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Great report, thank you!
I saw this firsthand on the rigs. The best company men and drillers had a feel for the formation that bordered on instinct. They could read the mud returns, sense a kick coming, know when something was off before the instruments caught it. That kind of knowledge takes decades to develop and it’s walking out the door.
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and why is it walking out the door?
Sounds like a great consulting retirement teaching the AI for somebody who knows a lot.
I have had varying interests and have been on location for dozens of horizontal wells, in Oklahoma, North Dakota, and West Texas, And I can say that the technology is incredible. To drill vertically to 12,000 feet, turn and then drill as many as a dozen 2,500’ lateral is awesome. The control room looks like a cockpit of s Moon Shot, and might even be more complicated. The US will never run out of gas and oil, although it will continue to be more expensive.
This guy seems to be more on the Drilling side rather than Completions. Frac guys have been using machine analytics for awhile now. Same can be said on the Production side as well
He’s right though about the boom bust nature of the business and how it affects personnel.
You see the same bimodal distribution of workers in many similar fields. Imagine how many young engineers want to burn coal as a career? All the experienced hands that invented supercritical steam power cycles and grew boiler sizes to 1,200 MW are retiring or have retired. Same with the people that operate and maintain the units. That institutional knowledge is dying or dead.
Why is that? Because we let the ultra-greeniacs get the upper hand and they drove the myth about how CO2 is going to end earth as we know it. The politicians dutifully fell in line and scuttled the oil, gas, coal, and auto industries with their stifling regulations.
The bigger problem is the cyclic nature of humans. Technology continues to grow and advance while political waves come and go. People choose careers based on which way the political winds are blowing when they come of age and graduate from college.
Will the Trump resurrection of domestic manufacturing and the renaissance of gas, oil and coal last? Or will the industries get whipsawed back to being the bad boys the next time “D” wins and election.
My money is on continued whip-sawing such that business planning is difficult to impossible and talented people won’t go near industries that keep getting the lash by government.
It's hard for AI to solve a bad data architecture issue. So yes, many many TB of data. Much of it orphaned and siloed without any context. Only domain experts can turn it into something useful.
Directional drilling is what the “Teapot Dome” sandal was all about.
Thx for posting.
The demand for energy will never go away.
The challenge is keeping it affordable. The 0bama administration killing coal plants has really set things back.
The constant boom/bust cycles is why I got out of it; thankfully I didnt have an entire career tied to it.
Hmmmm
Are the Cartels using AI to improve Pot growing and Meth production?
“Idiocracy” continues to be oracular.