Cathedral Energy Services Ltd. announced that Mr. Axel Schmidt will join Cathedral as Senior Vice President, Engineering and Technology. Axel is well-known in the directional drilling industry and brings a wealth of technical experience focused on the development, manufacturing, and operation of directional drilling tools. Over the past 22 years, Axel has built a career developing highly-competitive MWD platforms. At the start of his career with Newsco, he developed and patented a revolutionary mud pulser for MWD tools and went from there to develop and commercialize a complete MWD platform, which was sold to Sondex in 2006.

In 2007 Axel became owner and Vice President of Technology at Pacesetter Directional Drilling where he assembled a team that developed a proprietary MWD tool. Axel left Schlumberger/Pacesetter in 2020 after the buyout was complete and founded Lexa Drilling Technologies. The appointment of Axel to the Cathedral team will enable Bogdan to proceed with his planned retirement date for the end of June, 2022.