Energy 101: We Ask The Dumb Questions So You Don't Have To

00;00;00;00 - 00;00;16;13
Unknown
Welcome back to energy 101. Today we have Andrew Richard all the way from Calgary. Welcome. Thank you. Why? Why are you in town right now? I'm in town for a few meetings and I. Coda it's like coda week. So. And Sarah week. So it was very. It's all it's always a week here in Houston right when it comes to energy.

00;00;16;16 - 00;00;35;04
Unknown
So, you know, your face may look familiar to people who, you know, it's they don't watch the content too much. You know, I go, I keep seeing this guy everywhere, right? It's like you go all the way back to, the oil and Gas Startups podcast that Colin and our other OG founder, Jake, hosted, and it's one of those rare ones where they're both on because eventually they started splitting it.

00;00;35;04 - 00;01;05;09
Unknown
Right. But you got you got the full set. And I want to bring up some things I'll talk about in that episode. Sure. You all talked about oilfield services using the metaverse. Yeah. Okay. How that how that play out for years later. I well, it was what I think what I was thinking about at that point in time was like trying to tie blockchain and NFTs together into, into, like, the assets, that, that all the oil companies own.

00;01;05;10 - 00;01;25;28
Unknown
I'm not. That's not my world. I'm not in the space of selling oil and gas. You know, the land and property and wells and stuff. But it just feels like there's this way that people can aggregate or companies could have eventually aggregated all that data under one NFT, which, I mean, no one else in the world would buy it other than an oil company.

00;01;25;28 - 00;01;46;28
Unknown
It's not like it's going out on to that space. But yeah. Speaking of, you said don't tell y'all, y'all spitballing minting an NFT to a well, yeah, yeah, I just basically you said a lot of board ape yacht. Yacht club talk. Yeah. Y'all were like, y'all are, like, tying it together with, like, community and, like, web three and stuff.

00;01;47;02 - 00;02;02;05
Unknown
It was a very of its time talk. I'm sure it killed at the time, but it was just so funny listening to all these buzzwords come. I was like, oh, my. And then a lot of analogies, the Fortnite, Roblox and oh yeah, the kids. I was like, all right, like, this is this is a real fun one.

00;02;02;07 - 00;02;19;18
Unknown
Yeah. So that's our collide. If anyone wants to go back and see that, that's an interesting one. But, you know, here we are now. You know, we don't talk. We're not here to talk about NFTs or the metaverse. We're here to talk about what you do. It is automated rig technologies. Ever heard of it? All the way from Calgary, right?

00;02;19;20 - 00;02;41;15
Unknown
Yeah. So, you know, Calgary to the Texas of. Of Canada. Yeah. Yeah. To two peas in a pod. Exactly. Yeah. There's a lot of innovation that happens up there. We've got a much shorter drilling season. Like, our drilling season really focuses in the winter, and then. Great when it's freezing cold. It's awesome. It is awesome. What is that?

00;02;41;16 - 00;03;06;13
Unknown
You can dress for the cold. You can't rest for the heat. That's what I say. Yeah. I worked in Mexico for a few years long, you know, 20 plus years ago, and, I, I. Yeah, you're wearing coveralls because you have to. And that's it. Right. But when I was working in Cynthia Alberta, which is, you know, one building basically is the town, -40 Celsius or Fahrenheit.

00;03;06;13 - 00;03;25;29
Unknown
It doesn't matter. And you can dress well, and then you're moving in your work and then it's fun. Yeah. Well, why is drilling only in a winter? It's not only in the winter. It's just more prevalent for some reason. You know, like wool were the, I would say 90% of our business is international. So our exposure as a company to the Canadian market is quite small.

00;03;26;01 - 00;03;46;17
Unknown
But even in the last, you know, I mean, I've been around the industry for 27 years or something like that, 28 years. And, and it's been, and it's just always like that. It's busier in the winter. And that's when the contracts are issued. There's less drilling in the summer. Yeah. So you are, you know, making tech, would you say your tech.

00;03;46;18 - 00;04;13;01
Unknown
Yeah. Our our team. We are a little bit of a unique team because we we started the company off as a pure solutions provider. But you know with electrical, hydraulic, mechanical and software engineering all under one roof. But that just feeds the solutions, right? So our engineers have lived on drilling rigs. They've slept on drilling rigs in dog houses and mic rooms.

00;04;13;03 - 00;04;32;15
Unknown
They know what it's like when a line of code changes out on the rig. They know what it's like when they change relief valves on hydraulics. They know what it's like when they change, you know, weld on new, new products. So, new pieces. So our team is very well versed in, in the, the practical side of the industry as well.

00;04;32;18 - 00;04;55;06
Unknown
And, and we live in sort of three spaces. We live in the drilling space, we live in the completion space, and we live in the production space. And what we find really, I would say probably actually frustrating for some of our team is the cross training that we see, because you see so many innovations in each niche that could be used somewhere else.

00;04;55;08 - 00;05;16;01
Unknown
But they it's a the adoption curve is, is is slow. Right. Because the drilling side's seen this or believes in something for so long and it just isn't second nature. But the but the completion side doesn't get it right because people live inside of their, their silos. I guess, right in the industry. All right. Does that make sense?

00;05;16;04 - 00;05;33;02
Unknown
Yeah. It's just I don't I'm not exposed to this. I'm just a media guy, but. No, no, I mean, this is the talking points we hear all the time here collide. So, I mean, tech wise. Yes. Like, you know, coding, engineering, whatever, like, but all have, like the actual the all actually produce gear. Yes. Hardware. Right, right.

00;05;33;09 - 00;05;52;12
Unknown
So why don't we kind of get like a rundown there for everything. And speaking of tech company, like you got a relation with, Microsoft. They started in the garage, and so did you. All right. That's right. Yeah, yeah. Like right. That's always. That's always such a good hook, right? Yeah. I forgot to whip that out. We started in my basement sixteens with 2009.

00;05;52;12 - 00;06;19;07
Unknown
Right. Based in the basement garage. Either one kills. Yeah. I mean, the garage. The garage was much later, because that was when Covid hit. I. That's where I moved myself back to when we were all working from home, but, but, yeah, like the we look at the hardware platforms that we build as, as new platforms for the like the future of the industry.

00;06;19;10 - 00;06;47;07
Unknown
We, we've been involved in so many solutions provide like just pure solutions for the field. But what that means from a practical standpoint is as someone builds a service rig, those rigs have been around for 70 years. They've been there's very little changes on those. And they'll clients will come to us and they'll say, hey, we want to automate the talking or we want to automate the catwalk, or we want to automate something in the process.

00;06;47;07 - 00;07;15;01
Unknown
But there's all these unintended consequences of, of of that statement, right, of, hey, we want to automate one to remove this one person, but there's three other things that need to be considered. And the reason is, is because a lot of the industry is trying to automate what is already there, which is that, you know, they're trying to replace the person and what the person does and the and people take in all sorts of inputs and they're able to move in 3D space.

00;07;15;01 - 00;07;44;20
Unknown
Much freer than a machine. So a lot of the stuff that we've been creating is rethinks the process. And kind of started from a blank sheet. Well, started from a blank, blank piece of paper, that literally takes steps of the process out. So I'll, I'll use like when you're talking about gear, you know, we have developed, technology called a jointed pipe injector.

00;07;44;22 - 00;08;06;18
Unknown
And so this is an injector, like a coil tubing injector or a and a snubbing. Jack had a baby. So these two pieces of equipment. And I'm going to for the camera here. Basically what is snubbing Jack does. My hand is sitting on top of the annular bottom hand, and you'll grip the pipe. And then on cylinder jacks you'll lift up your clothes and grab the pipe.

00;08;06;23 - 00;08;31;11
Unknown
You'll open your bottom joint or your bottom gripper and you'll push down and you have to transfer loads thousands of times per well. And that's completely manual, right? The the jointed pipe injector, it's continuous movement. So you take over, you take out 97% of the operator input. They don't even have to worry about it. And they're only moving one joystick, one direction.

00;08;31;13 - 00;08;55;04
Unknown
So when you look at automation, when we look at automation, we look at it from a place of we're not just trying to do exactly what the person did, we're trying to remove full steps and processes to optimize, if that makes sense. The other part, which extends that is the data on the platform and the close up control that comes with all of these sorts of machines.

00;08;55;04 - 00;09;13;24
Unknown
You know, when you brought up that specific task, is this the guy on the rig who's like, kind of like on the on, on the ground or the one who's kind of hang it up top with the pipe. So it's we're picking on snubbing here, but but snubbing is, is an operation where you're pushing typically into a pressurized wellbore.

00;09;13;27 - 00;09;36;19
Unknown
So, these, these operators will have a primary Bop stack. Let's just say it's 12ft tall. Then on top of that, they'll have a B, snubbing, stripping stack for B ops, like blowout preventers. Right. To keep the pressure in the well. And then on top of that, b o on top of the the the the stripping stack, they'll have a snubbing jack.

00;09;36;21 - 00;09;59;12
Unknown
And then on top of the snubbing jack is where the people operate. So sometimes 45ft in the air all the way up to 60 and beyond. Yeah. And there's a really there's a, there's kind of a brutal industry term for that called the barbecue basket, because if someone screws up, that's the, there's, there's an it's it's not a safe place in those conditions.

00;09;59;12 - 00;10;19;09
Unknown
Right. So what we want to do is take those people and move them down to the ground. Keep them out of harm's way, and be able to do exactly what they're doing with it with a new piece of equipment. Yeah, right. So people have been doing this for decades, right? And I mean, you're one of the first people to be like, hey, let's, let's stop and fix this, right?

00;10;19;09 - 00;10;45;21
Unknown
Like, like we automate so much in this industry and other industries, but like, it's it reminds me of, like, when people talk about the government, they're like, they still use like windows 94, right? Is it is it similar to that a little bit. It's, so there's a weird there's a statement that I always, I always mess up, but it's, it's about the fact that they've had 70 plus years to optimize the equipment.

00;10;45;23 - 00;11;09;01
Unknown
So you look at a service rig, right. And it or even some exact, let's say, the kind of roughly around the same timeline, right? Maybe 1950s is when the, the, the snubbing jocks really came to came to, to being and maybe before that the service rigs. But they've had, let's say the last 50, 70, 100 years to really optimize what the process looks like on that side.

00;11;09;01 - 00;11;24;08
Unknown
And they've got really good at the brute force they being or we I should say, we as an industry have got really good at a brute force approach. So we we throw a bunch of people at it and we just go out to the field with what we have. Because if you give a roughneck a job to do, they will get it done.

00;11;24;11 - 00;11;48;02
Unknown
But it doesn't matter. They they're really good at that. Right. But but this, this new technology in this new platform, I wouldn't say we're the very first to try this. Maybe the way with the way we've done it, for sure. We've got a patent on worldwide patents on our, on our injector and, and then some components of the injector as well.

00;11;48;05 - 00;12;11;05
Unknown
But I think we're the first to be successful to the level that, that we're at with automating and removing, removing those steps from the operator. Yeah. It's are you working primarily onshore? Offshore? Both. We get very little focus from the offshore guys. We've done a little bit. We've had some conversations in other products that we do in other, other, other spaces.

00;12;11;05 - 00;12;37;20
Unknown
But, not in this company. We've done some offshore stuff at our previous companies. Yeah. I mean, because I understand like offshore, they actually do stay more, more on top of automation and safety and stuff. I mean, they're dealing with thousands of more people on site, right? And I mean, the whole the whole point of automating is, you know, not not only not only you're removing the person because the more people on site, the more people who can get hurt.

00;12;37;20 - 00;13;02;07
Unknown
Right? Is that something you kind of follow? Yes. There's so our we have a core, our core purpose. That automated rig is relentlessly reducing red zone risk. So, and that means if we can do something better and it means they spend less time on site. Great. And you're using the same size screws, but if you can remove people off of off of the location, you have just inherently less risk.

00;13;02;09 - 00;13;26;06
Unknown
You know, one of the highest or the riskiest parts of our, our industry's driving. So if you can reduce the number of vehicles out to location and the number of people, then you're then you're you're you're golden. The offshore part is a little bit, there's a little bit more complicated, I guess, because for every person you have on a platform, you have to feed them and you have to.

00;13;26;09 - 00;13;55;02
Unknown
They have to be trained for the secure training, the helicopter training and those sorts of things. So for every person you can remove, you're doing really, really good. There's some other specialist that needs to be there, not maybe the person that's that's just running some, you know, one of the machines, if it can be done by somebody else, are these products meant to be like new tech that like replaces it or is it like add on like like is there is there issues fundamentally with that.

00;13;55;02 - 00;14;15;10
Unknown
Like trying to, you know, paste, paste on new tech onto the old stuff? Or is it worth just replacing scraping from the ground up? That's a little bit, my preference would be to, to start from a blank piece of paper. And I don't mean that from our perspective, we have a solution that we feel we can bring out to the market.

00;14;15;10 - 00;14;27;03
Unknown
That way. It's what I would say. We're probably 50% between macro and micro or, you know, where or,

00;14;27;05 - 00;14;56;14
Unknown
The, the macro side is, is, is all the, you know, the, the linchpin like being the joiner pipe injector and the mast and the but there's, there's certain very specific niche things that, that for each job running any SP or you know, running mud motors or running like there's all sorts of little bits that happen on a day to day basis that people are comfortable with out in the industry, with the incumbent equipment.

00;14;56;14 - 00;15;22;04
Unknown
So it's down to that level. Now, we've worked with the technical, with the joiner, pipe injector and specifically we've worked with, and had, SMEs in our company writing all of these procedures. But every company has their own in-house SOPs, right? So those will have to go eventually to the to the end user. And that's from a blank piece of paper.

00;15;22;04 - 00;15;42;11
Unknown
But we are working pretty closely with a couple of companies right now on integrating into existing equipment. So there is a comfort level there of okay, we've got the existing equipment and we have this new technology and we can swap back and forth right. And, and our goal is, is to kind of just it's like the gateway drug.

00;15;42;12 - 00;16;00;18
Unknown
Yeah. Right. Let me get back to like kind of the timeline of things. So we used to do these big events called Energy Tech Night, and we'd have these energy tech companies come on and pitch what they're doing. And it was it was a lot of fun. And, you know, we're we're on hiatus. So, you know, don't look forward to any soon.

00;16;00;18 - 00;16;23;06
Unknown
But, you were involved in one of them. And I would say this was like 2 or 3 years ago. Yeah, I remember it was right after Russia invaded Ukraine, because I got a question about something for the cold weather. And, I mean, we started the machine up in -40 in Calgary or in Edmonton and, someone said something about Siberia.

00;16;23;06 - 00;16;44;03
Unknown
And I was like, well, I can talk about what we're talking about with Gazprom now because they're, they're we're not selling to them any time soon. Who knew that, who knew that it would be this much longer? But, yeah, that's that was a that was a great event and a fun night. Yeah. So what were you pitching at that time and what have you all accomplish since?

00;16;44;05 - 00;17;05;15
Unknown
Okay. So we were pitching the joint a pipe injector at that point. So from a timeline perspective, though, let me just rewind. So we built the joint pipe injector, the first one. And I'm going to just kind of jump back and forth here. We have two of these machines, a small version which is a rig assist machine.

00;17;05;15 - 00;17;28;16
Unknown
There's four of those out in the field. And I'll talk about those afterwards. But what I was pitching at that event was the big joint and pipe injector. So this is a 100,000 pound hoist and 50,000 pound snob that we've designed, up to 300,000 pound hoist and 170,000 pound snob. So it's effectively like a standalone snubbing Jack or a Wells.

00;17;28;19 - 00;17;53;03
Unknown
Well, sir, a big well service rig that's 300,000 pounds. And we were, we were pitching this, this idea and just talking about this change in the industry. What what has happened since then? We built the machine. We tested the machine. We reliability tested it. We put it out for a trial last year with a major operator in the Bakken.

00;17;53;05 - 00;18;15;09
Unknown
We ran 244 joints of of tubing in and out of the well multiple times with nobody on the work floor, nobody touching pipe and two people operating the machinery. So we we saw it as a pretty big success. Now we're moving. We're we're going to be moving this technology we believe in to the completion space.

00;18;15;11 - 00;18;41;01
Unknown
So that that trial, gave us a lot of a lot of data and we learned a ton from that. And nothing I would say, nothing was a surprise. We definitely had challenges, but they were all we overcame everything. So we're really excited because the product is now we feel ready for for actual prime time. Right.

00;18;41;03 - 00;19;06;09
Unknown
Now the smaller machine, the smaller machine was actually conceptualized around the same time. We, both of these have their origins from 2015, and the smaller version was, was a product that we developed for, one of the major, well, servicing companies in the U.S. we didn't do it for them. We did it on their advice.

00;19;06;11 - 00;19;28;17
Unknown
And they had said they have all of these vertical, these very shallow vertical wells with these long horizontals. And their problem was, was that they had no way of pushing pipe into the wells. So they had to call a rig assist company and a rig assist snubbing Jack. So the rig, the snubbing jack comes out and it pushes into the well, and it takes a long time to get to the bottom.

00;19;28;19 - 00;19;53;20
Unknown
And it's snubbing is a specialized operation. So you have to pay a specialized trained person to do that. These are again non pressurized well bores. So the risks are quite low. And we designed an injector that walks over couplings and upsets and pushes into the wellbore. And then we had a few problems with the testing of that machine and we shelved it.

00;19;53;23 - 00;20;21;27
Unknown
And then when Covid was starting to finish, we had a couple of people through our shop that that couldn't believe that there weren't like one of these injectors sitting on the back of every service rig around the US because they're like, it takes one guy to operate this thing, and it's just a joystick and that's it. And and so we started going out to market and talking to a few people and, and they, they came up with they, you know, we, we sold four of them out there.

00;20;21;29 - 00;20;42;02
Unknown
And, and we're in the process of that. We did that over the last couple of years. And we're seeing the, the adoption of that technology. And so we're, we're looking to get a bunch more of those out. So you mentioned working with like majors in the Bakken or in like other like yeah. How how do you start so small and like attract these big guys.

00;20;42;02 - 00;21;05;16
Unknown
Like are you, are you doing that on purpose. Are you trying to target more mom and pop or midsize companies? So there's well, there's two things like I'll go back back to the day, back in the day because we were our core group, had a lot to do. And my dad actually had a lot to do with Tesco top drives, like he developed the hydraulic systems for them back in the day, and they eventually bought his company.

00;21;05;19 - 00;21;21;25
Unknown
They bought it in 97. Then he'd been doing work for them since the 80s. Like, I remember being in a place called up for people who are listening. It's a place called Bluebird Drilling in Calgary. And, you know, I'd be in there on a Saturday with all these tall guys in this orange machine that I had no idea what it was.

00;21;21;25 - 00;21;44;04
Unknown
And, you know this guy, you know, pear and Everett and and Bob are all, like, standing around with my dad built in this top drive. Right. And, and so the strategy back then for them was to market directly to the oil companies, get the oil companies to adopt the technology, and then force the offices and oilfield service companies to, to adopt the technology.

00;21;44;07 - 00;22;09;10
Unknown
And so we've been doing that with the join and pipe injector and the PTI and our KD tongs and our other technologies where we go to the oil companies, because the ultimate goal is to get your your specification right on their RFQ. Right. But we in this case where we're working with this operator in the BOC, and this was actually driven by the oilfield service company.

00;22;09;12 - 00;22;39;18
Unknown
So they had a very particular strategy or goal. And that goal was that this is from the operator and from the office. Is that in the BOC? And they have a very difficult time maintaining crews because of the weather and the wind. Right. So they shut down. So if you're on a drilling rig, 365 but if you're on a well servicing rig and the wind picks up and there's tubing racked and they've got to lay everything down, or they got to leave the rig because of the wind and the cold and all this other stuff.

00;22;39;20 - 00;23;11;12
Unknown
Those guys aren't working for a little bit. So this particular office and the operator have a strategic alliance or something. So they always pay their guys. They keep their guys trained. They can keep they can maintain them. But they thought, well, if we can maintain these people and we can actually bring a technology that can kind of go from completions all the way through to a, then we have one crew, one machine, and we don't have to have all these other ancillary services on standby.

00;23;11;13 - 00;23;31;17
Unknown
Does that make sense? Yeah. But you know, it just things don't work like that always, right. You're right 100%. Yeah. That was their goal. Like this is their goal not our goal. Right. So so what ended up happening at the end of the day was the oilfield service company brought us into the meeting with the operator and, we didn't even talk about our technology.

00;23;31;20 - 00;23;52;19
Unknown
We just ask questions for about two hours. And then at the end, the office was like stomping his feet, the one guy stomp and he's like, what about the joint pipe project? And we're like, we're not sure this is the right solution yet. Let's have another meeting next week. And then we asked more. We we clarified everything. We ask more questions, and we kept going down that path for 2 or 3 meetings until we said, okay.

00;23;52;19 - 00;24;14;20
Unknown
We think we think this might be able to solve the problem that you're looking for. And so that's that's how that that's how that project work. I mean, like how many people are on the team at this time? We've we've done a little bit of a reorg in our business. And we're, we're in 15, 16 people right now.

00;24;14;20 - 00;24;34;17
Unknown
Okay. So I wanted to ask like a real broad dumb question, which is like you're you're 15, 16 people. You have like this tech, you know, everyone's got a solution, right? And, you know, everyone wants to here at our doesn't want to like, how do you like actually like market and like put your name out there. What are you what are you all literally doing to get known and seen?

00;24;34;20 - 00;24;59;11
Unknown
Not even to get you to that major, but just at anyone. Like, what is the process? The process is it's talking a lot. It's, there's there's a there's a lot of relationships. I'm seeing the combination. Let me just take a step back here. So you were. We were talking about the earlier conversation with Jake and Colin and the metaverse and and all that sort of stuff.

00;24;59;11 - 00;25;28;23
Unknown
And, you know, I remember reading a book. I might have even referenced it in the thing called, something nomics. Yeah, social norms expire. And thanks. And there it said, you know, what's the ROI of social media? And the ROI is that your business will be around in ten years or something like that. Right. And, you know, I remember when we started the company, writing, marketing plan and a four, it's a four inch binder.

00;25;28;23 - 00;25;52;01
Unknown
I still have it at my house. And, and then fast forward to yesterday, and I'm and and I and I'm at the AI coder luncheon, and I'm listening to JP Warren talk about how 40% of the operators choose bot based, choose their their contracts, or choose their offices based on price, but the other 60 don't. So what are the other 60 making their decisions on?

00;25;52;03 - 00;26;24;26
Unknown
And what he's learned from connection crew and, and the conversations that they're having is, is that it's the relationships and the trust that the vibes. Right? It's. Yes, yes, yes. Sorry, I feel old now because I know that's awesome. Yeah. So it's, it's a lot of conversations and understanding your client and, and once your client understands that you understand their problem, you break this barrier to the next level of trust.

00;26;24;29 - 00;26;48;03
Unknown
Yeah. Right. And at the same time, you're competing with, you know, all this new tech people want to pitch. And, the irony is that it's stuff that works that industries need maybe boring, maybe hard to sell. Not so sexy, right? But, I mean, like, automated stuff. Seem sexy. Like, are you. Are you balancing, those two and, like, it.

00;26;48;06 - 00;27;06;05
Unknown
Does it feel like, you or maybe competitors, like, it's it's a little too flashy and a little too, like. Do you think I don't know, like, what's the pitch and how did how did these people see your tech without it being like, oh yeah, this is those. So fix all your problems. Well, again, I'll reference JP's conversation yesterday.

00;27;06;05 - 00;27;26;17
Unknown
I mean your it make it makes a guy think a lot about feature dumping and talking about, you know, the literal hardware on the nuts and bolts versus the outcome. Right. What do they say you sell the sizzle or something like that or you're you're wording it more elegantly. But basically that's the talking point. Yeah. And and it's you're right.

00;27;26;17 - 00;27;50;16
Unknown
It is. Listen, there's so many even even when I did the energy tech night, there's so many solutions out there, that are there pure software based. Right. And so those solutions, those solutions, they, they, they end up being something that, that somebody at a desk is doing right in an oil company and they're. Yes, it optimizes a whole bunch of what they're doing there.

00;27;50;16 - 00;28;26;00
Unknown
But but we're seeing so much in the data acquisition and and measurement basically out on site. But again, those things are getting bolted on to platforms that are already existing. And our, our world is basically bringing, bringing this new layer of what's the what's the catch line data driven decision making to the field. Right. So we're we're our real background.

00;28;26;00 - 00;28;47;09
Unknown
Like one of the things we're really, really good at is closed loop hydraulic motion control like pure robotics. Right. So taking a 3D object with a robotic arm and moving it, it's 10,000 pounds and it is accurate to one eighth of an inch in 3D space like 3D and you're like in a different city. Yeah. Well yeah. Yeah.

00;28;47;12 - 00;29;21;14
Unknown
But but yeah, yeah. But that's, that's the level of control that we're talking about with the jointed pipe injector. Right. Like it's, it's moving the field from one operator who's running a hydraulic valve or like valve to move a cylinder. And they're watching, you know, they might be needing to watch 3 or 4 gauges. That operator who says they have, they need the feel or something, cannot react as fast as the control system that's running some sub millisecond loop times.

00;29;21;16 - 00;29;58;00
Unknown
So the control system can look at all of those gauges instantly. And the nice thing about what we're doing and what we're driving the industry to with the automation side, is that you're giving the machine a task, and that machine is collecting the data and telling you how well it did the task. You're not recording what the operator did and then trying to figure out what why the operator did that, or did they even pull the handle to make something happen because you don't have those measurements in place that.

00;29;58;02 - 00;30;29;29
Unknown
Does that make a little bit of sense? I'm you're getting a little deep in there now, but. Okay. It sounds like a good product. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it reminds me of, you know, everyone's like the normies outside the industry just in general, like AI is taking our jobs, stuff like that. But anytime we, I post like, something on social media, like from, you know, other podcasts and stuff, about like automation in the field that's, you know, these people in this, in this industry been talking about losing their jobs all the time.

00;30;29;29 - 00;30;48;01
Unknown
And, you know, they tell stories of being replaced and stuff like, how do you balance, you know, if you, if you were, if you are marketing your technology and you have all these people in the in the comments being like, you're ruining the industry, you know, whatever. It's like, obviously you're balancing like, well, this is cheaper or it's, safer, right?

00;30;48;01 - 00;31;07;08
Unknown
Like, do you actually have to deal with stuff like that, or do you like to, slam dunk on people with some talking points on that? Yeah, there's well, there's, there's several different things to speak on around that. One is, is that this niche that we're working in is highly specialized, and it takes years to train to get to that role.

00;31;07;10 - 00;31;24;21
Unknown
You still need to have that mindset. You still have like, I'll, I'll pick on snubs because subs, we have this we have this core belief that we think numbers are going to rule the whole everything after the after the drilling world, okay? We're giving them a new tool. We're not we're not replacing them. We're giving them a new tool to do their job even better.

00;31;24;25 - 00;31;46;11
Unknown
Right. And so you look at you look at the operators that are in the U.S and I don't know, I'll just throw a dart on the board and say there's 70 of these snubbing jocks. So that means if you've got three crews, you've got 210 people that are trained in the US that are making a lot of money because they're very good at what they do, and they understand that machine really, really well.

00;31;46;13 - 00;32;12;27
Unknown
Well, what if you were able to take away 97% of their workload? They still need to be there, but they don't have task fatigue, right? Because these are highly risky roles. And so now you take that task fatigue, instead of having that person sit there and have to literally run muscle memory to to to run. Here's the value proposition, kind of I said a little bit earlier about that.

00;32;12;29 - 00;32;43;27
Unknown
What do we say about the technology. It's 97% less operator input running two times the speed with 33% less input horsepower. That's the that's the sort of value prop, right? You still need those people. But if if you take if you take the other argument is, is if you take six people that are on site normally and that means there's 18 people on that rig crew because there's three shifts, and you take two people off of each one of those crews.

00;32;44;00 - 00;33;09;22
Unknown
Now you've got six people, that can do one and a half more units, right? So you can keep the same headcount inside the company, but you can have more assets out there working. So there is a really interesting thing I heard the other day, and I this may be a little bit altruistic, but did you hear about did you hear about this, chat bot with Ikea?

00;33;09;24 - 00;33;44;28
Unknown
No. So they called the chat bot. They called the chat bot. Billy, like their bookshelf. And I think the number was 57% of the calls that were coming through. Our chat coming through were being handled in by the chat bot. So they were like, well, what are we going to do with all these people? Right? So then they focused in on the 43% and they said, okay, well, of the 43% that are making it through to one of our our support people, the bulk of those calls are about, you know, interior design.

00;33;45;01 - 00;34;07;15
Unknown
So they created a whole they trained those people on interior design and questions, and they opened up a new service line, allegedly. Now, I only saw this on line. I didn't validate it, but it was a person speaking on stage, talking about this new business line that Ikea has. So if, if, if I think there's an interesting thing that they were able to discover.

00;34;07;17 - 00;34;27;27
Unknown
And one upskill their people, keep them, keep them working and they were also able to, open up a new business line right. Wait, so these people are calling in to, like, get advice on how to decorate their home? I guess so I don't I've never called Ikea to ask, but if you're getting mad about that, then you know what?

00;34;28;05 - 00;34;58;17
Unknown
What are you doing? Like, yeah, they're lazy. Like, what? You gonna like? Go ahead, talk to the robot. Like, if you don't want to do your own research or. Yeah, have your own creativity. Like, damn. Yeah. The other one, the other one that always comes up is there's a Ted talk about automation, and about replacing people, and I, I can't remember who who does the talk with the fellow's name is, but he talks specifically about ATMs and banks, and he says, you know, when when the ATMs came out, they thought all the all the bankers were going to go away.

00;34;58;19 - 00;35;18;07
Unknown
And what happened was they actually were able to open more banks and hire more people because the standard everyday, normal, boring stuff was done by the the ATM. But then the more complex stuff was able to be handled by the teller, right? So it took away all of the fluff and that's, that's really what we're doing here, right?

00;35;18;09 - 00;35;42;03
Unknown
You have a person on us. Again, I'll use this topic. Jackass is a perfect, perfect example. That's operating levers 17 times for every 30ft joint of joint that goes into the well. But that person is highly trained. They're very smart. They understand what they're doing, and they're getting paid a lot of money to run these, run these valve handles.

00;35;42;06 - 00;36;03;10
Unknown
But there's if you if you back them out of the control loop and you, you get them to oversee at all. That's elevating the roll. Right. That's what we want to see. Yeah. And that ATM analogy always kills I mean yeah when it comes to the argument and it's like, you know, well banks didn't disappear when ATMs are here.

00;36;03;10 - 00;36;27;22
Unknown
And, you know, Starbucks wasn't the first coffee shop. I just I always like I always love this little debate fallacies. You can bring up. But we're missing one big point, which is, you know, these jobs that are being automated are dangerous. Like what? What, like kid right now is, like, I can't wait to grow up and fucking hang on 20ft above a rake floor and -40.

00;36;27;22 - 00;36;53;07
Unknown
It's like people forget the consider like, hey, some of these jobs suck ass. They don't want to do it and they shouldn't be a job in the future. Like, how do you deal with that? Yeah, well, I mean, I don't disagree with that statement at all. I might have mentioned this in the last in that first podcast. You know, I have this I had this idea from a young age that our rigs would eventually go to the field, and they would literally transform, like transformers and even the noise.

00;36;53;07 - 00;37;15;10
Unknown
What happened? They would stand themselves up, you know, and I've used this thing about Ron, who is here with us, recording for for my sales thing the other couple weeks ago. You know, we, we we used the same sort of conversation where there's this that, you know, one of this, this older fella that I used to work with, he's retired out of the industry now.

00;37;15;10 - 00;37;40;29
Unknown
He's worked all over the world. And, he always said, you know, there was going to be the the the industry will get to the point where there is a person and a dog person's there to feed the dog, and the dog is there to make sure he doesn't touch anything. Right. Eventually we'll get there. I even had an operator in my last Houston trip that said, you know, I had a question about how how small can we make the crew sizes on site?

00;37;41;01 - 00;38;11;16
Unknown
Because there's well control events and things like that, that you want to have a certain number of people to react to. And he just said, we'll get we'll get to zero. If there's zero people there, then we can't hurt anybody. We can always drill another well. Right? So I don't know if that's going to be the real world in my lifetime, but yeah, I mean, speaking of like just time in general, like there's so much red tape and so much slow moving parts when it comes to, like, adopting this tech and stuff.

00;38;11;16 - 00;38;34;21
Unknown
Right. Why like, why does it take so long for these things to happen? Like, I'm sure they thought of what your product is as a solution decades ago, but like, there's two things. Whether the technology just wasn't there to be cheap enough or the like policy of like move, like implementing it. I mean, like, yes, let's now let's move on and use this.

00;38;34;28 - 00;38;53;12
Unknown
Like, that's got to be like the biggest struggle you deal with, right? Yeah. Well, I talked to the end of talk to our team engineering team and said like, you know, the engineering part, working through all of the challenges over the last ten years, not only the business challenges, but getting the technology challenges, that has been the easy part.

00;38;53;12 - 00;39;15;14
Unknown
I think the hardest part is the change management in the industry. So the the big thing about that is that it's sort of the there's there's a there's several layers to this one layer is that, you know, nobody ever got fired for hiring IBM or buying an Ovi or whatever, not to throw them under the bus because they build great products, but they're the Kleenex of the industry, right?

00;39;15;14 - 00;39;53;29
Unknown
Like, so you have a lot of comfort in, in the history of, of of those past pieces of equipment. You need somebody that has the vision and the foresight that wants to reach that goal, but you also need somebody that has the time and the effort that will invest the time and the effort for the SOPs and the Jesus and everything that has to come along with implementing the technology and then you have another layer of problems with a lot of the incumbent oilfield service companies have huge debt on their balance sheets.

00;39;54;02 - 00;40;23;24
Unknown
And so by going to a new technology, they've they're effectively saying that their existing fleet, they may be saying depending on who their investors are, that their existing fleet is obsolete and they're moving down this path so it doesn't look good all the time. On on that side of things, we've got several we've got several mid tier, not mid tier but mid level clients I would say that aren't large guys with two 300 rigs out there.

00;40;23;24 - 00;40;48;04
Unknown
You know the guys with 10 to 30 rigs out there. Those are the meat and potatoes rig companies that are that are really like, hey, we can differentiate right? We can take a leap over our competitors if we if we do this right, and the, the fall through for those companies of removing one person, on site is very noticeable on their EBITDA.

00;40;48;06 - 00;41;07;11
Unknown
Yeah. Very noticeable. And another layer is with like adopting new tech. Is that and you may have brought this up before is that you don't want to be the first to strike. Right. Yeah. There's, there's, there's an oil. The oil field is funny. It's like everyone wants to be first. To be second. Is the line right? Yeah. There it is.

00;41;07;14 - 00;41;31;13
Unknown
They they it's it kind of goes back to that no one got fired for, for hiring IBM, right? Like, they want to see they want to see the success and and it's a never ending battle. And, you know, you put one unit out and then the next client wants to, you know, when does the when does the, has the job, has the unit done 100 jobs?

00;41;31;13 - 00;41;53;01
Unknown
Has the unit done a thousand jobs? Do you have ten units out? Do you have 100 units out? There's always those those objections. But I think that's where the, the trust and the, the, the, the building, the relationships with the clients and making sure they know you're there. Right. Like, that's that's part of this as well. We're seeing success because we're so damn stubborn.

00;41;53;01 - 00;42;15;17
Unknown
And then we're just still here. Right, scrappy. Yeah. And there's it's one of our values is relentlessness. You know you've got to be in this industry otherwise you don't live. Yeah. Right. Well sad. Yeah. All right. Well let's wrap things up with, a post you made on collide. If you don't know, collide is at least our community is where a bunch of oil and gas professionals come in.

00;42;15;17 - 00;42;36;00
Unknown
They talk and they spill their guts, and they're being. They spill the beans, and they. They tell stories and stuff like that. And you wrote something very cool last week about something you seem to be very passionate about. Aptly named Bad data is, in a sense, a problem. It's a platform problem. How would you, sum this up and, get get your get your ran out to the people on camera.

00;42;36;01 - 00;43;08;15
Unknown
Yeah. Well, it's it's sort of like what we were talking about earlier about, the software. You go to a lot of these conferences and there's all these softwares and they're trying to solve something, but their hardware, the base hardware that that was delivering that data was never designed for optimized or automated. So you're always recording, you're recording and then you're assuming what happened for those, for those outputs.

00;43;08;17 - 00;43;34;20
Unknown
What we believe is, is that this GPI platform is, is a new platform to enable data driven optimization. And so the article basically in the back of my head, it's, it's it's the, you know, the coil and the snubbing and the regressive snubbing and the and the, well completions rigs all lumped into that one bucket that there's no real closed loop motion control.

00;43;34;20 - 00;43;59;27
Unknown
There's no real automation in there. A lot of it is completely manual. And what we're doing is offering a whole new platform for the industry to completely optimize that whole process. Right? Yeah. And, I think my I think I posted the it on LinkedIn as well a few days after Callide because I have to give Callide the you got across it got across both.

00;43;59;28 - 00;44;39;21
Unknown
Yeah. And and I think I said, you know, we keep arguing whether people are better than machines, but when you're, when you're looking at, a person versus a machine, the machine will win every single time with sub millisecond loop times. And we've got to stop arguing about the physics of it. And move the person above as the supervisor of of the system, and understand if the system can actually perform with the parameters and limitations that it has, and let the person intervene when we know when that person knows, the machine won't be able to do something.

00;44;39;23 - 00;44;59;07
Unknown
But for the meantime, let the machine do what it does for the meat and potatoes part of the work. Yeah, but you know, people don't think like that and they're just going to keep on be gloom and doom about it. You're so positive and optimistic. Yeah. Yeah. I was just on line too much. Yeah. So I mean, just wrapping things up.

00;44;59;07 - 00;45;20;01
Unknown
Is there anything you want to talk about? Hardware wise, you're putting out there? You know, you're talking about data. Maybe on the software side, like, what are we looking forward to? Is AI involved somehow? What are you excited about? Yeah, that's that's where it's going, right? Like everyone, AI is the buzzword and everybody wants to be able to, apply it to, well, completions.

00;45;20;07 - 00;45;50;02
Unknown
What we feel like we have is the machine that has that closed loop control that can feed into a model, because what you have to start with is a lot of data. Right? And there isn't there is not that level of data from a controls perspective for this niche, that we're living in. So we know what we've done is, is we've set up the hardware platform, which is completely connected to an industrial computer with the with with date data.

00;45;50;02 - 00;46;16;13
Unknown
The data is, a requirement from a control system. You're just going to you just collect it, right? It isn't an afterthought. Bolted on to the machine. So that's what we're that's where we're pushing next is the next level of, well, completions and intervention. All right. Yeah. So if, y'all want to learn more about automated rig technologies, you know, we, we did a whole episode with John on Energy Bites where you get more into the data side of things.

00;46;16;15 - 00;46;37;29
Unknown
Yeah, the, the old Jake and Colin episode is. I don't even know. You kind of get the backstory there. We are really shooting the shit in a casual setting. Yeah, but, Andrew, if you're if you got nothing else to share, then I guess we're good. And I appreciate you coming on. Yeah. Thank you very much.