Q’max

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There are some companies that break the mould, some that squeeze into it, and some that mould themselves.

Q’max is not a ‘one-size fits all’ company. In fact the lengths the Q’max team go to in order to fit their client’s needs are quite startling.

The IRJ caught up with Mr Reginald Northcott, Q’max President and co-Founding Partner, to hear how ‘the largest Canadian mud company operating internationally’ always manages to fit the bill.

Q’max was founded in 1993, by five partners including Northcott.

“Four of the five original partners remain today, including Tony Davis and Bill Hans here at our corporate office in Calgary, and Bob Hans working from our Latin American office in Quito Ecuador” Northcott says.

“We enjoyed working together and in 1993 we felt the time was right to begin a new company with a focus on the customer. This focus has developed into an engrained belief that the reason for our existence is to create value for our customers. At that time we felt our competitors in the industry had moved to a more inward focus as a result of the downsizing and difficult times of the 1980’s and early 1990’s.”

In pursuing this common belief, the varied, perfect blend of the founders’ backgrounds allowed Q’max a true ‘experience money can’t buy’ beginning.

“As individuals we brought complimentary skill sets to the partnership including international experience. We felt a need to be seen as technically strong against our largest competitors and shared the strong belief that we were establishing Q’max in order to grow our customers. We agreed we would do this through the application of our deliverables in our core business, which was drilling fluids supply and management” Northcott says.

“Our mission is to make a difference in the drilling process. We believe that by successfully growing our customers, they will grow Q’max, which in turn allows us to grow our people and suppliers. This is really the essence of the growth partnering concept we began marketing. It continues today as our primary focal point” Northcott says.

A worldwide range

“Today we’re approaching 1100 personnel with expertise centred around our three holistically integrated core businesses-drilling fluids, solids control, and environmental solutions. Within the scope of our businesses we have specialists who focus on solutions and technologies to address such issues as reservoir damage, bore hole stability, high temperature and high pressure fluid design, rapid penetration fluid systems, deep water fluid design, and other specialist technologies for heavy oil and coal bed methane” Northcott says, and this merely touches upon the Q’max international reach of today.

The company wasted no time in getting to work after its inception. In fact, one month after  beginning in Western Canada, Qmax was awarded its first work with Home Oil and Canadian Hunter Northcott explains. By 1995 Q’max enjoyed “a major alliance with Shell Canada and Pan Canadian Petroleum.”

“From there our first long-term international work developed in Ecuador in a partnership with a Canadian operator called Pacalta Resources. From that international starting point expansion began into Mexico in 2000. We also moved offshore in Eastern Canada with the Husky White Rose Project in 2002 and continued expansion into Peru in that same year, then a year later into Colombia in 2003, then India and the United States markets in 2006” he explains.

The Husky White Rose Project was a big step for Q’max.

“This was our first major offshore project so it required the establishing of facilities there. It was also a significant reservoir access challenge for which we seconded one of our specialists here to Husky to work on their reservoir team under a confidentiality agreement for several months” Northcott says.

“We presently operate onshore and offshore in seven countries. Within Mexico – our largest market- in all of the oil and gas producing regions we’re one of the largest drilling fluid providers at the present time. We’ve also worked on projects in places such as Kazakhstan and the Republic of Georgia, and Greenland too. The reason we are now working in the countries we’re in is primarily because our customers invited us there or one or more of our innovative technologies have found application there.”

Past project success
The Q’max approach to each and every one of these projects is unique. Their customer-centric focus plays out all over the world, each time in a wholly individual manner.

The Pacalta Project in Ecuador is a fine example of this.

“They were faced with a number of serious drilling issues which were mostly caused by borehole instability and were ultimately costing them a lot of money in the time spent on each of the wells they were drilling. They were two or three times longer than necessary so they invited us to create a drilling fluids solution because they felt issues they had were drilling fluid-related, so we did. We changed the design of the drilling fluid. It was a water-based system that we designed to counter the borehole stability issues they were experiencing” Northcott says.

“It worked very well and helped reduce drilling cost by over 60%. It proved to be an environmental solution for them as well because the design of the fluid was essentially based around a fertiliser component so we could re-vegetate the well site after we finished the drilling operations.”

The Camisea Project in Peru, a joint venture between Plus Petrol (Argentina) and Hunt Oil (U.S.A) offered up plenty of challenges too.

“This was really a complex drilling situation where a number of issues confronted us. Firstly there was the drilling of the wells themselves. The only access was by air and water. A prior operator in the region had determined that oil-based mud’s would be the only way of drilling there and we were challenged by Plus Petrol to design a water-based system that would work and prevent borehole instability but also allow good reservoir access. We were successful in doing that, and it was also an environmental challenge because it was in an environment ally sensitive area of South Eastern Peru that I believe is a world heritage site” Northcott says.
“It was an extremely difficult logistics project too as all of the material we needed had to be shipped from Houston, up the Amazon river, offloaded on to barges and down to the helicopter site, then on to the final drilling location.”

A future in customer intimacy
“As far as future areas go, they will be wherever our clients see a need for profit improvement and our technical innovations and applications, where our expertise can provide a financial advantage for them” Northcott says.

“We believe each client and each job is unique, therefore each solution must be complete and unique accordingly. Our value discipline of customer intimacy compliments this complex systems architecture. In all cases we strive to gain superior knowledge of our customers processes and how best to apply our deliverables to create new value for them.”

As Q’max grows both geographically and strategically in the coming months and years, their reason for being remains strong: The Customer.

“Our vision is to become the go-to company for customers, for employees and for suppliers” Northcott says.

“I think it’s important to understand that a real key success factor for our customers is drilling quality wells, and a key success factor in drilling quality wells is drilling fluid design and execution.”

And it is also important to understand that at Q’max, their “real key success factor” is, has, and always will be to do their utmost for each and every individual customer.

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