Geologist and entrepreneur Craig Lindsay is used to rolling with the punches.
Mr Lindsay’s resilience may be the reason the geoscience consultancy he founded in 2010 is still around after one of the worst downturns to have bared its fangs.
At one point, the situation looked bleak, but now there is plenty to be cheerful about at Core Specialist Services (CSS), whose bread and butter is analysing rock samples to help oil companies calculate the economics of a reservoir.
CSS is close to defying the odds by securing a contract worth about £50,000 with Aker BP for managing a programme of laboratory tests.
Mr Lindsay admitted he never thought CSS would work for a company like Aker BP, as large operators have their own specialists.
And CSS has added another string to its bow by hosting a Geotek X-ray scanner at its base in Bridge of Don since March, essentially turning the office into a laboratory.
The presence of this expensive piece of kit is creating a lot of excitement in CSS’s dog-friendly office.
Mr Lindsay expects it to generate extra revenue and help CSS get a “foot in the door” with bigger clients.
Mr Lindsay said: “Before we were a consultancy – it was just four guys sitting at desks behind computers. Now we’ve got a more tangible piece of equipment.”
And there’s more good news. In April, a joint industry project formed by Statoil, ConocoPhillips, OMV, AkerBP and Faroe Petroleum agreed to stump up funds worth £1.3 million for the development of a hydrophilic probe.
CSS is involved in the development of the tool, which is the brainchild of Norwegian reservoir engineer Trond Rolfsvaag.
CSS has an equity stake in Mr Rolfsvaag’s firm, simply called Hydrophilic, and previously facilitated funding via the Oil and Gas Innovation Centre for a successful proof of concept test at Strathclyde University.
Mr Lindsay said the tool would be a “huge breakthrough for well logging technology”.
It can measure the free water level in a reservoir, in other words, the point where the oil stops and the water starts.
“The free water level is hidden and you are often left guessing, but with this tool we can measure that point,” Mr Lindsay said. “That number is important as it is used to calculate the volume of oil.
“That could be very important in the North Sea, where operators are looking to develop small pools.
“Knowing that number could make the difference between a project being sanctioned or not.”
Further testing at Strathclyde University is planned, which will involve picking the material for the final version of the tool.
In an ideal world, the tool would prove its worth and get snapped up by a tier one contractor. “At that point it would be ‘bingo’, but that’s far away,” said Mr Lindsay.
All looks rosy, but that wasn’t always the case.
CSS was “really struggling” last year, with revenues down about 75% compared to pre-downturn levels.
The Chester native said: “The last few years were very tough. We were not breaking even. We were in survival mode.
“We managed to stay in business through a lot of hard work by the team here.”
But if Mr Lindsay needed a living example of someone digging in, he had only to look in the mirror.
“It was not a smooth start,” he said of his first great leap into business ownership. “I handed my notice in then found out I had cancer.
“Luckily I had an operation and it was removed.
“So far so good – it’s been all fine since then, but the future looked quite uncertain for a time.”
Despite the health scare, Mr Lindsay, who has lived in the north-east since the early 1980s, recalls having a fairly “soft landing” with his fledgling business.
“What I did was fairly niche and the company I worked for did not bring in anyone to replace me,” he said.
“They subcontracted and kept using me. Then I cut out the middle man and dealt with clients directly.”
Mr Lindsay said he was a late-starter to entrepreneurship, getting off the launchpad while in his 50s.
He said going it alone was the “best thing” he ever did.
At first, he did not intend to hire anyone – CSS was envisaged as a one man band when he started out.
He is now one of four based in Bridge of Don following the firm’s move from Banchory last year.
He said: “I got really busy. After two or three years I found I was working 12-plus hours a day, seven days a week.
“I wasn’t keeping up. Luckily I was able to recruit people from companies I worked for previously.
“I worked at a subsurface reservoir consultancy from 2001-10 and was in a role that meant I was running my part of the show myself.
“The banking crisis in 2007-08 led to a downturn in the business. I was proactive in bringing in work. A lot of other people were not as active. They were doing nothing for weeks and months on end.
“I thought, ‘if I can do this for a company I can do it for myself’, so I decided to go for it.”
Mr Lindsay said CSS essentially “sat between the operator and the lab”.
They take the lab data and put it into a digestible format, allowing operators to use it immediately and with confidence.
Mr Lindsay said core testing methods had improved vastly since the 1980s and 90s, meaning bad data can be weeded out.
As a result, operators should be able to better calculate the volume of oil in reservoirs and the speed with which it can be recovered.
With CSS expecting to be in the black this year, Mr Lindsay’s thoughts are again turning to international expansion, with the Middle East and Far East on the horizon.
“We’ve done a lot of work in Africa and Europe, but there are lot of areas where we’ve not done any work,” he said.
“We’ve only scratched the surface of what’s possible.”
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