WELLYNX: Well Specialists with a Wealth of Expertise

An independent well engineering and well management company, Wellynx has been operating globally since 2011 to establish all-encompassing capabilities to span the full spectrum of services in the traditional petroleum upstream, CO₂ storage, hydrocarbon gas storage and geothermal sectors. A wide base of specific services today include drilling and completion engineering, well integrity management incorporating gas storage wells, production optimisation, and plug and abandonment.

Wellynx’s aim is very simple at its root: to serve customers offering only the very best resources available and with full access to what is an ever-deepening pool of knowledge. Crucially, adds Operations Director and co-Founder Dario Casciaro, “we retain an honest approach regarding what can be achieved and what we are capable of providing.”

By sticking closely to these founding principles and then harnessing the power of networking and sharing information, Wellynx has been able to significantly improve the quality of its service offering. In a very short space of time the company has notched up well over a century of worldwide success stories in almost all corners of the globe, undertaken by a team boasting deep experience and long careers across swathes of industries and territories.

HARD-FOUGHT SUCCESS

“We founded Wellynx to become a point of reference in the technical consulting business in the exploration and production (E&P) scenario,” Casciaro begins of the company’s esteemed background. “We are all engineers and all started out in the service industry, and almost all of us come from a well completion background, which is an area where we have particular strength.

“In 2011, we came together from our own various, disparate directions and took the leap to form this company without, it is fair to say, knowing exactly what we were doing initially,” Casciaro insists, with typical humility. “As a result, we stuck to what we knew how to do best at first – consulting – and after quite a few years of toil and hard work the business took off and began to expand into the Wellynx we have today.”

While tough, these were formative years, Casciaro goes on to qualify. “This period massively improved our approach to the client,” he details, “and prompted us to zero in on small- to medium-sized outfits, as opposed to those in the very tight, competitive corporate leagues. We set about developing a very wide expertise, which has been central to our growing in competitiveness in terms of winning key tenders, which were vital to giving us continuity and momentum and which allowed us to move forward with real positivity.”

Today, Casciaro tells us, Wellynx’s work is concentrated primarily in the Mediterranean area, but also branching into Mexico and Argentina, as well as continental Europe. “We have also recently established a base in the UK,” Casciaro reveals. “Not explicitly for that market, as such, but more to intercept a number of further international opportunities. It forms a key part of our ongoing internationalisation effort, aimed at increasing our footprint and reaching outside of continental Europe.

“The establishment of this UK business, moreover, extends our capability to provide cutting-edge well engineering services, and marks an important milestone in our global growth strategy.”

STRONG SKILLS EQUAL FAST GROWTH

Casciaro explains that the extremely high turnover of staff within the service industry was a major factor in Wellynx’s founders’ decision to set up shop themselves, and is a trend the company is very deliberately at pains to avoid. “We were seeing even the very best employees passed over in favour of much younger engineers, with a lot less experience, who were, essentially, cheaper to hire,” he relates. “It was something that all of us noted, and which definitely helped pushed us in the Wellynx direction.

“We very deliberately tried to use this experience to our advantage, though,” Casciaro continues. “What we saw was an opportunity to buck this trend, and it gave us the chance to bring on board the most experienced talent available; we simply wanted to work with the best people possible, and the nature of the industry allowed us to do so. A number of our ex-colleagues were out of work at the time, for instance, despite being some of the best in their respective fields. We were able to take these people whose capabilities and strengths we already knew extremely well, convince them to join us and allow us to put them to the best possible use for Wellynx.

“It was so illogical to see these talents sitting idle and not being utilised, and they too appreciate the change.”

Casciaro explains the stark differences between the professional situations, and how working for a service company can so often mean the creation of endless paperwork and an enormous amount of bureaucracy continually ongoing in the background. “This prevents an engineer from being able to fully concentrate to what the client requires,” he furthers, “whilst now, with us, they have so much more time to focus on the technical aspects of their work, the elements which really inspire and drive them, and apply their true talents in much more directed way.”

Wellynx’s progress and expansion, through those admittedly tough formative years, has been key to attracting this talent, Casciaro analyses. “The growth that we experienced made us a lot more credible to prospective employees,” he explains, “and a number of desirable people felt more confident to leave a job with a multinational to join a small company such as ours.” An appearance well inside the top-400 in the Financial Times’ prestigious ‘FT1000’, its third annual list of Europe’s fastest-growing companies, speaks volumes of the developments that Wellynx ’s operations director so modestly relates.

“Along the way,” he sums up, “we have been fortunate to have accrued a staff body comprising multi-disciplined, in-house technical specialists who have each honed their expertise in major E&P and service companies across both existing well interventions and new well delivery.”

TECHNOLOGY SUPPORTS GROWTH

At the beginning, Casciaro tells us, he and his fellow founders were content with just having enough work to keep the business operating. Today, of course, Wellynx far exceeds these modest aims, with a turnover in excess of €3 million, and putting it now in a position to make investments in leading-edge technology as the business scales up.

“We are becoming sizeable enough that we can implement a number of key new developments, such as a small ERP, but we are also now experimenting with mixed reality,” he adds, with understandable excitement. Mixed reality technology is a serious consideration, and is frequently referred to as the future of drilling. Increasingly, companies are finding innovative ways to capitalise on its benefits for subsurface studies, training and simulation, and for developing and improvising processes and products.

“It comprises a headset and camera which allows the consultant or engineer to conduct a Teams or Zoom meeting to enable people to remotely view operations as they progress,” Casciaro explains. “It is fully X-rated, and so can be brought onto drilling rigs, too. Another hugely important strand for us is business automation. We want to streamline administration as much as possible, going paperless on all the processes that we can.

“To accomplish all this we ensure that all profit that we make is directly reinvested back into improving and progressing as a company,” he states, as Wellynx continues to hone the very best of its capabilities and build on its sizeable developments to date. “We strive to be competitive in all spheres, and offer value for money in everything that we do,” Casciaro summates of the company’s primary concerns as it moves into its next phase.

“We will provide the best consultancy that we know how, backed by our wealth of expertise in the industry, at the best price. This is what will continue to set Wellynx apart, and provide the platform for even more of the growth that we have witnessed in our first decade.”