A Global Shortage of Tools for the Oil Industry

Kim Bennetts, an executive at a Texas-based natural gas company, traveled more than 7,000 miles this year to the heartland of China to look for the right rig to drill four wells in the Piceance Basin, a booming exploration area in western Colorado.

That is how far he needed to go to get the basic tools of the trade. The shortfall in drilling rigs has become so acute that some executives blame it for slowing down new exploration projects. “Sure, there’s been some hue and cry,” said Bennetts, the vice president for exploration and production at Presco. When the skeleton crew arrived, along with the rig, a local newspaper compared them to Chinese railroad laborers in the Rockies in the 19th century.

Rigzone