From the President/CEO: Through tough times, IADC will maintain focus on safety, crew competence, cost reductions

By Stephen Colville, IADC President/CEO

Our industry is facing the most difficult of times. Internally within your companies, shareholders, executive boards and senior leadership are asking you to do more with less. Outside, customers are beating you over the head on costs and performance metrics, while competitors are nipping at your heels and regulators continue to crack the safety whip.

It is in the most difficult of times that we turn to our family for support. At IADC, we are the drilling contractor family that comes together in tough times to continue to make things better. Unfortunately, acute pain has a way of making us focus only on the present. But it is critical that we maintain perspective and continue to work on shaping, preparing and securing a better future for our industry, even as we deal with the here and now.

IADC is doing both, and our goals are unchanged. For the longer term, we continue our goal of striving to catalyze improved performance. While the association cannot enforce change with regard to oil and gas market prices, we do continue to fight in your corner on some key fronts.

Right now, we are completely focused on reducing and driving out costs, improving crew competence and maintaining safety.

The introduction of some key initiatives to market, like WellSharp, KSAs and the Workforce Attraction and Development Initiative, demonstrate our collective commitment to these goals.

Just as importantly, we will be speaking up, loudly, on your behalf. While we have always been the voice of the drilling industry, we have often struggled to be heard. That is changing, with a new campaign that we have launched, called Step Up and Step Out.

We will be speaking up loudly and clearly so nobody can fail to hear us, and nobody can mistake what we are saying. We shall be speaking up to obtain and maintain our freedom to operate – to continue to undertake safe, clean and efficient drilling operations in a manner that is sensible, practical and cost effective.

We shall be speaking up to secure enabling regulation, defined for us as regulation that enables our industry to function in the way that we know is best, and for regulation that is fit for purpose, clearly understandable and consistently applied. And we shall be speaking up to influence governments, shaping their legislation and policymaking. This work began several years ago, and we stepped up our politics, government and regulatory affairs work even further with the recent addition of IADC’s powerful new advocate in Washington, D.C., Liz Craddock, whose background and experience in politics will help ensure we have a seat at the table with regulators (see Page 104).

Our Operational Integrity and Policy, Government and Regulatory Affairs activities have begun to hum like a well-oiled machine. The last strategic piece toward raising IADC’s operational effectiveness is now taking shape and lies in the world of strategic communications.

Over the next six months, we will be focusing on establishing a briefing book that will pull together our positions and messaging around core issues and topics and will be available as a resource to industry; and we will build a constituency of highly capable and effective ambassadors and advocates for the drilling industry.

We will build an online education center to grow awareness about the critical role of our industry, providing the proper details and information for the outside public to understand what we do and how we do it; and we will build our online strategic engagement platform to provide information, tools and communications to both our internal and external stakeholders.

It is a lot of work to accomplish in a short period of time, and yet critical to the success of our association’s efforts to champion the drilling industry. IADC is certainly up to the challenge.

As always, the work is not possible without the strong support and active participation of our members. I do believe that by working together, we can and do make things better for our industry, to the benefit of all.