semi_infinite and jbog are better resources for your questions. It’s definitely not a penny wise, pound foolish situation. The short story is that the reasons behind relationships between E&P companies and oilfield service companies is no different than any other business. The guys that make Oreo cookies don’t make the boxes or the machines to put the cookies in the box or the trucks to get them to market.
With respect to a production company obtaining a service from Superior versus SLB, the latter has a tendency to “gold plate” services and try to tie on additional services or jobs in order to support their higher overhead. Obviously, the producer doesn’t care so they’ll go with the lower cost provider unless SLB can demonstrate some over-riding advantage. In the past few years I think they’ve lost that ability- largely because I suspect resources such as the Permian basin don’t require highly specialized approaches and SLB has not supported lower cost services and tools to compete in such domains (I’ll defer to semi_inf on the 1st part. I know the 2nd part is true.).
With regard to pumping horsepower: in the 200x’s I frequently heard comments in SLB about how “any mom and pop company with a few million $ could operate a pumping fleet”. In places where power, transportation and water are readily available, offering an advantage over mom and pop is more difficult for higher overhead providers. Water is a problem in the Permian but that’s a business for yet a different set of service providers and I suspect the margins are very tight so producers are happy with the situation.
I frequently see HAL pumping trucks rumbling around the Delaware. I see smaller operator pumpers as well but they’re not as distinctive. I’ve never seen a SLB truck bigger than a pickup or personnel shuttle van. They have field stations in surrounding towns but I don’t know how they’re making money. Of the big field service providers, I think HAL is much more flexible and nimble vs SLB
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