Deloro Stellite

Century of success

This year Deloro Stellite celebrates a century of successfully developing and manufacturing market-leading solutions that solve wear and corrosion problems, based on high performance cobalt (Stellite) and nickel (Deloro) alloys.

Today, the company is a group of engineering businesses operating across the globe, producing its own propriety-based alloys for customers in a range of industry sectors, including oil and gas exploration and refining.

Deloro Stellite produces metal alloys that have exceptional metallurgical and physical properties, and are ideally suited to solving wear problems, including heat, abrasion, corrosion, erosion, and galling. The company’s range of solutions and services, which includes castings, powder metallurgy, coating services, machining, consumables manufacturing, and equipment design and manufacture, helps customers to increase operational life, shorten downtime and maintain cost efficient operations.

Wayne Holden, director of sales and marketing for Belleville, Ontario, Canada, at the business elaborates: “From a components perspective, for clients in the oil and gas sector, our objective is to solve our customers’ high-temperature, high-wear and corrosion problems, through specialised and custom type developments for the exploration and refining sector. Throughout our history, our key strengths have been our ability to develop and provide a vast range of finished machine components utilising one of eight different processes in various Stellite materials. We currently have around 1250 employees operating in ten different locations in eight countries around the world.”

Renowned in the industry for its superior products, Deloro Stellite supplies its solutions to a vast number of customers around the globe, and focuses on building and maintaining long-term relationships with its clients: “Our main customers are the major players involved in the exploration side of the market, such as Schlumberger, Halliburton and Weatherford,” says Wayne. “Additionally, we undertake a range of refinery projects for clients such as Exxon and Shell.

“Our strength lies in producing customised components for individual customer requirements, “he continues. “the two key factors in all of our customers demands are abrasion and erosion. These have great effects on the overall operations of the clients, and by using our products they are able to remain operational for longer periods of time. If they were not using Stellite materials it is quite possible that they would have to pull out the drill string in half the time.”

Deloro Stellite provides customers in the oil and gas exploration and refining sector with a vast range of high-quality, cobalt-based finished machined components, and welding consumables. The company’s alloys, which include STELLITE 6, 12, 21 and 6B, are used in the manufacturing of logging while drilling (LWD) and measuring while drilling (MWD) tools. Critical components such as rotors and stators, centralizers, wear sleeves and erosion inserts, supplied by Deloro Stellite result in efficient, durable, extremely reliable long lasting cast and finished machine parts. Other critical parts such as fishing heads, filter screens, sucker rod couplings and subsurface safety valves are provided to exact and tight tolerances.

Additionally, for refining operations, the company manufactures feed injector and regeneration nozzles, thermowells, valve trims, fluidised cat cracking units, and pump castings and internals.

Danie De Wet, vice president technology and business development elaborates: “There are two key areas that we supply for the oil and gas industry – both materials and finished components. Clients will come to us with the need for highly wear resistant components, which help them avoid inaccuracy on their positioning and drilling. The components that we manufacture protect all of the electronics that carry out the measurements when drilling, because if there is any wear on these parts then there is a significant loss in drilling accuracy.”

Mauro Bianchi, global sales director for the Hard Facing Alloys Division adds: “Deloro Stellite has a further unique advantage in this market, as it is the only company worldwide capable of producing the full product range of products under one roof. These include castings (investment casting , sand, resin shell, centrifugal) as well as welding consumables (continuous casting rods, electrodes, wires, powders, solid wire, PM powders, PM parts.)”

In order to retain its market-leading position, Deloro Stellite places considerable emphasis on continuous development: “It is very important for us, and will become increasingly so as oil and gas becomes more and more difficult to find, and the environments become ever harsher,” Wayne says. “As this trend continues it will be more important to work with our major clients, such as Schlumberger and Halliburton, to fully understand what the requirements will be, and how we can develop components suitable for those demands.

“The changing environments will put further demands on the development processes themselves, although this is something that we are currently working towards,” he continues. “We are streamlining our operations, and adding additional equipment to give us a more rapid product development capability. Previously, it may have taken us two to three months to develop a product for a client, whereas after streamlining it could take us around nine or ten days, so we are going to compress our development cycle considerably.”

Wayne believes that the current state of the industry, together with the company’s vision, will allow it to continue to expand: “As best as we can tell, the oil and gas sector is strong at the moment, we have experienced good growth in recent years and we are cautiously confident in moving forwards. Although we may not see the same levels of growth as in previous years, we believe that there will certainly be opportunities to expand. The key challenge will be to continue to work with our customers to meet their expectations regarding products and deliveries.

“The future opportunities are looking very positive. We expect to grow our business by aligning ourselves with our key customers, such as Schlumberger, Halliburton and Weatherford, and by making sure our engineering teams and development personnel are working together to produce specialised alloys, and make components that meet, or exceed the requirements in terms of wear,” Wayne concludes.

Deloro Stellite

Industry: Wear resistant, alloy based materials