The Insane Engineering of Deepwater Oil Production
00;00;00;00 - 00;00;23;28
Unknown
All right, everyone, welcome back to energy 101. Today we have Austin drawn from Radial Flow. And today we're having our offshore episode. Finally offshore wind a win offshore 101. Kind of I will probably go go into the weeds with other things. But I mean good old comparing the offshore to the onshore. I always say onshore. Is that right?
00;00;23;28 - 00;00;47;22
Unknown
When you land onshore, what's funny if you're in onshore, people don't say onshore. It's only something for somebody in offshore to distinguish the other thing because they're different onshore. Yeah I onshore folks like if you're in West Texas you're not going to say I mean I'm onshore in West Texas. Exactly. Okay. So what's up man. What are you doing?
00;00;47;24 - 00;01;18;08
Unknown
I, I run a technology company consultancy called Radial Flow. But I was at BP for nine years, and most of the time I was Gulf of Mexico, Gulf of Mexico, Gulf of Mexico. Shout out, is it officially official? Gulf of America? No, Bessy at the, the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement, which is the government agency that oversees it, changed like the day after changed their name on the website, on the official government website, the Gulf of America.
00;01;18;11 - 00;01;41;00
Unknown
I was impressed by how fast it got changed. The real the real one time, the real time it switches when Google Maps switched it. That's the official way. It's officially on Google Maps, I think it is. And back then it was Gulf of Mexico back in the days. Gulf of America. Gulf of America. Yeah. And so I worked, I was a production engineer in the Houston office, but I was supporting different offshore rigs.
00;01;41;02 - 00;02;03;27
Unknown
And so that meant I had to go out there and spend too much of time on the rigs and, like, look at stuff and meet people and see how it all works. And, and then I just sort of stayed there for like the next, you know, eight years or whatever. So then my career was really all offshore. And the particular, things that go on there, I did a little onshore in Alaska, so, you know, I was a different animal, the North Slope.
00;02;04;00 - 00;02;19;26
Unknown
Yeah. I've been to the slope. Spent some time up there. How cold was it? What what month was it when you went? I already month. Is December already talking now? Why? It's funny, in the summer is like kind of hot. It was like you could wear, you know, t shirt or whatever. And wasn't the sun shining all the.
00;02;19;29 - 00;02;39;02
Unknown
Yeah, whole entire never goes down. It like dips kind of low but then just keeps so crazy. Did it throw off your sleep? Yeah, I would say so. I mean, all the rooms have, like, heavy blinds as you go down. So you could still get some sleep, but yeah, it was pretty. You could definitely tell. Like, it would be like we were back in Anchorage, like it'd be midnight.
00;02;39;02 - 00;02;59;25
Unknown
And you still talking, hanging out, and you forget that. It was like, hey, it's probably time to lay down. Yeah. That's scary. That's so crazy. But it wasn't cold when you went while on the North Slope. I went also in the fall, and that was not nearly the worst of it. I mean, I was like a wimp. And so I was, I don't know, maybe like I would have done 20 and blowing or something, snowing.
00;02;59;25 - 00;03;18;06
Unknown
But I was very cold. And did you have all the gear? Yeah. They gave you some stuff I had, like, it's like this fleece and this heavy parka thing over. Yeah. There's a special winter gear you have to keep in your truck in case your truck stops working and you get caught in a snowstorm, like you'll die in 24 hours or 36 hours or something.
00;03;18;07 - 00;03;36;26
Unknown
What is it? No, no, it's like the the suit. This. Yeah. Special parka thing. So you won't they can get you in time, you know, like, save you from dying. You literally ducking cover until I think I'll stay in Texas. That's terrifying. Yeah. It was freezing to death. Pretty cool. The darkness thing in the night was the weirdest.
00;03;37;00 - 00;03;54;02
Unknown
It was like. It was like living on the moon. It was like you would wake up in the dark, you know, go to work. And then when you were, the sun would come up while you're in the office, right? It would be up for like 3 or 4 hours and we'll go down. So you come home in the dark and it's like, you know, zero degrees.
00;03;54;05 - 00;04;14;00
Unknown
How long were you there? I was there for a full year. It was like a training thing to learn on. Sure. So you were there for like, all the seasons? Yes. Yeah. Yeah, we moved up there for the year. My wife and then our first our daughter was born there. Oh, it's actually a funny story. My, my daughter, my first was born there, but I was two.
00;04;14;03 - 00;04;32;12
Unknown
So my dad worked for BP on the slope. You know. Yeah. That's so funny. So I went up and someone was like, you're like the salmon who, like, go back to their home to the spawn and lay eggs and then come back. It was like I had to go back to my home to have our baby.
00;04;32;14 - 00;04;47;17
Unknown
That's funny. Did you have more kids? Yeah. And you didn't go back? No, no. All the other I have, I have three more, so I have four. And they're all born here in Texas. Well, it'd been called. Sorry. If you want to move back for each one. Yeah. I also, I'm pretty sure salmon, when they swim up and lay their eggs, they die.
00;04;47;24 - 00;05;06;16
Unknown
That doesn't say. Do they die? Yeah. When is that the best analogy? But I didn't die I live. Yeah, it's close. Call the salmon. So okay. What is like the day in the life of a production engineer? Like, what do you do when you say you were in here in Houston as a production engineer, but you'd have to go offshore?
00;05;06;21 - 00;05;26;11
Unknown
Like, what does that look like if you not on the rig offshore? What is your job entail here? So it's it's like a oil and gas. Well it is different. So like this is one of the things that's quite different with onshore and offshore. There'll be similarities. But this is going to be one of the distinguishing factors.
00;05;26;14 - 00;05;44;05
Unknown
The offshore wells were we only had a few of them like for comparison. Right. So like an offshore. Well we may be operated like I was sort of in charge of like 12 of them. Whereas on shore is typical. You might have 100 or, you know, I had more than 100 in Alaska and then you could have a thousand, you know, way more.
00;05;44;08 - 00;06;03;03
Unknown
But if one of those wells, especially when I was on Thunderhawks, like if one of those wells went offline, like, and we didn't know why or be able to account for it within six hours, it was like the VP or the CEO or whatever. It was like wanting to find out like this, well, is offline. It makes, you know, 30,000 barrels of oil per day.
00;06;03;03 - 00;06;24;12
Unknown
The one single, well, why is it offline when it's coming back? What is? So a production engineer's job was to think about, every, every well and what is it making right now and like, what level is it flowing at? Is that the right level for that? Well, and if it's not at that level, like how do we close that gap and get it back up?
00;06;24;14 - 00;06;47;20
Unknown
And the point was you had to have like 100% awareness of, all your wells and all your production because it was like the production was the very revenue that the company was running on. Right. And to shuffle the wells had tons of problems. They would have a lot of challenges and problems, and they were like sneaky things that would kind of creep up slowly on a well and then like, bam!
00;06;47;20 - 00;07;11;10
Unknown
Just not like what? So like you would have, I don't know, we're going to get two techs. I know, I love it. Let's get technical. We'll, we'll ask you to explain if it's way overhead. So like, a big problem is, it to the oil that you're getting out is, can have something called asphalt in it, which is actually, like a gummy solid, like asphalt is like, sticky.
00;07;11;13 - 00;07;30;00
Unknown
But it's tricky because it sometimes wants to stay as a liquid and it'll flow, no problem. But under certain conditions, it'll want it. They say drop out or like become a sticky liquid or sticky solid and it'll like block off the inner walls of the pipe, but not totally. It'll just sort of begin to coat builds up like calcium in a drain.
00;07;30;01 - 00;07;44;21
Unknown
Exactly. Yeah. And then all of a sudden you could just have, like, a glob come up and just bam, shut off the well. And if you could, you know, there's some stuff you could do, but if you could get it back in time, maybe you could save the well. But if you couldn't, then you had to get a rig.
00;07;44;21 - 00;08;04;03
Unknown
I mean, you were going to tell your manager, like, we just lost this. Well, it's 10,000 barrels of oil per day. We think it's going to be down for four months. And, we are going to get a rig. We have to break in the rig schedule. We'll do a xylene wash, Xilinx organic solvent that can put basically push the asphalt back into solution.
00;08;04;07 - 00;08;23;29
Unknown
Drano. Got it. And yeah. And then you normally flush it out and then you got the well back. Right. So like that is one particular problem that you might have. But we used to joke like that a 10,000 barrels per day. Well was like normal. And it was something like the state of Montana's energy consumption or whatever, or like a big city or something.
00;08;23;29 - 00;08;48;06
Unknown
It was just like an enormous amount of energy that was going to be offline for a while. Because of these problems. So we would try to build like I was on a team that was really working on technology, because there's very subtle indicators as to that particular thing happening. You want to look for like certain signs and the pressure signals, but it's not like you can just look at the pressure trend and see it.
00;08;48;09 - 00;09;13;03
Unknown
You have to like calculate something and divide by something. And then you might see, like this little line starting to creep its way up. And like that was the thing we were looking for. So I built a lot of technology there that was designed to look for, target those things and then tell us beforehand so that we could maybe, shut the well down preemptively, do a easy, small thing to it to save it, and then prevent that bad thing from happening.
00;09;13;03 - 00;09;42;11
Unknown
Yeah. How long ago was it that you started working on, I guess 2016. Okay. And then so over the years, over the past ten years, have you seen technology really, like just blow up? Yeah. Oh yeah. Big time. Yeah. Well I think particularly in like I remember, early on if you wanted to do something, difficult or calculate something difficult, you know, it was an Excel spreadsheet was like the only option you had.
00;09;42;11 - 00;10;16;27
Unknown
You had to download the data on your computer and then open Excel. And you could, you know, use Excel and do little formulas in the cells and drag them down. And it was very manual. It was very like a lot of work, for one thing, like trying to answer one question for one. Well, and as time went on, like I remember, this is super nerdy, but I remember the day that you could write a Python script, but it was deployed in the cloud on the production environment, which is important because otherwise you still would have had to download chunks of data and like run these scripts locally and find some small answer.
00;10;16;29 - 00;10;40;29
Unknown
We can actually take the script and put it in the cloud next to where the data is and just say, hey, every hour. It's like real time pull stuff in, run the calc and output the value. And maybe I had the value say like, no, no issue, potential issue or you know, it's certainly an issue, right. And then we every day would have a dashboard then that would always be updating.
00;10;41;01 - 00;11;03;27
Unknown
And you could just look at the dashboard, have all the wells and it would have like no issue, no issue, no issue, maybe an issue. And when we got to do stuff like that and calculate stuff and put it in dashboards, a real time and automatic, I remember on the, it's like on the 21st floor or West Lake or something, we had these TV screens and they were supposed to show like the lunch menu or something.
00;11;03;29 - 00;11;22;09
Unknown
And the 21st floor is like where all the reservoir development team. Yeah. And I convinced my manager that we should be able to, like, use it on a rotating thing. So the screen would change. And we put the dashboard, the production dashboard on one of these like food menu screens. And it does. And people loved it. Yeah. Yeah.
00;11;22;10 - 00;11;40;22
Unknown
Because people were like stand there and stare at it and like everyone wanted to know, right? Yeah. That's awesome. I had a big thing for like the data should be totally available, clear, free, like easy to look at, like it shouldn't be hidden, right? Hard to get to. It should be like out there, you know. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00;11;40;23 - 00;12;06;29
Unknown
Data is definitely, an issue for all companies. So that's awesome that you it will do that. I have kind of a dumb question. Me too. Okay. So when I think of offshore, I just think of the rigs. I think of offshore drilling. What is a plot like? Is it just a platform when it's just like the like the wells actually in production, you're not servicing it or anything or whatever.
00;12;07;01 - 00;12;24;12
Unknown
Is it just a platform out there? These are these are great questions. Let's get into it. There's there's really two worlds even in offshore you got onshore offshore than in offshore there's two worlds. You've got the shelf is what it's called. So you have the continental shelf is where the gulf of like the thick of the coastline.
00;12;24;15 - 00;12;50;01
Unknown
Yeah. Extending out a few hundred miles. And then there is this big drop off called like the six B escarpment or something. There's a huge drop off in the water. Depths get dramatically deeper, you know, all of a sudden. So in the shelf was all of your old like they've been doing offshore stuff since like the 30s, you know, there have been there's very old shelf platforms that are still operating, shelf wells are normally, typically smaller production numbers.
00;12;50;01 - 00;13;13;05
Unknown
You know, it's like a in between onshore and offshore, offshore, past the shelf they call deepwater. And deepwater is actually a technical term. It's more than like 6000ft deep or something. But the point is like if you think about it, your hard your bigger pools of oil are probably harder to get to because all of the easy, close stuff was probably been depleted.
00;13;13;08 - 00;13;33;05
Unknown
So as technology and exploration improve, you're sort of scanning further and further out there and, you end up with things like deepwater. There's something called ultra deepwater, which is like 10,000ft or something. But yeah, then the question is like, but how do you they used to build, like a common shelf platform would have been a jack up rig.
00;13;33;05 - 00;13;52;17
Unknown
So jack up rig, you can still see them sometimes if you go to, like, Galveston. They have these large, towers. Yeah. That have those crisscrossing thing on them. What those towers are is they would float this thing like a barge out, and it's only like, you know, 100ft of water. So you need a 130ft tower. It lower these, those towers down.
00;13;52;17 - 00;14;21;13
Unknown
And then actually at the end, the barge would actually climb up the tower and the barge would become, platform and would, like, be situated there. It's touching the seafloor. For offshore, there's no way you're going to touch the seafloor. So what they do instead is they build either a spar or a semi sub semi-submersible and in similar cases, but like a spar is a tall think like a can of soda or something.
00;14;21;15 - 00;14;37;10
Unknown
And you can imagine that. Okay, let's say you're in a pool right? And you have like a can it's empty. So it's full of air. And imagine if you had a wire from the bottom of that can to the bottom of the pool, and there's like a small, you know, bloop or something on the bottom of the pool.
00;14;37;12 - 00;14;55;07
Unknown
And you, like, tug it a little bit, that wire, and it actually pulls the can down onto the surface of the water a little bit like a Bui can is pretty well situated and won't move too much. That's exactly how a Bui is made. It's like more buoyant, but it's pulled down a little and so it'll stay pretty much right there.
00;14;55;07 - 00;15;12;24
Unknown
Yeah. So we're doing the same thing with spar and semi sub semi sub. They actually sink the bottom part of it. They fill it up with water so it'll actually sit in the water. But the point is like you need these opposing buoyancy forces. And then you can have a structure that's pretty solidly like stays right there.
00;15;12;24 - 00;15;31;25
Unknown
They actually put like pipe. Then. Well, so then they'll run anchor chains and they'll run like they can't move or the pipe will like go up is their pipe. Yeah. We'll get to the pipe. It's quick. It moves in the water. I believe we were. Yeah. It's meant to take the resistance of the water. Okay. We'll keep going with the.
00;15;31;26 - 00;15;50;29
Unknown
Yeah. Wait. As you finish this thought, let me just say like like me, like, five years ago is thinking that, like, I understand there's there's drilling rigs all the way out in the water, like, not like on a shelf, but like deep water. Right. And I would assume, like 5000ft, whatever. Five years ago, Jacob is thinking like, okay, there's a structure to probably like a four pillars on each side.
00;15;50;29 - 00;16;12;19
Unknown
So it stands, I'm thinking there's a 6000 pillar, 6000. So like of concrete or whatever. It's like, how the fuck do you even do that? It's like, no, it's they they thought of a way around that. And it is floating essentially. Yeah. Like a billion tons of whatever. Just floating and not moving around, making you seasick somehow getting all that.
00;16;12;21 - 00;16;31;22
Unknown
Yeah. You still. I mean, so it depends on, like, how big the structure is or exactly how it's positioned. But everything will roll with the sea. So, like, if a storm comes in, you know, that thing is going to be heaving and, you know, you'll see like chairs in the control room, like sliding around. And the operators are like, used to it.
00;16;31;22 - 00;16;49;12
Unknown
They're not even, you know, they're not even bothered by it. Rest of us are like, getting seasick. But, you do have, like, maybe a drilling rig or a drill ship might have dynamic positioning, which is a bunch of little turbines on the bottom and a bunch of GPS signals. And I just want to ask that, that are helping.
00;16;49;12 - 00;17;08;07
Unknown
They're like constantly, you know, puffing little, turbine spins to keep it exactly where you're supposed to be. But those are susceptible. If you lose the GPS positioning and you get too far outside the pipe. Right. And we'll talk about the pipe. But there's a problem and you're like, we're having we're out of position with where we're moored to on the ground.
00;17;08;07 - 00;17;30;09
Unknown
We're going to have a problem. If we don't do something, will it break? Yeah. It depends. So how you get a pipe to connect from this floating thing to. But what's. Well what's down there. Right. Sand sharks. We the starfish. Yeah, that's all true. But, way down there is the seabed, right. And the seabed is like, kind of.
00;17;30;12 - 00;17;58;09
Unknown
Not that dense. Not dense, like muddy sand, you know, and way below that, like 10,000ft further down is the oil that you're trying to get to. So what you typically need is, you're going to definitely need a riser. And a riser is a big piece of pipe that's going to run from somewhere where it's going to connect to the floating platform and all the way down to the wellhead where it's going to connect to a well.
00;17;58;11 - 00;18;30;17
Unknown
Or it could connect to, very nerdy, but a Platt pipeline in terminal, or, manifold. But you typically are, well, let's say you've got your drill ships, you're drilling rigs and your production facilities. So let's say that you, let's pretend we're like Wildcat, right? Offshore Wildcat. It's pretty cool. So our geologist has told us he's got an elephant hunting, which means they're looking for, like, massive giant because it has to justify, like, a $30 billion platform.
00;18;30;17 - 00;18;44;29
Unknown
Right. So we need, like, there's pools of oil out there, you know that. We know of. But it has to be enormous to be able to for us to like go to invest in investment. Yeah, we're going to spend 30 billion on a new platform. So let's say we find something and we want to Wildcat. We want to put an exploration.
00;18;44;29 - 00;19;05;02
Unknown
Well, we're going to hire a drill ship. The drill ships going to like park over that spot using GPS. And then they're going to lower first the riser. Their riser is these pipes in joints, just like on an onshore rig. But they're first going to have to build this riser and slowly and run all the way down.
00;19;05;04 - 00;19;25;02
Unknown
And then on the seafloor they're going to need their, their Bop. And then then inside of that riser pipe, there's an internal space. Then they're going to run their drill pipe, and then they're going to start drilling down into the mud, the seafloor below. They're trying to get out. What is Bop? Bop is a blowout preventer.
00;19;25;04 - 00;19;50;27
Unknown
Okay. And these, you know, became the term became more famous after Deepwater Horizon because the BP famously malfunctioned. But, it's supposed to it has, like 5 or 6 different ways that you might shut off, flow that. So that's sitting at the bottom. Yeah. You deploy this Bop to the seabed, you have to sink it. They tested, I think, every two weeks you have to haul it back up.
00;19;50;29 - 00;20;09;18
Unknown
Some rigs have to bop their giant there, like, I don't know, 20ft wide and like 40 or 50ft tall. And, it's like a school bus turn sideways and they sink this bop, and then they have to hook it all up. They deploy these robots, these big, like, yellow and white robots with these little hands that go in and, like, so cool.
00;20;09;19 - 00;20;28;02
Unknown
Tighten stuff, turn stuff, attach pipes and stuff, check stuff, test stuff. And then you would drill your. Well, you know, and that part's interesting. Is similar in many ways to like, drilling the onshore. You just have to account for the riser. So you drill your well and you run casing, you're going to cement the casing or test the casing.
00;20;28;02 - 00;20;48;16
Unknown
And then when you're ready, you're going to, flow the well. So then what you have to do is you would like you have your wellhead, you're going to have to close your wellhead. So you have this, this pipe then of the casing string. Or maybe if you completed the well you're on tubing inside of it. But then let's say you finish all that work and you're well as like tested, ready to go.
00;20;48;16 - 00;21;10;28
Unknown
We were successful in our exploration, so we're trying to we got to make the oil right. How are we going to produce the. Well. Well the because that well would be called a subsea. Well, it's different from you. Have I realized it's kind of complicated. You have offshore wells that if you can imagine, each have their own riser.
00;21;11;01 - 00;21;33;16
Unknown
So like a particular platform might have 16, slots in the well Bay and they run 16 individual risers. They don't have to go straight down. It might be like a little bit octopus and land on different spots in a sea bin, but then those are going down further to the different spots to the reservoir, where it really does look like an octopus draining from different parts of the reservoir.
00;21;33;19 - 00;21;54;13
Unknown
But that we call dry tree because top of the wells where you put the Christmas tree called a Christmas tree, because the first flanges and valves that go out wider and then less wide. So you end up with this Christmas tree shaped thing. It's funny, the offshore ones don't look any more like Christmas trees, but the name carried over and it's funny tree.
00;21;54;17 - 00;22;16;19
Unknown
Yeah, but if the tree is on the seafloor, it's like 100 times more expensive and more complicated to operate. Or the tree is on your platform. So that's your dry tree and your wet tree or subsea tree. So like in our case, if we, we wildcat it our. Well, and let's say that there's no platform above our new.
00;22;16;19 - 00;22;50;06
Unknown
Well. So we're going to have to tie it back to something is where things get interesting because I might you know, there's cases where you have like a platform like five miles away over there, but the well is so strong and profitable that we're going to lay a five mile flow line just for this. Well, from here all the way over there and it's going to go up and it's going to connect to that production facility, and we're going to pay like a lease for them to operate our well, and they're going to run control lines all the way back, five miles out to that.
00;22;50;07 - 00;23;11;24
Unknown
So they can control the well from over there. And so you end up with these very fascinating, wild like arrangements where you've got a production facility with some wells under it and then like way over, there's a well then way over there to Wells and there's something called subsea loops, which you don't have to get into, but, yeah, that's a good start.
00;23;11;24 - 00;23;17;26
Unknown
It's a lot. Yeah. I'm visualizing 70% of that. You know, we do.
00;23;17;29 - 00;23;43;08
Unknown
All right. So yeah, I still have like a lot of questions around just this basic stuff. So a few things come to mind, like so we've been learning this last year that, you know, the on the island drilling has really gotten fast. Like from exploring being like let's boom, poke a hole, drill, suck it out and cap it like they're doing it in like less than a month, right?
00;23;43;10 - 00;24;03;19
Unknown
We're here like 3 or 4 weeks, something like that. So what's that timeframe on offshore? How years? Decades? We realistically like the modern day modern. Like let's poke a hole right now and start like, what are we looking at? Your typical it also depends in most cases what you're actually doing is they drill what are called the top holes.
00;24;03;22 - 00;24;24;23
Unknown
So let's say our exploration well successful and what that really means is we kind of know through some science how big the reservoir is, how much oil there is. And let's say like we throw a big party because it's huge and we like did it. And the investors, we build the platform and we now have a dedicated production platform and we are ready to drill 12 producing wells and two water injectors.
00;24;24;23 - 00;24;41;24
Unknown
Right to like, operate this facility. Well, the facility is going to have to operate for like 40 years to get all that oil out. So there's a lot of oil there. And, what that typically means is, we're like, all right, well, we're going to drill 12 wells. It's actually cheaper if we get a rig and just drill the top part.
00;24;41;24 - 00;25;03;17
Unknown
That's pretty straight 12 times. So imagine like 12 empty slots that are holes in the ground. And, when we're done with those, we can then kind of get a sometimes the same rig, but we can do very specialty technical things about. Exactly. We're gonna go down and then we're gonna actually turn kind of like horizontal drilling, but, or just generally called directional drilling.
00;25;03;17 - 00;25;27;08
Unknown
We're going to go for like a very specific spot of this reservoir so that all 12 of these little offtake points are like, perfect. They're just the right spot where the best oil is. We're gonna have two water injectors that are in just the right spots, like push or sweep all the oil up, you know, so you might your your top holes are shorter, maybe like 30, 60 days somewhere in there.
00;25;27;08 - 00;25;53;12
Unknown
But then your, your, reservoir target section might take longer. So I could take, you know, another 30, 60 days, but then your completion could take 90 days. So the overall the process takes much longer. And you're typically looking at like to drill an offshore. Well, I don't know. It depends wildly on the completion time for like, different problems, but it could be 90 million common.
00;25;53;12 - 00;26;11;29
Unknown
The low side like 150 million, on the high side. But, are we generally thought about like 90 days, you know, but then the rig schedule, there's only like, 3 or 4 available rigs in the whole Gulf, or maybe that we had access to. So we were always waiting, like we knew there was a cool new.
00;26;11;29 - 00;26;29;08
Unknown
Well, we wanted to add that we're getting later, but we had to wait till 18 months before the rig could come around and do that work. And interesting. I didn't think about it from that perspective. Yes, I think quickly being service, it's different that you would you couldn't just like call up a rig and have somebody out in a much shorter time frame.
00;26;29;09 - 00;26;51;07
Unknown
Normally you're signing very long contracts. And typically the reason it's like they always said, like it's offshore, it's ten times more expensive. It's gonna take ten times longer. There's going to be ten times more people involved with it because the risks are so much higher. Both kind of like health, safety and environment and financial risk of something going not right is both pretty bad, right.
00;26;51;09 - 00;27;16;16
Unknown
How much? Automation is out there now like a little is it a lot like is it automated like in drilling offshore. Is it unmetered? I think it's gotten better. I mean, it you can definitely say that offshore drill ships. Also, one thing is drilling completions was not my forte. I was more on the production side, but typically you're the highest level of technology sophistication you would find.
00;27;16;18 - 00;27;39;11
Unknown
In an in an offshore rig. Like if it exists, they're probably using it or trying to use it because things are so, high risk. Like they want the best stuff, right? So production wise, like what is what is your job when you go out there like, what are you? So when you were out there, did you have to sit out there for like weeks or like what was your kind of schedule like?
00;27;39;14 - 00;27;58;04
Unknown
So we normally so like let's say like all that office stuff I was doing normally. What, what like what's the result of all that work? It's okay to know what's going on with the wells, but ultimately you're trying to do something to them, like change. They every well typically had a set point for how much it's allowed to flow.
00;27;58;06 - 00;28;18;20
Unknown
This is another aspect. But like some of the wells were, they were powerful enough that they could actually blow apart their own, completion. If you just, like, let them flow full open, they would actually collapse and fill with sand, because the rock was not strong enough or the flow is too high or you're going to rip through the sand screen with high gas rate or something.
00;28;18;22 - 00;28;34;23
Unknown
So what that meant was we were always like setting the set point and then watching it very closely. And if we felt like we needed to change that or actually shut a well down to like do some maintenance or some work on it, we are communicating with offshore. So these are the the folks that worked on the facilities.
00;28;34;25 - 00;29;00;11
Unknown
You know, you normally had, the, the captain or the person in charge of a facility is called OEM, that is, a Coast Guard term, I believe, for offshore installation manager. But it's just very clear, like this is the person that's in charge of all the 350 souls on this vessel. And then from there, you know, you had your superintendent or you had your production supervisor, and then you had your operators.
00;29;00;13 - 00;29;23;00
Unknown
So the operators are typically the people that I would be working with, like multiple times a week or we had like, you know, calls twice a week, or I would be texting them or calling them or talking to them. And normally, like the control room operators and the operations production engineers, we're trying to be super in sync on, like what's going on with the wells, what's going wrong?
00;29;23;03 - 00;29;38;04
Unknown
You know, they would just they would call me in the middle of the night and be like, hey, this world is doing a weird thing. We're not sure. Can you take a look at my laptop, take a look at it, you know, be like, once, leave it and see what happens in six hours. You know, that sort of thing is pretty simple.
00;29;38;04 - 00;30;00;02
Unknown
From sleep. Yeah. You said, like, 300 souls on it. On. So there's hundreds of people on a rig. Yeah, well, they're all different sizes. Or they all have a different, like, pod bead limit personnel on board, but it's like a hard rule again, like a Coast Guard limitation of, like, you are not allowed to have more than 120 or 210 people on this vessel.
00;30;00;06 - 00;30;18;04
Unknown
I mean, my first thought is I've shot all kinds of stuff on, like drilling rigs on land, and there's like five people there doing all the work. Like how like, what are these hundreds of more people doing that at the compare offshore, like the I think Thunder Horse is the biggest at one time. It was like the biggest production facility in the world.
00;30;18;04 - 00;30;35;11
Unknown
I think I was on a horse, a rig or a basin or what is that? Thunder horse is the name of an offshore production facility, and it was one that I supported for a long time. And it's like near and dear to my heart. Working Thunder horse somewhere in the Gulf is in the Gulf of Mexico. I think it's in Mississippi Canyon.
00;30;35;17 - 00;30;54;16
Unknown
If you're familiar with the block names, numbers and all that, but it's, I think it's the biggest by POB by head count. It's like this giant big thing, you know, and it has a it actually had two, had a double Derrick and it had an entire drilling and completions side to it, an entire production side of it.
00;30;54;19 - 00;31;22;13
Unknown
So the drilling side was run by the well side leader, and then the OEM was sort of the captain of the vessel. But we had like painting crews, maintenance crews, let's say you have food. We had cooks, chefs. Well, well, let's talk about the actual dang good. Let's talk about the actual workers. Because if you go to on an on site, on land site, you know, you got a driller and a doghouse, you got 2 or 3 roughnecks out, tripping pipe.
00;31;22;15 - 00;31;41;25
Unknown
Some dudes like spraying with a hose, cleaning something like, I see this every time. And like this at only two more people. Like, that's not even ten people. So, like, what are the actual like? And these are all like. But these are all like, people with hardhats working. So like, how many workers are on doing something. Yeah, I would say, well keep in mind you're going to have like a day crew and a night crew, right?
00;31;41;25 - 00;32;06;11
Unknown
So already you've got sort of half and half, but you would have, you know, I think a lot of the same stuff there. But imagine that a lot of the part of it where you're like fixing or cleaning or working on something that you could see is sort of being done by, this whole sub team and the sub team maybe are like, in that they had this like, ROV is a remote operated vehicle.
00;32;06;11 - 00;32;29;27
Unknown
Those are the robots that went down and fiddled with stuff we might have like two, ROV shacks, these little air conditioned cabins that you would go in and they had, you know, 2 or 3 operators controlling the robots, barnacles or. No, they just had a screen up. But, VR would be cool. They did have a very cool, it was like this gyroscopic like, mouse pen thing.
00;32;29;27 - 00;32;50;14
Unknown
It was like, it was like a copy of the robot's arm, but in a little physical model. And you could, like, very carefully adjust this thing, and the robot arm would do the same thing. That's crazy. Literally playing video games. It's so cool. So I think. Yeah, you would you to your point, you kind of see maybe a little bit less on the deck.
00;32;50;17 - 00;33;07;23
Unknown
There's still definitely like, you know, mud pumps and, you know, sacks of bay right back there somewhere. But, a lot of the stuff that's happening, all the interesting stuff is going to be happening on like, video screens from feeds of what's going on at the seafloor or it's happening still in the in the dog house. Yeah.
00;33;07;26 - 00;33;35;06
Unknown
You mentioned earlier that like, you know, the the top exacts, the CEOs are keeping an eye on these, offshore rigs because they're, they're probably their biggest assets, right, compared to all the onshore stuff. So why why are the offshore stuff much bigger than onshore? I mean, obviously, it's this big rig in the middle of the ocean with all this room to drill, but it's like, so are some of these rigs on land or like in the middle of, like, nowhere Midland.
00;33;35;13 - 00;33;57;00
Unknown
Why aren't they operating so huge? Like they're only getting like 1000 barrels a day compared to tens of thousands? Like, why why is it a bigger deal on offshore? Yeah, I think it's because of, like, the general, sense of risk. And what's going on is a big aspect. But it's, it's a funny like it's a rule, right?
00;33;57;00 - 00;34;22;15
Unknown
That if there is a deepwater facility that exists and is producing the only way that that could have worked that way is if there was a ton of high productivity oil that would have supported that capital investment. So typically a deepwater asset is already like passed through all of these trials and stages that it gets to exist as this extremely profitable, high productive asset that you normally like watching super closely.
00;34;22;17 - 00;34;41;10
Unknown
But then, I mean, it depends like there's still higher producing onshore wells, but it could be like you still have wells, you know, in West Texas that are making like, you know, a few hundred barrels a day of that, maybe less than 100 barrels per day. I think they, you know, the term stripper well was a well that was like less than 50 barrels a day, that 20 or something super low.
00;34;41;12 - 00;35;00;13
Unknown
And, your offshore wells are going to be making. So like if, if a stripper, well, makes ten barrels per day, we're making a thousand times more than that with an offshore. Well. So like a 1000 stripper wells or a field of them right over many miles would correspond to one. Well, we have enough facility and we have 16, wells.
00;35;00;16 - 00;35;18;29
Unknown
Yeah. I mean, you gotta put in all that effort. You might as well go big. Well, you have to. It's capital. Like it has to have an ROI. Yeah. Otherwise, like, it's so expensive to operate you, it wouldn't be worth it if it didn't have enough. You says I'm funny. You made me laugh. Quietly. There's, like, deep water.
00;35;18;29 - 00;35;36;22
Unknown
And then you said it was like super deep, ultra deep, ultra deep. Let's stupid ass name. But it is funny, like, obviously it's like, technology gets better. We get to go deeper, right? Like, literally we're on a shelf. You said in the 20s and 30s because it's like right there, right? But then we learned how to go deeper.
00;35;36;25 - 00;35;53;10
Unknown
Now we're on ultra deep, like, what are we doing? Go inside the trenches, or just like the actual deepest part of the oceans, like, what is the actual challenge and what technology has gotten better to help us do that basically, you know, yeah, it's a good question. I, I would say I discovered like this, like when you think of a steel pipe, right.
00;35;53;11 - 00;36;16;27
Unknown
Like we're talking about a casing our, our production string of a drilling a well, we think of a steel pipe like, wow, that's very, you know, you just drilling, you know, a straight line. Straight line from A to B, we've got a solid, straight steel pipe, just like run it in there. What's the problem? You know, the point is that if you think of, like, maybe a thinner, like, think of a PVC pipe, you know, at Home Depot or whatever, like a ten foot PVC pipe.
00;36;17;00 - 00;36;38;20
Unknown
And if you grab the middle of it and you, like, wiggled it, that thing is super wobbly. It's like spaghetti, you know. Well, steel has the same sort of flexible behavior over a very long, span. So we're actually, like, trying to, like, push spaghetti down, like four miles away, trying to hit a, like, four foot by four foot target.
00;36;38;23 - 00;36;57;05
Unknown
And it's impossible. These guys nail it every time. Like, it's incredible the that in that aspect of technology, like the feedback that you're getting at the doghouse to be able to control exactly where the end of that pipe is going, getting in just right spots where you're going ultra deep water that's going 6000ft to 10,000 was 4000 more feet.
00;36;57;05 - 00;37;22;15
Unknown
That's another mile you've got to cover. So your flexibility problem is way harder. It's even more difficult. And then there's various challenges on the production side of like there's a big problem with, with a special kind of ice called a hydrate. So the sea bed is the bottom of the ocean floor is 32 degrees, you know, and it can't get any cold in there because obviously it freeze in ice floats.
00;37;22;15 - 00;37;47;23
Unknown
So like, you can only ever stay at 32, but at 32 it's very common for, methane that's mixed in with a little bit of water. The water forms this special kind of nasty ice called a hydrate. And it's really like forming an ice crystal. If you think of like water ice as a crystal. But because of the position of the gas, it forms like this bigger, nastier, like sticky crystal called a hydrate.
00;37;47;25 - 00;38;06;01
Unknown
And so that's a huge problem. Where have you got, you know, what say we have our four mile long flow and on the seabed it cannot get cold. If it gets cold, the whole thing will freeze up and it's gone. And you have to wait 12, 24 months to lay a new, you know, six inch line the five miles long from A to B.
00;38;06;04 - 00;38;25;14
Unknown
So we're like constantly monitoring for the temperature of the well is it. You know if there's a problem and we shut down the rig we can't produce, then that well's offline and it's on like an eight hour clock before it's dead. Right. So we're, like, scrambling to try to figure out what happened on the rig. Can we start the well?
00;38;25;15 - 00;38;49;11
Unknown
Can we turn on a pump and just, like, circulate fluid to get some warm fluid back in there? Like, these are the sorts of things we're worrying about. And as the technology gets better, we're going after deeper and more difficult to reach places in the in the ocean is what's adding to the challenge. Me it's so much harder than is like the Gulf of Mexico, Gulf of America like the easiest place to tap in because you know, they're off.
00;38;49;12 - 00;39;08;05
Unknown
They have their of the the North Sea up by like the UK. They have everyone they had the rigs off the, Perth and I'll show you they're in Guyana right now. Is there like geographically like it just looks like water. Right. So it's like, is there a difference depending where you are on the earth when it comes offshore?
00;39;08;08 - 00;39;22;07
Unknown
You know, I've heard some crazy things about the North Sea in terms of, like, the winter storms. They get up there, they get like waves from, like movies, basically. Right? They get like crazy 100ft waves and waves like ice on the top, like flying over and oh, my God, you went over in the helicopter on the North Sea.
00;39;22;07 - 00;39;44;02
Unknown
You had to wear a dry suit, which is like next level above a wetsuit, because if you're a helicopter crashed, you are going to freeze and die in the water. And so many hours or whatever. Yeah. I think. Terrifying. Do you have you been offshore since having kids? Yeah, I did go off. I would go offshore to support.
00;39;44;05 - 00;40;05;10
Unknown
We did a lot of, flowback support. So like the, you know, our Drano problem. Like, if our wellhead had an issue, we had to go do Drano. There's another challenge. The Drano was heavier than the oil is, right? Like oil floats on water. This Drano stuff is mostly water. It's heavier. And sometimes the Drano was like plugging the well.
00;40;05;10 - 00;40;23;20
Unknown
And so you had to, like, flow the Drano out. And then when you flow the Drano out of the well through this equipment on the production facility, it would like things would break, there would be more problems. So we the productions, you have to go offshore to support a flowback and you'd have to sit out there for like ten days while they're flowing back the well.
00;40;23;23 - 00;40;39;01
Unknown
And you had to watch, you know, at each time, like what was going on. Tell the operators and, that sort of thing. But I did do the, I remember doing the helicopter training. Have you heard about Do It? Yeah. Have you done it now? I really want to. We've talked about this so many times, I feel like I've.
00;40;39;01 - 00;41;01;15
Unknown
Mr. Bass, I know no, Colin worked offshore, so I like, was introduced to him through all of that. But the reason I asked, I was like, I when he, we had to go offshore would get so much anxiety because I'm like, I don't like actually, the first time he went offshore, was like my first like emergency with the kids.
00;41;01;15 - 00;41;31;25
Unknown
And my, son had dropped a weight on his finger. He was like two. And he dropped away. And it like his finger was like split in half. And I was freaking out. And anyway, I can imagine if, like, something else happened, I would have been, like, freaking out. But did we? Were you ever scared? You know, I think with my wife, like it was we didn't we didn't, like, focus on and then talk about it all the time, you know, that you would be because I read the thing that bothered me the most was that you'd be in the helicopter.
00;41;31;25 - 00;41;46;27
Unknown
And, I mean, it's like it's not quite as high as an airplane, but it's way up there. And then the airplane loses power, you know, it's designed you could just sort of glide, right? And it's scary, but you could glide down and make like, I guess the rock like audience will fall down. And there's it was like dangerous.
00;41;46;27 - 00;42;09;01
Unknown
There's so many. Yeah. Stories you hear about helicopters in their stories. They talk about the the helicopter lands and the blades are still turning. I turn sideways, the blades will hit the water and explode. Stuff like that. But yeah, we did this Hewitt thing. So you're in. You go to this, you to this normal looking conference center area and like, it's just sort of four hours of PowerPoint presentations.
00;42;09;04 - 00;42;25;25
Unknown
You're just, like, taking notes like, wow, this this course is great. I'm so interested in this. And then you're like, all right, now we got to go get our wetsuits on and go over to the to the pool at the YMCA. And you over there, they got this giant like metal contraption hanging over the water. And there's like, four guys in scuba suits that are down there.
00;42;25;26 - 00;42;48;29
Unknown
Did you survive? I yeah, I bet I did it. And then they, they you clip you in this thing and they dunk in the water. This thing turns upside down and you have to get out. It's because fear factor. Because that there were like maybe one or multiple accidents where the helicopter crashed, but, nobody knew how to get out, you know, and they or they figured out, like, they always turn over for some reason.
00;42;49;02 - 00;43;06;17
Unknown
And people were not, like, getting out of the aircraft, fast enough. And they were dying. I think it was like they were dying. It could have been preventable by just training on, like, how you get out. Yeah, yeah, get out of the helicopter. So that was the whole point was what was it? It was like index locate elbow through or something.
00;43;06;17 - 00;43;28;04
Unknown
There's like a thing you had to remember. And it was about like finding your seatbelt, undoing the five point harness, finding the window and pushing out the bottom corner with your elbow. But if you aren't strong enough and then, I don't, you know, they never everybody like, everybody got there, you know, even people who were pretty nervous, you could tell before that of where the thing went down.
00;43;28;04 - 00;43;50;17
Unknown
You can see who's going to struggle. And there is somebody like that with the scuba diver was like helping them up. Yeah. They make you die. Make everybody run it back till we got everybody to pass. Well, dark ending well and well. This was your first podcast so you know, congrats or whatever. That was a really good overview of like, you know, offshore.
00;43;50;17 - 00;44;17;04
Unknown
There's obviously we can go deep in a lot of that stuff, but, why don't we wrap it up with just like, what's in the future? What technology can we expect? I and and, you know, what are we looking at here? Yeah. Good question. Well, yeah, I think that's sort of the things I'm focusing on now is, in, in my businesses, like, I'm trying to help surface those same questions.
00;44;17;06 - 00;44;37;01
Unknown
Right. Like I the whole thing boils down to, I think I operate on the belief that, like, actually a lot of people are are very competent with what they're doing and are, like, seriously working very hard to do a good job. And all we have to do, if we're the technology people is like surface or make available to them what they already care about.
00;44;37;03 - 00;44;54;20
Unknown
I just think about so often people or like me, you know, trying to like find, you know, how I'm going to like, where did I pay the how am I going to find the guy who came to fix the electrical outlet right in the garage? Like I'm like, where was he? What's his number? And I'm standing like a caveman trying to, like, remember how I.
00;44;54;20 - 00;45;19;22
Unknown
There was this guy Zell? Was he Venmo that he emailed me and I can't I'm having a hard time surfacing what should be like a very basic and easy part of the thing. I'm trying to do. So along that very simple rubric, like that's all I try to do now is like, make it very easy for people to go actually do the thing they were trying to do, get rid of all the clutter that blocks us from, you know, our goals.
00;45;19;24 - 00;45;36;08
Unknown
So I find that if you operate like you believe that people know what they want, and they have pretty clear on, like the steps they would take to accomplish something, but they're just stuck at, like, finding the thing or everything's a mess, then really just trying to, like, surface all that for them. I think I really good at that.
00;45;36;08 - 00;45;57;09
Unknown
I've noticed, one thing that it's really good at is the many to one. Right? Like, your lawyer sends you, like a 35 page document to review. What are you going to do? You're going to control a control V if I send ChatGPT, you're going to ask it the question you had in mind, like, what happens if I don't?
00;45;57;11 - 00;46;17;18
Unknown
What happens exactly when you pay the guy on time or whatever? And it's going to tell you like, oh, will you run this risk or do this? Or you can say like, does this look normal there? So it's taking this 35 pages and you're adding your little like focus thing. And we're just trying to get out of it is like the single 1 or 2 sentences that would actually answer your question.
00;46;17;18 - 00;46;45;26
Unknown
So taking like a large volume of things and just giving you the one thing that you wanted, you know, it's like the that shaped problem, is really, really good at that. So I also tried to there's this thing I'm working on now called a narrative layer, which is where I want to compute like these properties or mechanics or like the pieces that are important to resolve, like, is this well, going to have this problem or that problem or how many days until this thing happens?
00;46;45;26 - 00;47;10;28
Unknown
I want to calculate that. So do like the hard calculations are fixed. Right. So I got the number because I don't want the I just sort of guess at those tricky things. But I don't want that number to get buried. And so the narrative layer is where you would just feed to the AI model like a bunch of different of the statistics with that prompt of like, do any of these look out of, you know, spec for what we're expecting?
00;47;11;00 - 00;47;34;12
Unknown
And then the AI does a great job, summarizes that gives a sense out. And you put that in front of people and they go like go, wow, I love it. Yep. We see the same thing AI collide and it's the best use case for AI. Making all these industries, especially important ones like energy efficient, safer, better. So doing good work and anything else?
00;47;34;14 - 00;47;54;17
Unknown
I don't think so. All right, well, join us next time for a more in-depth offshore experience because you can imagine there's a lot more rabbit holes to go down. So many rabbit holes. Austin, thanks for coming on. Yeah. Thank you. Yes.
