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Drilling Specialties

Drilling Specialties Company, of Bartlesville, Oklahoma, was a Phillips Petroleum subsidiary that sold Flosal, an asbestos additive for oil well drilling mud that Union Carbide's papers describe as Johns-Manville's product. Those papers treat the company as the main competitor to Union Carbide's own drilling-mud asbestos, and in 1981 the company wrote to OSHA arguing that the asbestos standard was too broad for drilling sites. A company of the same name was a defendant in Texas-law asbestos litigation decided in Delaware in 2020.

Draft. The history on this page was written from the documents in our library and has not yet been reviewed by a person.

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Flosal and the drilling-mud market

A Drilling Specialties brochure, attached to a 1976 letter in the Union Carbide files, says the company introduced Flosal to the drilling industry in 1964 as a suspending agent for drilling mud.6 The company's 1981 letter to OSHA says chrysotile asbestos had been used as a drilling-mud additive since the early 1960s because it let wells be drilled faster and more cheaply.4 Our library holds one of the company's advertisements for Flosal, headed as a drilling mud asbestos additive and showing a worker emptying a bag at a mixing table.78

Union Carbide entered this market in 1969, when its distributor Montello, Inc. began selling Union Carbide's Calidria asbestos to drilling companies.9 A 1974 Union Carbide report says one of the two products chosen, Visbestos, was meant to compete with Flosal.9 The same report says that in the last half of 1973 Drilling Specialties brought out a new version of Flosal that was said to be as good as Union Carbide's premium Supervisbestos, and that testing by Montello and customers' laboratories found "considerable merit to the claim."9 A 1975 Union Carbide table of competing products lists Flosal under Drilling Specialties, with Johns-Manville in parentheses.3

A 1980 Union Carbide memo summarizing a meeting with Montello describes Drilling Specialties, which it calls DRISCO, as a subsidiary of Phillips Petroleum and "the sole distributor for J-M's Flosal." The memo says DRISCO was Montello's only competitor in drilling-mud asbestos, that it had kept a good market share "because of Phillips' influence," and that it had recently begun advertising more openly. It adds that the word "asbestos" was not used in the company's advertisement.1 Kenneth N. Campbell of Montello made the same point in a 1976 letter to Union Carbide about a new Flosal flyer, asking in a postscript whether Drilling Specialties was on "thin ice" for not mentioning asbestos in it.6

In 1982, after Johns-Manville announced its Chapter 11 filing, a Union Carbide salesman reported on a phone inquiry from Phillips Petroleum. According to his report, Phillips's business manager for extracted chemicals, who was responsible for Drilling Specialties, was asking other asbestos suppliers about becoming a second, or later a main, source of fiber in case Johns-Manville could not supply it. The report says Flosal was Phillips's trade name, so the company could put any supplier's asbestos in its bag.10

Dust counts, OSHA and the industry association

Drilling Specialties staff attended Johns-Manville's asbestos and health meetings for customers in Dallas and Houston in September 1974.11 The company appears in a list of companies on the Asbestos Information Association's 1976 letter sending industry comments to OSHA on the proposed asbestos standard, and a 1980 membership list of the association names it as a regular member.212

A 1973 Union Carbide call report on Montello records a rumor that Drilling Specialties had put out letters claiming an "OSHA Approved" asbestos; Montello had not been able to obtain a copy.13 In April 1977 Harrison B. Rhodes of Union Carbide wrote to Jim Reese of Johns-Manville about fiber counts at drilling rigs. Rhodes wrote that in one Union Carbide test, the Flosal counts during dumping were "not much different" from Super Visbestos, and he cautioned Reese to be very sure of any extremely low counts given to OSHA. He also called it only one test with possible complications that "precludes reliable conclusions," and said he hoped Drilling Specialties would release its own numbers.14

Among the attachments to the 1980 Union Carbide memo is an article on recommended work practices for handling Flosal, which it describes as produced by Drilling Specialties' Technical Services Division. The article says field tests indicated that following those practices should keep a worker's time-weighted average exposure below 0.1 fibers per cubic centimeter.1 In its 1981 letter to Thorne Auchter, the Assistant Secretary of Labor in charge of OSHA, Drilling Specialties wrote that it had developed a way of formulating Flosal with water to reduce the release of fibers, and that monitoring at drilling sites, counted by an independent laboratory, showed exposures consistently below the 2 fibers per cubic centimeter limit and no higher than 0.1 on an 8-hour average. The letter argued that the standard was too broad for drilling sites, being suited to enclosed, fixed worksites, and that its medical examination, monitoring and recordkeeping rules were unnecessary and impractical there, given a transient work force and short stays at each well.4

A 1983 draft affidavit by B. J. Pigg of the Asbestos Information Association, opposing OSHA's emergency temporary asbestos standard, cites an affidavit of Frank J. Shell for the statement that a large drilling contractor cancelled all further deliveries from Drilling Specialties immediately after the standard was announced. The draft says Texas and Louisiana were the company's first and third marketing areas.15 Shell is listed as the company's technical director in 1974 and as its manager of technical services in 1980.211

Litigation

Shaw v. American Friction was a Texas-law asbestos case brought in Delaware. The Delaware Supreme Court's 2020 decision lists among the defendants Drilling Specialties Company, LLC, "individually as successor in interest to Chevron Phillips Chemical Company, LP." That description comes from the caption and the list of parties, as the parties named them; the court made no finding on it. The appeal concerned the trial court's refusal to delay the trial, not the merits of any claim against the company.5

References

  1. J. L. Myers to B. L. Ingalls, H. B. Rhodes and J. E. Walsh: Summary of September 30, 1980 Meeting with Montello (UC-720), pp. 3, 8
  2. Asbestos Information Association/North America List of Member Companies, 1980 (UC-4878), p. 3
  3. W. C. Thurber Table of UCC Asbestos Products by Market and Competitive Products, 1975 (UC-370), p. 1
  4. Drilling Specialties Company to Thorne Auchter (OSHA) on Asbestos in Drilling Muds and the OSHA Asbestos Standard, 1981 (UC-3889), p. 1
  5. Shaw v. American Friction (In re Asbestos Litigation, Del. 2020)
  6. Kenneth N. Campbell (Montello, Inc.) to John Myers on Competitor Flosal Flyer and Super Visbestos, 1976, with Drilling Specialties 'New Flosal' Brochure (UC-710), pp. 1–2
  7. Advertisement: FLOSAL drilling mud asbestos additive (Drilling Specialties Company), ACL Doc 20875
  8. Flosal (Drilling Specialties), product page
  9. H. B. Rhodes, 'Supervisbestos: A Review of Product Quality Trends and Competitive Market Position,' 1974 (UC-1495), pp. 3, 6
  10. J. E. Walsh Customer Call Reports on Phillips Petroleum Company, Bartlesville, Oklahoma (UC-932), p. 1
  11. Johns-Manville Corporation, A Condensation of Environmental Facts on Asbestos and Health, with Customer Seminar Attendee Lists, 1974 (AIA-112), pp. 56, 59
  12. R. H. Hereness (AIA) to OSHA Docket Officer, Docket H-033, Transmitting Industry Comments on the Proposed Asbestos Standard, 1976 (AIA-115), p. 2
  13. H. B. Rhodes Report of Call on Montello, Inc. (Sand Springs, Oklahoma), 1973 (UC-310)
  14. Harrison B. Rhodes to Jim Reese (Johns-Manville) on Fiber Count Data in Drilling Operations and OSHA, April 4, 1977 (UC-1505), pp. 1–2
  15. Draft Affidavit of B. J. Pigg (AIA/NA) Opposing and Seeking a Stay of OSHA's Emergency Temporary Asbestos Standard, 1983 (UC-3007), p. 25

Asbestos products

1 product our documents name Drilling Specialties as making or selling. Each product's page says what the documents say about it, including its asbestos content.

Court cases

1 court decision in our case-law library name Drilling Specialties as a defendant.

In our library

1 document in our library name Drilling Specialties, by collection.

Other library documents (1)

In the Union Carbide documents

Drilling Specialties is named in 12 Union Carbide documents dated 1971 to 1981 (1 as the source, 12 mentioned), from asbestos lawsuits over Union Carbide's Calidria asbestos. All are published in our collection.

Names in the documents

The spellings documents use for Drilling Specialties, OCR misreadings included, so a search for any of them finds this page: Drilling Specialties Company · Drilling Specialties Company, Inc · Drilling Specialties Co. (DRISCO).

Where this comes from

This page brings together every document in our library that names Drilling Specialties, across collections. Titles and affiliations are taken from the documents themselves, and units and subsidiaries are grouped under the company they belong to.

Mentioned on this site

Cite this page

“Drilling Specialties.” AsbestosClaims.Law Library. https://asbestosclaims.law/library/organizations/drilling-specialties.

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