Sometimes, it’s the little things. Sometimes, the little thing might be less than six inches long.

When the price of oil started falling, everybody wanted to know what the breakeven price was in US shale plays; there seemed to be a general consensus that if you said $70, you’d sound reasonably intelligent. More recently, my colleague Carin Dehne Kiley of S&P Ratings wrote a thorough analysis that said when you figure in natural gas value and average interest expense, the “required wellhead oil price” was $55.

There’s been plenty of coverage of how the industry got those numbers down. Some were cyclical and reversible: operating costs dropped as energy costs dropped. Service costs fell also. But Carin’s estimate was that 25% of the drop was sticky, and wouldn’t reverse itself just with higher prices. In an interview I did with Continental Resources CEO Harold Hamm at the Platts Global Energy Forum in early December, Hamm said that sticky figure is probably closer to 50%. Those more permanent changes include workforce reductions, drilling more wells from the same pad, drilling longer laterals and so on.

And then there are the smaller things. Bill and Diane Nielsen — spouses who are both executives and metallurgists at Materion Performance Alloys — were part of a team jointly nominated with Hess in the category of Commercial Application of the Year at the Platts Global Energy Awards for a piece of equipment that is less than six inches in length. They had the misfortune of sitting next to me at the awards dinner, and here’s their story (though their efforts didn’t win the coveted prize; the award winners and the full content of Insight magazine, distributed at the dinner, can be found here.)

Materion has an alloy that goes by the name of ToughMet, and it’s a copper-nickel-tin alloy.  But it wasn’t until Bill and Materion brought expertise to it that it could be machined; previously, it only had uses as powder metallurgy. Materion’s first use of the alloy in the oil patch was as a non-magnetic centralizer, a piece of equipment used in directional drilling. Other applications in drilling, aircraft and automotive equipment followed.

Meanwhile, Hess — and others —had a problem. The coupling joining sucker rods to other tubing ...