fits the new area’s conditions.

While Andre’s Wenzel Downhole sells or rents extra-tough drilling motors and associated gear protected by 19 patents, Uchytil’s Xtreme exports a full-service package including crews to operate its rigs. At plants in Edmonton and nearby Nisku, both firms manufacture equipment that boasts an edge over performance averages in the Canadian drilling fleet and capabilities far in advance of foreign competition.

International work comes naturally to Uchytil. He is an Albertan, trained by the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology in Calgary. But he made his first career with the global Schlumberger oilfield services network. He learned to speak Spanish during years in Venezuela and Mexico. His wife, Iris, is Venezuelan.

Relationships count in international markets, Uchytil says. It helps, when promoting technology to Pemex executives, to be the rare exporter who needs no translators, delivers a presentation in the customers’ language and shows familiarity with their industry, Uchytil says.

The human element plays a role in international business, Andre agrees. Few are born to it. His 1972-93 stretch in Parliament steeped him in political and bureaucratic ways encountered everywhere, often infuriating brisk entrepreneurs used to dealing with professional peers.

In Alberta or Texas, oilfield machine or service orders are negotiated and filled in as little as a week, sometimes for one well at a time. “The folks here can go from zero to full speed in short order – and the reverse as well,” Andre says.

On export markets, “it takes longer. A lot of the customers are state oil companies. They don’t have the same agility the oil patch has in North America. If you deal internationally, you’re going to have to learn that governments are slower. There’s good reason for that,” Andre says.

“It’s not that they’re lazy. In governments, the reward for success is moderate. The penalty for failure is huge. If you get tagged with making a serious error, you’re done. It’s true at the bureaucratic level. It’s true at the political level.”

Government culture includes extreme reluctance to take risks by private business standards and insistence on working through committees and proper channels. “You try to avoid making mistakes. You avoid making decisions or make sure many are involved,” Andre reports in recalling his education in Ottawa. In international business, it helps to be a graduate of a hard school.

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