ChampionX Brand Guidelines: Apergy, Ecolab’s Upstream Arm & a 2025 SLB Takeover

Two family trees: rod pumps and well chemicals.

ChampionX was a young name with old parts. It was created in 2020 by joining two businesses, each with its own long history: the artificial-lift group Apergy, and the upstream energy chemicals business of Ecolab, which had traded as Nalco Champion.

The Apergy side came from the industrial group Dover Corporation. SLB’s history of ChampionX, published in 2026, dates the oldest part to 1882, when Norris was founded as a maker of sucker rods — the long steel rods that link a surface pumping unit to a pump at the bottom of a well. Harbison-Fischer followed in 1933 in Fort Worth, Texas, making subsurface pumps and pump rod equipment. SLB says Dover was formed in 1955 with Norris Rods as a core business, and that over the following decades it acquired or developed further lift and production businesses, among them Harbison-Fischer, Alberta Oil Tool, UPCO, PCS Ferguson and Theta Oilfield Services. In 2018, SLB says, Apergy Corporation was spun off from Dover as an independent public company focused on artificial lift and production optimisation.

The chemicals side had its own path. English Wikipedia says Nalco Champion was formed after Ecolab, the parent of the water-treatment company Nalco, acquired Champion Technologies on 10 April 2013, and that it had corporate offices in Houston and Sugar Land, Texas. SLB dates the chemicals business’s start in the oil industry to 1929, when it began operations in Sugar Land selling drilling mud additives.

June 2020: a new name on the New York Stock Exchange.

The two halves were joined in mid-2020. SLB’s timeline says Apergy and Ecolab announced a definitive agreement in 2019 to combine Apergy with Ecolab’s upstream production chemicals business. On 5 June 2020, World Oil carried the announcement, datelined The Woodlands, Texas, that the company formerly known as Apergy had completed the merger of the businesses of Apergy Corporation and ChampionX Holding Inc., described as the former upstream energy business of Ecolab. Apergy changed its name to ChampionX Corporation, and its shares began trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol CHX. The release spoke of product lines in artificial lift, production chemicals and digital technology, and of more than 7,000 employees.

The combination fitted a single part of the oilfield: keeping existing wells producing. Artificial lift is the equipment that raises oil to the surface once a reservoir’s own pressure is no longer enough, and production chemicals, in SLB’s description, support flow assurance, asset integrity and production across the life of a well. SLB says ChampionX operated in more than 74 countries.

The company kept many older names alive as product brands. SLB’s list of ChampionX technologies includes Harbison-Fischer and Norris rod lift equipment, PCS Ferguson plunger and gas lift, UNBRIDLED electric submersible pumping systems, the XSPOC production optimisation software and the SOOFIE emissions monitoring technology. Its photographs show the Chemical Technologies business’s manufacturing site in Odessa, Texas, a ChampionX truck loaded with chemicals at a wellsite, and a Harbison-Fischer rod pump being installed in the Permian Basin. SLB quotes Harbison-Fischer’s trademarked line, “The Best Pumps in the Oil Patch,” as part of that brand’s heritage.

How oilfield service companies present themselves.

Oilfield service companies sell work that most people never see. Their customers are oil and gas producers, and the jobs happen thousands of metres underground, on remote well pads or on the seabed. So the way these firms present themselves leans on a small set of recurring pictures: crews in branded coveralls and hard hats on a rig floor, frac fleets of pump trucks lined up on a well pad, and service trucks parked at a wellsite with the company name on the door.

Offshore, the pictures change but the method is the same. Remotely operated vehicles hang from launch frames, supply and support vessels sit in a harbour or alongside a platform, and seismic ships tow their streamers across open water. Onshore and offshore alike, the firms photograph their engineering and manufacturing centres too: test bays, laboratories and workshops where pumps, tools and chemicals are made or checked before they go to the field.

Much of the communication is technical. Companies publish papers through industry bodies, case studies that set out a customer’s problem and the tool used to solve it, product data sheets and long catalogues of named technologies. Product names tend to be coined words or trademarks attached to a function — a drilling system, a lift pump, a monitoring service — and many firms keep the names of companies they bought alive as product brands.

Two further registers sit alongside the technical one. Safety pages describe procedures, training and reporting in the industry’s own vocabulary, and investor presentations explain backlogs, contracts and market cycles to shareholders. For many of these firms, mergers, spin-offs and restructurings are part of the history, so the name on the coveralls may be newer than the tools the crew is using.

Part of SLB since July 2025.

ChampionX traded as an independent company for about five years. In April 2024 SLB, the oilfield services group formerly known as Schlumberger, announced a definitive agreement to acquire it in an all-stock transaction, according to SLB’s timeline and Offshore Technology. The deal closed on 16 July 2025. SLB’s release of that day, datelined Houston, said ChampionX shareholders had received SLB shares for each ChampionX share and that former ChampionX shareholders now owned about 9% of SLB’s outstanding common stock. Offshore Technology reported on 17 July 2025 that the closing followed the final regulatory approval from UK authorities.

SLB described the purpose plainly. The acquisition, it said, added ChampionX’s production chemicals and its artificial lift, digital and emissions technologies to SLB’s portfolio in the production and recovery market, combining ChampionX’s customer relationships in North America with SLB’s international presence. SLB also says that certain assets were divested as part of the regulatory approvals and are not part of the combined portfolio.

ChampionX is therefore no longer an independent company. SLB now presents it as a legacy brand: a page published in 2026 says that ChampionX “is now part of SLB,” maps each former ChampionX capability to an SLB solution area, and asks customers to contact SLB about product availability and support. Its history, as SLB tells it, runs from a sucker-rod maker of 1882 and a Sugar Land chemicals business of 1929 through Dover, Ecolab and a 2020 merger to a place inside a larger group.

For a design guide, ChampionX shows how a newly coined name can sit over a portfolio of much older product brands, and how such a name becomes a legacy label once the company is absorbed. Compare SLB, its owner since 2025, and NOV, another equipment group assembled from many older names. For this guide we use a deep green, a pale grey and an amber with a condensed sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep ChampionX’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.