The Forgotten Science That Made Shale Possible
0:00 Today, we're joined by Peter Duncan from MicroSizemik. He and several other top industry leaders will be part of an amazing panel happening later this month. Join us for a once in a lifetime event
0:12 celebrating the stories that fuel our industry. January 22nd, 2026 at the Norris Conference Center. Check out the link in the show notes and grab your tickets now. Hello and welcome back to Energy
0:26 101 Today we have a revisit from Peter here. He is our geophysicist and we are going to get into seismic and more specifically micro seismic.
0:41 So I re-watched y'all's episode that was about almost three years ago. And three years ago, it's crazy. And at the end y'all were, y'all kind of wrapped up like just talking about everything We're
0:54 just kind of shooting a shit and you kind of went on the tangent about how it's so cool, like, it's such a cool profession that just doesn't get like its flowers, right? And you kind of compare it
1:06 with the astronauts, like they're exploring the sky, like space and everything, the ocean people underwater and the trench doing, and like it's all, there's movies about it, and you see it on TV
1:15 and it's cool, but these geophysicists are doing the same thing with everything that we can't see around. Scaring what you can't see. And you're right, and here we are three years later and
1:25 there's sort of a movie about geophysicists or anything like
1:28 that unless - How can we make it cool, how can we glamorize it? How do we make it cool? But here we are three years later. Like I said, no one's talking about it, but
1:40 we had to have you back on because I think it's cool and let's just keep trying. And you're our favorite guests, so we had to bring you back. Oh, you're too kind. It's good to be here and I have
1:50 to say that I enjoy, I watch many of your podcasts and I really enjoy them. seem to make people feel relaxed and get to the real heart of
2:01 the matter rather than rattling off the standard stuff. But geophysics is cool. You're absolutely right. Geophysics is cool. And when I first went to university, and I have no recollection of
2:09 what we talked about the last time, so I'm just gonna free base. I love it. It's a good thing. So, but when I went
2:17 to go to university, I knew I liked science, and I knew I didn't like chemistry because my father didn't like chemistry. And my father was one of those guys who had listened to Lord Kelvin, who
2:32 said, There is only one science. It's physics, and everything else is stamp collecting. And while my father didn't really push me to physics, he did buy me a physics set when I was about in grade
2:47 seven, and we did all the experiments. But he didn't push me to physics, but he steered me a long way from chemistry. You can do anything you want, but don't do chemistry. And I never had much
2:58 affinity for biology. That seemed a little wet and messy. And so I just kind of went into general science. But the fun group at the university I went to, which was in Eastern Canada, were the
3:10 geologists. They were the fun group. They were the party group.
3:15 The reputation was A, if you wanted to go to a party group and still be science, then go to geology And two, the geology department always managed to guarantee that all of their students got good
3:31 summer jobs out in the field, doing practical work, which is, and I think to this day, I think was one of the best things I ever did, because too many students or applicants that I see these days
3:45 come in and they've never done anything in the field. They've never touched a rock or whatever. So I went into geology I was gonna get a good job. And it was with some fun people. And I did, I
3:55 had a fabulous job that after my first year, and I'm going to date myself by telling you that was 1970. And I went to Newfoundland to work on a copper project, copper exploration project, that was
4:10 being developed by a Chilean company. Oh, cool. And they were doing diamond drilling, drilling small holes, not big oil and gas kind of rigs, but smaller holes down to intersect where there
4:22 might be copper and we'd bring them up. And kind of my job was to split the core and package it up and send it away to get assayed for how much copper is there in it and that sort of thing. But
4:33 along the way, they sent this geophysicist into the field to do some work. And since I was the grunt, right, the first year student, I got to go be his assistant And we were doing what they
4:49 callinduced polarization.
4:53 but it's leg seismic in that we send a pulse of electrical energy into the ground and then measure the reflections from in the ground and interpret, and interpret whether there's war there. So if
5:07 there's a conductor like copper in the ground, when you send a pulse in, it lights up and it sends a pulse back and you know it's there and you can interpret where is the copper? And if there's
5:18 nothing there. Can you even tell the depth of the copper? The depth and the width and maybe even something about how much copper, what grade it is 'cause if it's just weak, you get a weak signal
5:29 and if it's strong, if there's a lot of copper there, you get a big signal. So my job, and it was dangerous, I don't know. But when you send this pulse into the ground, what you had to do is
5:42 have a long antenna so you'd have one place where you injected current the ground over here and way far away a couple of hundred yards away, you would have these copper pots that were full of copper
5:58 sulfate that were the other set of electrodes. And so the geophysicist who knew what he was doing would go up to, he'd be at one side of the line, and he'd have all of the controls. And my job was
6:12 to be at the other side of the line and put these copper pots down and then let him know that my hands were no longer on it, because if my hands were on it, I'd get a shock when they send the pulse.
6:23 And so, but he was a, so I did this for a little while. What kind of shock are we talking? Knock you over on your butt. Shock. Okay. Because you're trying to drive current through a lot of the
6:38 ground. I don't know lethal, but maybe, maybe knock you out. Maybe knock you out
6:46 If the ground's wet and you're sitting on it and you're holding on to these copper pots, the electricity might decide you're a better conductor than the copper pots are and bang. Anyway, not a
6:57 funny story. It was from Europe. Can I? Yeah, he was from Europe. And so we're in Newfoundland and we're sitting, there's cut lines and you're sitting, I'm sitting looking at him so that I can
7:10 know when he's turning on the current and we've got radios. So he's sitting and he's just down the lip from a hill. And I'm sitting across a little bit of a valley and looking at him and he's
7:23 hunched down with his back to the hill, reading the instruments. And this black bear comes stepping up over the top of the hill and down the line and is coming down the line, walking towards him as
7:38 he's sitting, reading his instruments. He's like locked in. And he's from So he's not a guy who knows too much about bears and things like this, okay? And I see the bear and I get on the radio
7:54 and I go, Roger, his name was Roger. I say, Roger, don't look now, but there's a bear coming up behind you. And the radio clicked. And when the radio clicked, the bear heard the radio and the
8:06 bear stood up. So when Roger turned around, there about 30 feet behind him was a black bear standing up on its hind legs and looking at him like this. Probably couldn't see him, could hear and
8:18 maybe smell him. Well, the equipment that Roger had went one direction. Roger went the other and the bear went the third and I'm sitting there laughing. And that convinced me that I wanted to be a
8:32 geophysicist. No, no,
8:35 the dangers. What was a true fact was that that guy being classically educated and every night we're in a field camp. didn't have much to do. And he showed me how to take the equipment apart, how
8:49 to put it together, and how to interpret the data. And to me, as you said a little bit a while ago, geophysics is about seeing into the earth what you can't see. Geologists hold rocks in their
9:02 hands, and I thought I was going to be a geologist. But geophysicists use fancy toys to see what the geologist can't see And a wise man once said to me and forgive the misogyny, but he said the
9:18 difference between boys and men or men and boys is the price of their toys. So here was a chance to do treasure hunting with really neat state-of-the-art toys and get paid for it and go out to the
9:34 field and go out in the woods and and chase bears and do all sorts of neat stuff like that. So when I went back, University in the fall of 1970, I went to the head of the department, the geology
9:46 department, and I said, Make me a geophysicist. And geologists probably considered geophysics a sub-discipline of
9:59 geophysics. So it wasn't as if he was offended by this. He thought, Well, that's neat. You want to specialize. It's still a geological discipline. And I'll tell you what, they went out of
10:08 their way to design a hybrid program for me, which was a mix of the math and the physics and the geology that you would need to be a geophysicist. And they let me do this program. It wasn't one
10:23 that was scripted. And it got me a really good footing. I got jobs every summer doing geophysics and worked underground and did all sorts of neat things and then went on to graduate school, but it
10:37 all started because of Roger and the Bear.
10:40 and led to a career that I don't think anybody could compare and you mentioned that geophysics is neat and people don't make movies about geophysicists. They really do because any time, geophysics
10:57 is just treasure hunting with neat tools, with neat toys, and any time you've seen anybody doing anything in a movie that has to do with finding oil and gas or treasure hunting or anything else. I
11:12 mean, if you've ever seen any of the films about trying to find Blackbird's treasure up in Nova Scotia, they use geophysics to look down to try to find that. The the FBI and the CIA, they use
11:25 geophysics to find where drug smugglers have buried their treasures, their dollars, or where gold hunting shows or where the caves are the tunnels. Underneath the Korean border or from Mexico up
11:40 into California for smuggling drugs. All of those disciplines where you're doing remote sensing is geophysics. And in fact, if I were to think about radio telescopes exploring the universe, well,
11:56 what I do in micro-size make is effectively make an acoustic telescope that's just like that and uses exactly the same data processing But I put it downwards, I point it downwards, and I focus that
12:09 antenna, and you could think of it as a dish microphone, it looks like it. I actually, we lay our geophones out on the ground, they look like the spokes of a wheel. And what I do in the computer
12:20 is steer them to focus on different points in the subsurface. And I'm not using electromagnetics, I could. What I was using in Newfoundland was electromagnetics, but what I use is sound because
12:32 sound will will go a little bit deeper into the Earth. and I can use that sound and bring it back, but I'm just exploring the universe below me as opposed to the universe above me, but it's all
12:44 geophysics. Well, I said, I couldn't imagine a better career. So you play with toys, you look with for things of value, and you get to travel the world. I've been around the world a couple of
12:57 times. I haven't been to every continent, but I'm gonna fix that. But I've been to every continent except Antarctica. And I've done work in them. I've looked at data in them, and I
13:12 was president of the SCG in 2003, 2004, and that's kind of what kicked off my world travels. And in that, when I was doing that, I got to travel around the world, particularly to go to different
13:25 sections of the SCG Society of Exploration Jivas, to meet different sections, to give lectures, or talk about the SCG,
13:34 But what I found was that I traveled the world, and everywhere I went, I found a community of like geonards who like to fiddle with toys and think about the math and the physics, and I'm not a
13:51 mathematician, but think about the math and the physics and the joy of discovery and the joy of being out in the field. And it's just been a great career, huge And it's a shame that more folks
14:07 don't really get introduced to it at a young age or at a younger age where they can have that chance because it's a tremendous career. Yeah, I love that you call yourself a treasure hunter. No,
14:19 I'm just a treasure hunter. I love that. I'm glad you kind of touched on the difference between geologists and geophysicists because that's a question I always have. Even though I think you
14:30 probably told me last time on the podcast, forget. That's all right. Well, when I, at one point in my career, I started off doing mining. And even after I got out of graduate school, I was
14:45 working for Shell and I was doing mining exploration. And I got stationed at a copper, not copper tin, at a
14:54 tin prospect that we were Shell was turning into a mine down in Nova Scotia. I was kind of the project manager, so we were doing geology and geophysics to outline the deposit so we could figure out
15:06 if it was big enough to be a mine. And it turned out that this deposit was what they call, I'm going to get a little technical here, but it's what they call a hydrothermal deposit. So what happens
15:21 in the earth, you know, the earth is we got this crust and then these deep rocks, the hot rocks from depth, they bubble up, really bubble. They bubble up into the crust. sometimes go all the
15:33 way to the surface and make a volcano, but a lot of the times they just sort of stop halfway up and get buried underneath and form these bodies that we call bathilists, but they could be griditic
15:46 and a lot of the stuff that you put on your tabletops is cut out of these bathilists from down in Brazil or whatever. But what happens when these hot rocks go up, they heat the water that's in the
15:58 crust around it, and that water seeps up around the outside edges, and it actually leeches out of the country rock that they're intruding into the valuable minerals. And in this place I was, this
16:12 tin deposit was one of these geothermal deposits, hydrothermal deposits, and on the edges were little veins of gold. So people would go out actually on the weekends and pan for this gold. I never
16:27 did. I like real gold. Like real gold. Real gold. Yeah, not full of gold. Real gold. So, I tell this story because the rock that the batholith came up into, that it leached the gold from,
16:41 was called the Maguma Group.
16:43 And when I, when Shell decided to sell that mine and moved me back into the oil and gas business and said, You are now an oil and gas geophysicist.
16:53 I went back, but I carried my rock samples with me. And one of the rock samples was the Maguma Group So now I'm going to cast shade on some oil and gas geophysicists who do not have maybe the same
17:11 affinity for the rocks that I had developed or they got me into it in the first place. But I go back to Calgary and I'm signed to do seismic defined oil and gas offshore Nova Scotia. And I'm in my
17:27 first meeting where people are putting the seismic sections up on the wall These are these acoustic
17:36 sections that are like an acoustic image. Think of it as an X-ray down at the Earth, but it's a two-dimensional picture, a slice in the Earth, and it's just where the sound waves are bounced back.
17:47 And once you kind of get into it, you start to see the patterns and you can intuit the geology. Anyway, this section had this green line on it that was the deepest that oil and gas could occur They
18:02 called that basement. And they had written on the side, Maguma Group. And I'm listening to the geophysicist talk about his expiration that I didn't. And I said, What's that green line? He says,
18:13 Maguma Group. And
18:15 I said, Maguma Group, my God, just a second. And I ran down the hall to my office and I grabbed the piece of the maguma group and brought it back and laid it down on the table. And I said,
18:26 Maguma Group, Green Line, Maguma Group.
18:32 Were they excited? Well, I was kind of disappointed in their response, because mostly what they did was look at me like I had rocks in my head, which I did.
18:45 But anyway, so seismologists, yes, were different than geologists, or a
18:52 lot of geophysicists are different from geologists. In the end, we're trying to intuit or infer what's going on in the earth, what the earth looks like down there, making an image of it. And we
19:05 use pattern recognition, I mean, when I love it today, everybody talks AI, right? Well, geophysicists forever have been doing pattern recognition or machine learning or AI in their heads, and
19:20 then later with computers, by looking at what geology looks like, what What does a salt dome look like if you have a. an outcrop or a rock, a road cut. What does a fold look like? And so we look
19:37 at those patterns and then we look at our seismic and say, oh, that's the same pattern. So that's a salt dome or that's a rock fold or that's whatever. So we're doing pattern recognition to
19:46 interpret. So all seismologists, all geophysicists have to interpret their data in terms of geology, but not all of them get to go out and actually hold the rocks in their hands Sometimes they have
19:60 to just depend on pictures that they've seen in books and things
20:20 like that. Which is kind of disappointing. I feel like it'd be cool if you couldn't. I think - Touch it. There is value. And certainly when I went through my basic training at Shell, there, the
20:22 whole point was they took you out to see the rocks and then took you back to show you what it looked like in your seismic section or whatever other section you were using and allow you to do that.
20:31 inference or that inversion of the data that you collect to create an image. But these days, so much of it is done by computer in that that oftentimes the students don't get a chance to practice
20:45 those very basics and fundamentals. They depend an awful lot on the computers to do it, which has made it faster and cheaper and probably better in a lot of
20:56 cases Maybe not quite so much. Not as cool. Not as cool. Not as cool. Not quite so much fun. But certainly, again, we're kind of waxing poetic about the career here, but
21:11 geophysics, particularly geophysics for
21:16 the oil business, up until probably the dawn of some of the financial computing or maybe the data centers today for AI has always been one of the biggest users of of computer technology and right on
21:28 the forefront of developing data processing for doing machine learning or pattern recognition or anything else. We have always been involved in that kind of enterprise. And sometimes it's not talked
21:46 about because it has, you know, defense kind of applications. One of the more famous geophysicists in the world from before my time, if you can imagine, was actually a guy called Norbert Wiener
22:04 who worked at MIT on one of the very first computers that ever existed. And what was that work done on in the beginning to develop radar and locate airplanes during the Second World War. And in fact,
22:23 if you go back even farther during the First World War. the Germans, a guy named Luger Mintrop, developed ways of listening to the vibrations on the surface of the earth to locate where the enemy's
22:39 artillery was. Oh, that's interesting. And then he founded a company to do exploration using that same technology and came over to Oklahoma and made the first discovery in Oklahoma of oil and gas
22:51 using that same technology. Wow. That's so cool. People don't talk about this You know, these things are all related. And when you start to,
23:03 well, for me, I find it fun to kind of see how it built on one step at a time and became more and more critical. But I mean, even the Mars lander had a seismometer on it and a thumper that they
23:22 thumped and recorded the signals to try to image the inside of Mars Wow, I didn't know that, did you know that? but we did learn about thumpers recently. Oh, yeah.
23:33 And you know that technology that Mintrop used that I said is exactly the same as elephants use to communicate. Elephants sense the waves in their pads of their feet and they can tell where it's
23:46 coming from and maybe even communicate. We're not quite sure what the language is. They can sense like miles away, right? Miles away The earth is phenomenal and it's one of the reasons that we
23:58 seismologists tend to use sound waves, seismic, just the German word for sound, sound waves rather than electromagnetics or whatever for the deep or the long distance exploration because the earth
24:05 transmits sound very, very well. I'm sure you've been in a pool underwater and how the sound
24:19 travels underwater, the
24:23 hotel over here, I'm not sure it's still there, but there was a hotel that when you swam in their pool, they pumped sound into the water and no matter where it was really loud underneath. That's
24:33 so cool. And I worked one summer, 1972,
24:39 I think it was. I worked underground in Sudbury, Ontario in a copper mine and there I learned just how well sound traveled. You could be,
24:53 say at the 1200 foot level and someone at the 400 or maybe 600 foot level could drop a hammer and it would sound like it was right next door to you. Wow. The sound would just travel through. Could
25:08 you hear it like 20 seconds later? There's certainly a delay, it wouldn't be 20 seconds, but there's certainly a delay. But it's exactly that
25:18 property of dense materials like the earth that earthquake seismologists used to image the interior of the earth and find out that we have a solid core. That oil and gas, geophysicists use to image
25:32 to find out where to drill. And that I use in my micro seismic practice, see, I'm bringing it back to micro seismic, that I use in my micro seismic practice to listen for where the earth has moved
25:49 to be able to create a different kind of image than conventional oil and gas 3D seismologists use. So you might ask me, well, what's the difference between conventional seismic and micro seismic?
26:05 Conventional seismic, I talked about that section that we had on the wall with the maguma group. In conventional seismic, it's kind of like an X-ray or an MRI or just a photograph. You're creating
26:17 a static image of the earth to see all of the structures in the containers, whether you want to guess might be or where there's. minerals or things like that, if you wanted to know how things
26:31 changed over time, you might take an image and then go back a year later and take another image and see what the differences are. They call that 4D seismic because of the time as well as the 3D's.
26:46 But what I do is take a dynamic image of the earth in real time. And these salt domes and things like that, they're not moving. In our time frame, they move over tens of thousands or millions of
27:00 years. But the San Andreas fault, when it moves, it's moving in real time. And when it moves, it creates a sound. And my whole practice is hearing that sound and then telling where it is, when
27:16 it went off, and how the rocks moved. So I'm taking a dynamic image. And I probably use this analogy before, as I always do, but. conventional seismic is to micro seismic as an ultrasound is to
27:31 a stethoscope. So the ultrasound can see something interior. Okay, if you repeat it over and over and you might see the baby breathing or something like that or it's heart, but you're doing 40
27:44 seismic then. But with a stethoscope, the doctor's just listening to your heart and inferring what's going on by hearing the sounds and that's what I do I listen to the reservoir and if the engineer
27:57 is doing fracking, hydraulic fracturing, to create a pathway for the oil to escape the rocks, then I map where those cracks are, the snap crackle pop, to know where to harvest it. If they're
28:12 doing geothermal work, which is getting to be talked about a lot more these days, and rightly so, I think it's a great source of energy. But when they're doing geothermal, they're drilling down
28:23 into the really hot rocks. Some of them, there's geothermal that their heat exchangers up shallow, but that's
28:29 domestic. If you want industrial level, hundreds of megawatts that can power communities, you need to drill down into the really, really hot rocks rocks that are two, three, 400 degrees. And
28:42 those rocks, since they're deep, and they are those bathillists I was talking about actually, they have their impermeable, the rock, the fluids won't flow through them. So what do you do? You
28:56 frack them, just like we did with the
28:59 hydraulic fracturing for the shales. You frack them to create cracks that the water will flow through and harvest the heat. So you create a heat exchanger and that creation of the heat exchange
29:12 chamber through fracking then allows you to flow water through the bathillith, harvest the heat back to the surface and create electricity.
29:22 And in fact, this is one of these ironies. I don't know if it's an area, but I think we talked about sort of how things build upon each other.
29:35 Back in the late 60s, early 70s.
29:41 The topic of the day, the new topic of the day in the energy world was geothermal Because back then, we all knew that the rocks at depth were hot. And we all knew, remember this is around time of
29:59 the oil embargo and things like that, that we had to find other ways to produce heat or produce electricity And windmills hadn't really got invented yet, at least not to the extent they are now.
30:16 And natural gas was something we flared, because it wasn't worth anything yet. and hydro, we were running out of rivers to dam. And the geophysicists and the geologists said, Look, we can drill
30:28 down deep, we can create fractures, and there's hot water down therethat we can harvest the heat. And so the governments got really interested, just as they have been over the last few years in
30:39 carbon sequestration. Geothermal in the early '70s was the carbon sequestration of the day. It was the sexy topic. Not only that, they probably thought like,
30:51 Oh, okay, this is where everything's heading. Everything's heading, everything's gonna be based off of geothermal in the '80s, and obviously we learned all the restrictions with that. So they
31:03 did, and the governments around the world sponsored about 15 massive projects to try to learn how to do geothermal. And they drilled the wells, and what they found was they didn't have the drilling
31:14 technology, and they didn't really understand how to create that heat exchange chamber. but they did do something that was really significant, significant to me. All of the micro seismic
31:26 technology that we used in the shales that I practiced today was developed during the work on these hot dry rocks trying to create geothermal heat exchange chambers. And they didn't work, but not
31:40 because of the micro seismic. They didn't work because we didn't have the technology to drill the wells and frack the rocks Well, go forward 30 years and people start drilling better wells into the
31:54 shales. And by now the geothermal projects have all pretty much been put on ice. They start drilling and the engineers start to learn to drill long horizontal wells in hard rocks. And then they
32:08 start fracking them and they develop the fracking processes that are current today by doing micro seismic monitoring, using the micro seismic from the geothermal. practice and creating the images.
32:23 And I'll tell you, when we started
32:27 fracking, shale wells back in 2005, '67, we were doing open hole fracks. That is, the whole well was exposed all at once. And then we started going to different stages where we'd block off and
32:41 do maybe three different stages in a well that was 1, 000 or 2, 000 feet long And what the micro seismic showed was that all you were doing was putting the energy into the weakest part of the rocks
32:55 and you were leaving a lot of the rock unfract, unharvested. And so micro seismic, now again, this is the geothermal technology, taught the drilling industry in the shales, in the fracking
33:09 industry in the shales, how to better position their wells and how to better do their fracking And then the shale business hit the fan, right?
33:21 stopped and my micro-size-make practice went down the tubes. But some of these unemployed drilling engineers who had made their chops or learned their chops in the shell business said, Well, wait a
33:35 minute. We've got a whole new technology now that we can apply to geothermal. And so they started doing it. And they've shown that it's being successful There's a project up, there are two
33:48 projects now up in Utah, in the valley there, where one is a government-sponsored research project and one is an industry-sponsored commercial project, where they're using shale technologies to
34:04 create heat exchangers down deep, and they're still monitoring it micro-sizemically. And so it's gone a whole circle from micro-sizemic being develop to support geothermal, to it supporting the
34:18 shale,
34:20 And now going back to the geothermal and everything that we learned in the shales is being applied. And it looks like it's going to be successful. Yeah. I always find that. I didn't know that it
34:30 took stuff from geothermal back in the day that drilling did. But I know now we use a lot of drilling techniques in geothermal, which is always cool. Drilling techniques that were developed for the
34:41 shale. But that were steered, dare I say, the microgrins, micro-sizing industry was responsible for
34:51 the development of those practices. I'd like to think that.
34:55 There's a lot of full circle moments, and we can easily transition into CCUS and all the salt domes you mentioned early. That's all connected, right? But I do want to talk about geothermal one
35:06 more time,
35:08 because the big limitation with geothermal is that it's super easy in certain parts of the earth where the mantle crosses closest to the surface, right? Like that's why Iceland is such a big spot
35:20 when it comes to geothermal. Yes. And then, you know, there's parts of, you know, basically like nowhere in the US is even close, right? Not true. Not true? Not true at all. Okay. And in
35:34 fact, the limitation on where you can do it is cost as you might imagine. So if it's shallow, like in Iceland, where it's just sitting on the surface of the earth, then it doesn't cost much to
35:50 harvest the heat.
35:53 But that heat at the surface of the earth is really not hot enough to be driving the turbines in the way that you need to create electricity. Now, if you look at the US, there's a really lovely
36:09 piece of work that was published by Stanford back, I think it was in May or June, a guy named. Roland Horn
36:21 and it's a lecture that's available. I'll pull it up in the edit area if I find it. Yeah. It's on the Stanford website and he did a broadcast and highlighted the advances that the geothermal
36:36 industry, particularly a company called Fervo, which is based here in Houston, a company called Fervo, the advances that they've made in reducing the drilling time and the cost and increasing the
36:49 efficiency of circulating water by doing better fracks and bringing it to the surface
36:58 and Roland's student, whose name is
37:02 difficult for me, I know they call him Jabb, but that's a shortened name for his name. Anyway, he, in this lecture, they show the potential where the heat is shallow enough. to be able to be
37:18 recovered at a good cost, at a commercial level in the United States, at the drilling costs before for those latest results. And then after, and if the after from the 2024 results, and I think
37:37 they've done better even since, it's expanded where geothermal can be commercial to from just along the San Andreas fault and down the Rio Grande Valley and somewhere up in the basin and range
37:48 provinces to almost half the United States. And what makes it also better is that if you can put these commercial deposits closer to a marketplace, then you that's kind of a double whammy that makes
38:03 it even more commercial. So really, there is a lot of potential. And I think to just continue this just one more comment, I think that the Ferval guys have. proven that they can drill wells to
38:20 get the operating costs down, that they can frack these wells to get the operating costs down. The one thing they have improved is over the long term, as you circulate the water and harvest the
38:34 heat, will the heat be regenerated fast enough? And that's why you need to go deep, 'cause if you're too shallow, you cool down the reservoir too fast So you need to go down deep so that the heat
38:49 keeps in there and you have a constant supply of heat. And I think that might be the one thing we have left to prove, but after that, it's Katie bar the door, geothermal away. All right. Yeah,
39:00 I've been trying to find someone actually from Fervo to come on to talk about geothermal. And then there's another company called Quays. Yes. I've been talking to them They sound like they're doing
39:15 like they're on knee. final front of like where we are right now with you at their mall. So Quays, I shouldn't I'm no expert on Quays, but I have read a
39:25 little bit about them and seen a couple of talks by them. They're a drilling technology. So they're out of the East Coast MIT, I think, and they're using a really fancy, I would call it a
39:40 laser-based drilling technology. It's all about reducing the cost of drilling, right? And so Fervo is still using conventional drills to go deep down into these hot, dry rocks. And they've made
39:56 marvelous progress on
39:59 reducing the drilling time. Quays is trying to do better to drill down into rocks that are even deeper and to do it more cost-effectively using these hybrid
40:12 plasma drilling techniques, if you like. It's actually a plasma. Good marketing terms, lasers, plasma. Oh yeah, really good. And now to my knowledge, they've certainly shown that it can be
40:23 done in the lab, and they've certainly shown that it can be done in shallow wells. I don't know if they've done a really deep test yet, 'cause when you get down deeper, there's all these issues
40:32 about removing the cuttings and stuff, and at that get we don't Why week. micro-sized about talking we're, 'cause fine That's quits. about know I everything exhausted, I've point like a
40:44 rundown of kind of like what your company industry does when it just, you're out in the field, what are you, what exactly are you doing, what are you benefiting, is it necessary when it comes to
40:57 the drilling process if we're gonna talk oil and gas at least? When I first started the company, I wanted to do, I had some intellectual property that I had purchased for shares, so it's on the
41:13 come made a, made a deal. with this professor who was a MacArthur genius grant fellow. And he had some intellectual property that he developed over his career, largely directed at mapping deep in
41:28 the earth, like mantle, crust, core, deep in the earth. And interestingly enough, doing
41:36 detection of nuclear blasts. So working for unaligned people to see whether the Russians were setting off nuclear bombs or the French were, or whatever. Because again, the sound waves travel
41:47 through the earth and you can see where it happened and when it happened and how big it was and all that sort of thing. So he had this intellectual property, he's getting old, he wanted to see if
41:54 he could monetize, if he could find some way in his retirement to take advantage monetarily of what he'd developed. And I was his guinea pig. I made a deal with him to say, okay, we're gonna take
42:07 what you've got, we're gonna scale it down to the oil field and we're going to take this ability where sounds are created and what created them and use it in the oil field and I wrote down all the
42:19 things I thought I could do with it and there were ideas like tracking drill bits or knowing when a fault is going to move that might cut off a well and cause an environmental disaster, stuff like
42:32 that. I made up a whole list of things that you could do and I put hydraulic fracturing on the bottom and put a big red X through it and I said, Ooh, hydraulic fracturing, that's supposed to be
42:41 nasty and there are other people who do it and so I don't want to do that. Turns out within three years that's all I was doing.
42:49 As I alluded to earlier, when people started hydraulic fracturing in the beginning in the bardette, we're up in Canada. They really didn't know what was going on in the subsurface and they had some
43:04 pretty weak models of how the rocks were going to break. What microsizemics. provided was the first opportunity to see how they really were breaking. And we learned very quickly that the methods
43:22 they were using were not particularly efficient. And as I said, it started off where they would just track the whole well, 1, 000 feet longer, as just one open, one open job. Whereas today in a
43:38 well of that same length, they'd probably do it in 100 little pieces so that the fracking would take place over every two or 300 feet, rather than just one or two places over 3, 000 feet. How did
43:53 they know that? Because we were watching with micro seismic, what was going on? We said, No, look, you're missing all of this rock in between, you need to treat it more regularly down the well.
44:04 So we, in the beginning, were teaching the hydraulic fracturing, the completions people.
44:13 how they needed to attack their well to create a better frack. And now that was sort of if you think of it laterally down the well. At the same time, we could see how far out from the well, the
44:26 fracks were going. And so we could tell them, well, you've fracked out 300 feet, your next well location should be 300 feet plus 300 feet so that you can frack back. So early days, we were
44:40 worried about the problem of creating fractures down the length of the well. Then we started worrying about making sure that you've got all of the rock in between your wells, so knowing what your
44:50 well spacing was. And then they started to drill these wine racks where the wells were here, like out in West Texas in the Permian Basin, you've got thicknesses of reservoir rock that are 4, 000
45:03 feet. And so you don't harvest that with one well. So we could tell how far up the fracks were going and where to put the next well in the vertical section.
45:13 That's kind of how the business developed, and of course, Wells were getting longer and data.
45:19 But then the
45:22 business matured, certainly in the United States,
45:27 and fields were getting drilled up a lot more than in the beginning. In the beginning, you had one well, and you were trying to make as much a possible that well And then you'd start to put pads
45:42 out of four or eight wells, and how should they be apart? How far should they be apart? Then vertically. And now they're in-filled drilling in between to try to harvest everything they've missed.
45:56 And nasty things started to happen. We have what we call fracture-driven interactions where a well that had already been drilled would be a hit by the fracks coming from the new well the frack kit,
46:11 right?
46:13 And our business, certainly in the States today, you were asking, what do we do in the oil field today? Our business in the States today is less about making a better well and more about not
46:25 hurting the neighboring well that you drilled six months ago because it happens and people don't talk about it. But we have, well, I have one experience where a company drilled eight wells and five
46:39 of them got sheared off by the neighbor.
46:45 And I'll tell you what, it's a career limiting thing to be the engineer in charge and have your8 million well get sheared off so that it has no value. Can you explain just real quick, like, how
46:60 destroyed is it when that happens? Is it completely useless or just a little less? It's the whole continuum. It goes all the way from the frat coming across and just causing a constriction in the
47:13 well. Um, and that constriction, sometimes they can bang out, you know, they can drive a tool through it and, and sort of knock it out. And it's not a big deal to, it's a constriction where I
47:25 can't get past it. And so I lose the well from there on, but I still got this part of the well to being it sheared right off. And if it's sheared right off, if it's at the heel of the well, you
47:38 lose the whole well. So it can be a whole continuum And it's it actually can go the other way to her on the other end of the damage that you can have. You can have one of these fracks come and hit a
47:53 well and not so much sheared off as have the sand, because they're putting in propins, right? They put in sand to hold the fracks open. Have the sand from your new well, go in and fill up your
48:06 old well So it. it causes it to not produce for a while and you have a while and you have to clean it out and it costs money and da da da da da. So when you're hitting the neighboring well, it can
48:21 most of the time be a bad thing and it can be a little bad to a whole lot bad. And you can't see any of it because it's all underground. Oh, I can see. You can hear it. I can see it was sound.
48:34 That's right I can see it was sound. Oh, God, that's just me out just there. The thing you're not an engineer. You don't know that.
48:44 All right. Well, we could talk forever, but we covered a good chunk and we have a whole another episode with you to even get more. But even with those two combined, there's still room, right?
48:57 Always learning. Yeah. Well, I think, yes, always learning is a good way to stay young
49:05 And a very famous geophysicist used to say, as long as you learn one, One thing a day, just learn one thing a day and you can take the rest of the day off. So we've talked about a lot of different
49:15 things. Maybe you can take the rest of the day off. I'm gonna take a week off. Yeah, me too. Yeah. You want to ask any more questions? No, I think I think I learned really well from you
49:25 because you're able to tie it into stories and it's very visual and thank you. I really appreciate it. Yeah, we didn't ask a lot of questions 'cause you - We didn't need to. We didn't need to. We
49:33 didn't need to. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not sure that's a good thing. I mean, maybe I didn't talk about what you wanted to talk about, but I'll tell you what. I promise that if you think of some more
49:41 things you'd like to ask me, I'm happy to come back anytime. Okay, okay. We'll listen back and if we come up with anything, we'll definitely write them down. You bet. And it'll be like, yeah.
49:51 Also, we could go a little, you know, you have a rock collection. I think we got to see it, you know? You got to bring it here. We go check it out and we do a little like - Yeah. Explain,
50:00 what was the Maguma group? The Maguma group. Maguma group. I want to see this Maguma group, rock. I think my wife might have thrown out all my rocks.
50:09 Move enough times and, you know, they're heavy, they're heavy. Move enough times and you get, uh, it becomes a, well, it becomes a boat anchor. Hey, you need to get rid of it, particularly,
50:22 you know, uh, if mama says you have to. Yep.
50:29 All right. I have a lot more, but what, you know, we are, we already came out. We went in and we came out So we'll have to just come back a third time. As I said, I'd be happy to. Thank you
50:42 so much. Thanks.
