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

0:00 Welcome back everyone to another episode of energy 101 today we have Andrew here from forecast. He is the chief technology officer. Do you want to tell us a little bit about how you got into the

0:12 industry? Yeah, of course. So my background is a geophysicist. So I went to Texas AM for my undergraduate and geophysics. And then I went to Cardo School of Mines for graduate school And that's a

0:27 standard for most geoscientists in the industry who want to work as a geologist or geophysicist. They have to go get a master's or a PhD. And so coming out of that, I went to work at Newfield

0:40 Exploration and I've spent most of my time there doing

0:45 on exploration teams and on operations teams And I was there for close to a decade. And then I left there to go to Inside Natural Resources and I was the geophysicist for them for about one. three

0:59 and a half years until we sold the company to exit it to Marathon. And then about six months now, I started working with Zach Copeland on Forecast and

1:17 took over development of the software and now that's what I do. Can you go and slow down on what the software is? So, ironically enough, it's not necessarily geoscience related, but I have a lot

1:30 of data science experience that I picked up from my work as an operator. And so, what the software does is it's basically a full suite, economics, and reservoir evaluation tools. So, if you need

1:43 to know how much an oil and gas project or a set of oil and gas wells are worth, or maybe even a future project's worth, our software provides the data, provides the tools and it provides all the

1:56 built an expertise that you need to create that evaluation and come up with a number. And so what we've done is we've streamlined the whole process to where almost anybody can pick it up. You don't

2:09 have to be a reservoir engineer. You don't have to be somebody who has a deep knowledge of how to build these valuations. And so we have a number of clients who are non-technical. You use it all

2:22 the time to make deals. And so we're really proud of that and we try to keep it very simple. And there's a lot of really powerful tools in there that we can help with analysis and forecasting.

2:32 That's awesome. So going back to the basics, can you give us the low down on what is geology? Yeah, so geology, in my opinion, is the most important field in oil and gas, because what you're

2:46 doing in oil and gas is getting oil from rocks. So the rocks are where it starts, and the rocks are what you really have to understand. And so geology, you know, being an earth science discipline,

2:59 an oil and gas specifically is studying the rocks were a welcome from. And what we do is we are trained and we learn how to predict and measure the different the rocks that are contained miles into

3:19 the ground. And there's lots of, there's lots of ways of doing that But a day-to-day geologist and a gas company will look at measurements that we take from the wells that we drilled and those are

3:32 called well logs.

3:34 And a geophysicist like myself will look at

3:38 seismic data which I'm sure you guys have at least maybe heard of but it's basically a way to create a three dimensional picture I think of like a sonogram or ultrasound X-ray create a

3:51 three-dimensional picture of the earth put it together and then interpret it for where rocks and oil and where they are on the subsurface, what they look like, what are the characteristics of them.

4:05 And those are the typical duties of a geologist, geophysicist is what we try to do each day. So is a geophysicist usually onsite or like would you go like, okay, you're offshore? Did you go

4:20 offshore? I mean, for fun, or

4:25 for like to check out the well site, right? But I would say it's not necessarily, it's not necessary. Although there is a subset of geologists in the industry that are called mug loggers, and

4:36 they are onsite just as much as anybody else on the rig is. So mug loggers are geologists who are picking samples from the well, so they're drilling and cutting into the ground, they're getting

4:48 rock samples back, and they look at the rock samples and they just do that continuously throughout. drilling operation, and they're really important for locating where we are in depth, for having

4:58 a person to check on site, what's happening in the well, and those are guys that we check in with quite a bit and use.

5:09 So what type of rock,

5:12 I guess, are you looking for? Yeah, no, that's a great question, and it's traditionally, in oil and gas, you can think of the rocks that we looked for as almost like sponges, where they can

5:28 take a lot, they can absorb a lot, they have a lot of pores, they have a lot of space in between them, and those are what we call conventional, and those are typically made of sandstone So

5:38 imagine like all the beach sand compressed into a really tight rock, and those have enough pore space to just post oil that migrates to them So I'll tell you about the. where that oil comes from.

5:53 But way down the subsurface when it almost formed, it creates pressure that's greater than just the pressure of being buried. And then so it wants to escape. You know, naturally it's trying to

6:05 find the surface because it's like, oh, this is a lot of pressure and we're receiving it out of the rock. And so it finds pathways inside the rock, whether it's through breaks or cracks or whether

6:16 it's just another rock on top of that's that's got space to take, take oil and displace, displace whatever waters in it. And it moves into those rocks. And so those rocks, you know, most of the

6:26 time are sand zones or they're like carbonate reefs. That's another really common reservoir. So that's another subset of geology is looking at carbonates. So almost like the reefs that you would go,

6:38 you know, dive, dive in. It's normal in the have coral and that are, you know, built up in certain areas of the world. And those can actually host oil as well. Those are conventional, that's

6:51 what we would do where you try to figure out where these rocks are. They're kind of in sparse areas because oil can only fine, you know, certain places to go to and migrate to. And then the new

7:03 world, the world that we've lived in since 2008 has been tackling what we call unconventional. And those are

7:13 essentially resource place. And so what you're doing is you're actually tackling

7:20 getting the oil from the rock that

7:23 creates the oil. So the rock that creates the oil is this really tightly compacted rock that has a bunch of microorganisms in it. And so geologists, we try to map those out and we try to figure out

7:38 where they are in the in the subsurface, because we can't. It's like you have a picture underground, right? You have to use these geophysical techniques. which is a well-logged geophysical

7:48 technique, seismic geophysical technique, and interpret that and figure out, okay, how deep is this? Where is it located? What is the rock like, how much oil does it have?

7:59 And so what we do with that is, so let me go back to resource place. So those rocks are really compressed, usually they're like fine grained, and they're like really thin, small clay particles,

8:13 like kind of stuff you'd see out of the Gulf of Mexico, and they've got a bunch of plankton, and plankton's the most common type of material that you use for source rock. And those rocks generate

8:25 oil when they get heat, those organisms generate oil when they get heated up, so they get compressed, and they get pressurized and pushed way down into the subsurface, and then as they heat up,

8:37 they expel hydrocarbons, they expel oil first, and then eventually they'll start as they get hotter and that oil starts to actually break down, it'll turn it into natural gas. So, and that's why,

8:50 so in resource place, typically natural gas is in the deeper part of the basin and oils in the shallower part of the basin 'cause it's just where it formed. And so

9:00 that's what we target in a conventional disease, these plays and they're called unconventional because you can't just drill a well into them expect them to flow back. They're really tight and that's

9:11 where the idea around hydraulic fracturing cane was you had to pump water and sand into those really tight rocks, break them apart and create these synthetic pathways that we generate with that

9:25 pressure to the well to flow through and come back to the well well.

9:30 So going back to seismic data, you guys use that to determine where you're gonna drill a well? Yeah, it's used for a few things One, yeah, locating where you are in the subsurface is really

9:44 important. So you wanna know how deep to drill, especially when you're drilling down and then turning the well, horizontally, like we do in most on conventional resource plays, you wanna be able

9:56 to find that formation across one to three miles. And in order to build a Ford model or to kind of build an idea of where that is projected out, you've gotta spend a lot of time, understanding,

10:14 okay, either you gotta map a bunch of wells and kind of interpolate between them, or you need to have seismic data, which basically uses sound waves. You can, we take like a big truck called a

10:28 fiber size or drill holes and put sticks of dynamite in them. And inside them off, and there's a bunch of microphones on the surface that then listen to those waves as they travel down, reflect off

10:40 the rocks and come back And so through some computer processing. you can figure out, okay, how far down are these different reflections and build a picture? And so the picture is, it's a relative

10:51 picture, right? It's like,

10:53 if you were to

10:56 use an ultrasound, but you didn't know what was there, you need like a doctor to figure out, okay, this is the, you know, like for a baby, I've got three kids, so I've seen lots of ultrasounds.

11:06 You've got, you know, this is the baby, this is our arm, this is our legs, this is our head, you know, like, unless you've seen it a lot It's kind of what a geo-business is like, you know,

11:15 looking at seismic data. We can, you know, we've have tools and we've been trained to look at the data, to map it, interpret it, and understand, okay, this is where the rock formation is,

11:26 this is where the well ties into in this image. And then we use that to plan wells, figure out where we need to drill them. And then the properties of the image, So like that, the ample to the.

11:43 The amount of energy that comes back also tells you a lot about the rock itself. So you can determine what kind of rock it is, how much oil or gases contained in the rock.

11:59 What else? I mean, that's the main thing. The rock properties. So mapping those out in a really dense way is what seismic is a really powerful tool for. And of course, you're spending millions

12:11 of dollars to drill well Obviously my next question is that it's obviously an expensive process. So does it ever happen like when you go do this process and there's you like picked the wrong location?

12:24 Yeah. I mean, that's expensive. Yeah. Yeah. So that's why seismic is so important because it affords you the ability to not make that mistake, right? You might you might get seismic over an

12:37 area and spend, you know, tens of millions of dollars If you're gonna drill, you know. dozens of wells, then you'll make it back immediately, 'cause each well might cost, you know, 10 million

12:48 to drill and complete it. And so, how long has seismic data been? Is it like a fairly new concept? Like, what did they do before? Yeah, so seismic has been around for a long time. I mean, the

13:02 first seismic reporting. We've done in Oklahoma, I don't remember the year, maybe somewhere in the 1920s, 1930s And that has been an integral technology, especially for conventional exploration.

13:18 In conventional fields, you can't just map a resource and say, well, we can drill pretty much anywhere here, like we do in our conventional fields. You can drill anywhere in this whole area and

13:28 make a well. That's where the concept of her dry holes come from. In conventional levels, you can literally drill a well that will make nothing. It might make water It might make maybe a little

13:40 bit of gas. It can make literally nothing. And so there's a huge risk to drilling those wells. And seismic is super, super important for this conventional wells. Not only for the depth, but

13:50 figuring out a case that are actually even whale here where I think there is, or gas here where I think there is. And so, seismic will tell you that directly. We use what they're called direct

13:60 hydrocarbon indicators to figure out if there are actually fields that you can drill. And so it's super important for that because it can be the difference between making a completely dry hole or

14:15 making an economic well. Right, so it's like more efficient to do

14:21 it. Yeah, and it's, you know, people rag on the cost, but again, when you put it against drilling and completing wells, it's minimal for de-risking. For people who are actually gonna put the

14:33 money into operating, it's a very important process that I think everybody should be doing And unfortunately, you know, I think. One of the timely things about this podcast and about image right

14:46 now is that geophysics and geology are on the decline coming out of universities. Graduates, there's just, it's abysmal. I mean, there's very few graduates. I know the same things happening in

14:56 petroleum engineering, but it's been like that in geology and geophysics since 2014, just been a steady decline. Yeah, do you wanna touch on what the image conference is? Yeah, sure. So image

15:09 was, unfortunately, I think, created partially out of the decline of geology and geophysics in the industry, and the number of geophysicists, because we used to have separate conferences for

15:19 geologists and geophysicists. So the geology side is AEPG, American Association of Petroleum Geologists, and then SCG, the Society of Exploration Geophysicists. And so they combine their annual

15:30 conferences into one, which I like a lot better, and you get a lot more cross-pollination, things like that, but it's basically a tactical conference where you can go and see talks and visit.

15:42 with vendors and just network with each other, other fellow geoscientists. They're targeting students that are coming out of college. Absolutely, yeah, yeah. That's a great place for students to

15:54 go. It's a great place to go get a job, bring a resume. If you're gonna go to image, definitely bring a resume or bring a, print off some cards. It doesn't cost very much to make some cards on

16:05 Canva. It's actually a good thing I've had. Lots of students give me cards before Made some good relationships from that, you know? That's awesome. Yeah, I know, or myself, like when I think

16:17 about oil and gas, I never think about geology. So, right, I think, yeah, this is good. That's sad, we need to fix that. Right, yeah, yeah. Because the rocks is where it starts. That's

16:28 where it starts, that's where it ends, you know? I mean, that's everything. You have to know, you know, where the rocks are, where the, we talk about the breaks in the ground, I haven't

16:40 really discussed yet. all these subsurface hazards, like faults you are familiar with, like what a fault looks like.

16:49 Well, these faults are deep down in the ground and there's these big displacements in the formations and you need seismic to Sam and you need to be able to map them, you know, to drill wells. And

16:60 then you need to understand them for like the natural permeability around some of these unconventional plays. So they, there's just all these natural fractures in the rock that we try to, try to

17:10 target. And yeah, it's just, it's so important to have good geoscientists on your team that are working with you, helping you understand the subsurface. Yeah. So when you guys are looking for

17:24 the potential of a site, using sites and data, like how, how long does it take? Is it coming at you in real time or? No, that's a good question. You know, a lot of the resource plays, for

17:37 instance, the unconventional plays have already had seismic acquired over them. It's a fairly long process to go and acquire seismic overall large area. I mean, it can take one, two years to

17:48 acquire it and process it and all that for a big area. For smaller areas, the turnaround time's gotten a lot faster with bigger, faster computers now.

17:59 But generally, you already have the data acquired. And what you do is you go through and interpret how regionally, at least it's a geophysicist, and you integrate it

18:12 with geology and with well logs, that are just the same thing. It's just geophysical measurements in the borehole. And you put all that together, usually ahead of time. And then you refine it

18:22 over time. As you drill wells, as you collect more information, it's just a constant refinement process because it's not like you get an answer when you get your seismic data. You have to have

18:31 somebody constantly looking at it and integrating it with new well data and understanding like, oh, well, this was, you know, a bad interpretation or maybe I need to change my understanding

18:42 you get the answer right away. You have to, you have to interpret it and figure it out. It's a relative process that's constantly evolving. Even for people who've been in the industry for many

18:50 years and are like, I can just look at a seismic section and be like, oh, this is what you have to do. See you later. Yeah. It does take, you know, it does take somebody there on the team,

18:60 you know, constantly working with you. Mm-hmm, wow. I know we talked about this before. We started the podcast. Yeah. Do you want to explain to us what's going on here? I thought this was

19:08 really cool. Yeah, so these come out of, these are some oil samples. I don't know if it's picking it up, the camera's picking it up or not. There you go. Yeah. These are some oil samples out

19:18 of my favorite basin and most, I would say most geologists who have worked this basin and ends up being their favorite basin. It's called the UNTA basin. It's in central Utah. And when I was at

19:31 Newfield, I had the pleasure of getting some of these oil samples. These are actually oil samples your solid at room temperature. because of the paraffins and asphalt teens

19:44 in the oil. And when you, it's kind of smell to it. When you actually transport 'em, you have to transport 'em in heated trucks. That's gonna be over 165 degrees to keep 'em molten and moving

19:58 in heated pipelines. And so it's a really neat, this is a really complex, very challenging basins. That's why a lot of geologists like it. And it's kind of a small area, but not a lot of

20:11 operators in it, but it makes some really cool oil. So as you go from a shallower section up through, let's see how my camera up through

20:21 the deeper section, as you get deeper, it gets more yellow. It has more paraffins, less asphalt, asphalt, teens. And so it's a neat sample collection that you can put in GM jars and kind of

20:36 put on your Jazzy and hang out. I just wanted to look at it more, it's a it's a When you contrast it with where I was when I was at inside this is from South Texas And you can see it's it's we call

20:49 high API gravity condensate and it's Very light. I mean, it's just it just looks like a gatorade I don't know that has a bad smell. I don't actually know what it smells like I don't want to open it

21:01 because I'm afraid that the BOC is you're gonna like invade my nose and I don't like it And

21:09 so and so this this was this was also this was collected in South Texas This is actually from the the Austin chalk, but it has a very similar The evil for oil would look the same, but you can see I

21:20 mean it's very it's very light. Yeah It's right. I API gravity, which is like a you know, non viscous and And so it's just neat to contrast the two, you know, this is this is super viscous And

21:33 this is you know really light and that's that's reality with oil basins and a lot of this is determined by the types of types of microbes and the types of organisms that create the oil. They can

21:46 create byproducts that make it solid or they can just make really clean, you know, really clean and

21:54 light oil. Mm-hmm. Would you say there's like more of

22:02 the light oil in Texas or? Yeah, so the oil in the Permian is, I would say the oil in the eagle fur is mostly light crude. You have some, we call it black oil, a little bit up-dip, that's, you

22:19 know, that's a little more viscous. But yeah, in Texas, so you've got the eagle fur, the Barnett, which is up in the Fort Worth basin, and then the Permian, which has got wolf-camp-bone

22:32 springs, Avalon, those formations. And I'm not a Permian expert, but I believe those are especially compared to stuff like this, you know, this, this type of oil, you might see, you know,

22:47 there's some Canadian grooves like the oil, oil sands is even lower API gravity than this. So it's basically just a, a puddle that they have to, or not a puddle, but like a, a slush, they have

22:57 to put steam in to actually mobilize it and move it. And that's what they call the, the tar sands, even though it's a bit of a misnomer. And so they're, I mean, and around the world, they're,

23:08 you know, or a lot of heavy oils like this. Interesting. And then he also brought really cool rocks. Yes. These are some, some gifts that I had been given over the years that are, um, bringing

23:18 me, you have an MI and, uh, a bivalve, which, you know, for most people who've had oysters, they've seen that. So this is, this is what it looks like when it comes out of the ground? Yeah.

23:29 So these are like, is this a dumb question? I mean, that's a good question. They're, this doesn't come like this. I mean, this is like polished. But yeah, you might imagine it being really

23:39 dirty in a bunch of bunch of other host rock around it, and these are cleaned up and polished and looked really pretty. But this is what they look like. What happens is all the organic material

23:52 that is contained in these, when they're buried, is replaced by something else. And so that's how they're fossilized, is that they're basically filled in, like this one's got a bunch of, this

24:02 Ammonite's got a bunch of little quartz grows on the inside of it, almost like a geode, and even like this trilobite, this little trilobite sample, it's got, it's essentially been replaced with

24:13 something else that goes in and fills it. And so, in general, for oil and gas, fossils are used to figure out, okay, what time period are these from? There's a lot of fossils that are from

24:29 certain time periods, and those will actually tell you, okay, if I look at a rock over here and I look at a rock 100 miles away, are they the same rock? they have same properties, but it might

24:40 be created totally different times. And so that can be really important for understanding when was this rock deposited? Is it correlated to the time where there's a lot of oil created? And so

24:53 that's, you don't look at fossils like this, but you might look at smaller and called biomarkers in the rock that are more measured in the lab, not necessarily like, or measured in core So we can

25:08 actually go in and take out from the borehole, actually go around and cut a whole piece of rock and pull it out of the section. And that's another great way of identifying what's in the rock that

25:21 you're trying to explore in.

25:25 And then we usually pull out a cylinder of it and cut it in half, then polish it and look at it in a lab and, you know, measure different boundaries. look for small microorganisms that are in

25:39 there and markers and do a lot of tests on it, and that's a really useful way of understanding of actually tying into the physical rock that's thousands of feet down into the ground.

25:51 Is that what your day-to-day looks like as a geophysicist? Are you behind a computer? Computer all day. Really? I mean, I would say for most people in upstream oil and gas, that's what you're

26:05 doing. Behind a computer, there's a lot of opportunity to go out and see outcrops. And I don't know if you guys are familiar with outcrops, but basically, you know, rock over time, as it's

26:16 deposited, is shifted and moved from plate tectonics. So as the plates collide and move around, the earth kind of shifts. The formation's bend and move and you get kind of put on a slope. And so

26:32 those slopes eventually can get eroded down and exposed to the surface. Um, and so those exposures allow us to kind of see a picture of what, what the rock is, you know, way deep down, uh,

26:43 underneath us, if we just kind of project it down, like, oh, this is the same rock, you know, over here and in south Texas, it's, you know, it's, uh, it might be two miles into the ground,

26:51 but over here, we can actually see it on the surface because it's dipping way up and in file is exposed. And so, um, those outcrops are common field trip that we'll do and all the gas will go look

27:03 at the woodford or go look at the awesome chocolate, Eagleford. We can't really look at the Eagleford because it's, because it's a shale. It's basically just eroded so horribly. It's a, it

27:11 doesn't preserve well at the surface, um, but you, there's spots where you can look at, um, lots of rocks on surface and outcrop and understand them a little better and, uh, get, get, you

27:22 know, hand samples and pictures and look at organisms that are contained in it. And, um, that's, that's, that's one field opportunity you would do as a geologist So I guess it just depends on

27:33 your upstream, midstream, Yeah, I mean, we're all pretty much upstream. Okay. Yeah, so we're basically all on the planning and execution side. And then everything, once the oil's out of the

27:45 ground, geologists and geophysicists don't really have a hand in that. So especially as the geophysicists, you're really, the only time you're on the field is when you're acquiring seismic data or

27:56 acquiring. There's other types of geophysics too besides seismic. I really only talked about that 'cause that's the primary thing that we use. But you can use electromagnetic waves, you can use

28:07 electromagnetic fields, you can use measurements of changes in density the across changes gravitational at looking by measure we which

28:16 earth magnetic fields. And those are more commonly used in other industries like mining and in an academia where you're just trying to map things

28:35 on the surface. But because seismic is the pious resolution to physical measurement that you can do for the subsurface sets. that's why we use it mostly. And talking about like technological

28:41 advances, is there something that could put out even like more accurate or faster data than seismic that has? I think the physics kind of limited, you know, because sound waves are the thing that

28:56 best travel down into the subsurface. It's all very compressed, you know, is everything's buried, it gets really compressed So, sound waves are the things that travel the fastest and the furthest

29:07 into the ground. And I think what we can do is just get better at processing it, yeah. So, and that's really what's changed over the past 20 years has been just this rapid advancement in not only

29:17 compute power, but algorithms. And of course, things like machine learning that become more available and full waveform inversion, which is a whole, you know, subset of seismic geophysics. It's

29:28 just like this really advanced way of looking at rock properties while you're processing them essentially.

29:36 and using the entire wave field because, you know, just there's different kinds of waves and there's different ways that you can process the data. So you have waves that are like compressional

29:48 waves. It's like, wavesy. Compressional waves are basically sound waves, like waves that you hear in the air. So if I'm talking, you're hearing compressional waves come into your ear. That's

29:57 what your ear bones are vibrating hearing. And then you have shear waves, which if you think about how like a slinky you might move the holder from end to end and kind of shake it. Shear waves kind

30:08 of move up and down like this. And they can move in different polarizing waves. And those can also be measured. They don't travel as deep, but we do use those for certain types of processing. And

30:22 then of course there's like surface waves, which is like what you see from an earthquake. Those are the waves that damage things. They kind of move side to side and do these really horribly

30:30 damaging motions on the surface that are called ground roll.

30:35 measuring and seismic. But those types of waves are the kind of things that knock buildings down and things like that. And so, whenever you're shooting seismic, you don't make much of those waves.

30:46 You just kind of feel it shake the ground a little bit. But when you have an earthquake, that's what causes those types of waves. So, mostly, capturing more wave information,

31:01 better faster processing, better algorithms, better computer techniques. Those are those are the things that we kind of advance in and what has really changed the industry a lot. This is a little

31:12 bit off top of it. I'm just curious.

31:15 Is there like when an earthquake happens, you can't predict that? Not really. Well, no, not really. I mean, you can find there are a lot of areas that are prone to earthquakes. So where plates

31:29 collide, you know, we're continental plates collide. That obviously a place where there's going to be a lot of noise from the earth

31:38 and There are just a number of known areas that we've measured seismicity over the years that just generally produce it from yeah, like California That's that's plates sliding next to each other like

31:47 this translational plates There's areas with a lot of natural subsidence. So a lot of the there's there's Room and the subsurface for things to kind of collapse and over time that that can cause

31:59 Earthquakes anytime you're having rock shifting against each other. That's that's causing an earthquake. Yeah But yeah, they're not really easy to predict necessarily. I guess they just happen on

32:10 Yeah, for the really big ones usually there's some There's some kind of leading smaller earthquakes ahead of time Mm-hmm, and if you know it's an area then that's where there can be some monitoring

32:20 systems I can send out alarms and alerts and things like that But yeah, usually if you live next to where earthquakes earthquakes are gonna happen. It's not much you can do about it, right? So I

32:29 have a kind of stupid question, so Since the earth is like constantly evolving, if you use any of these techniques to, you know, process data Say the first time you did it 20 years ago. There

32:45 there's no potential. Yeah, and then You know present day 20 years later. Is there a chance that the site has completely like evolved into something else? And now that there's like unlimited

32:56 potential in that area. Well, there's that's a great That's actually a great question because there's there's two parts of that one you could have improved your data acquisition Quality a lot over

33:06 20 years, right? So you might have shot a really crappy survey Maybe you only shot like really wide you only use like really wide sources and crappy your microphones and anymore Maybe your

33:15 processing techniques weren't as good. So reprocessing or reacquiring data over that same area could yield things That you didn't see there before you just didn't have the resolution It's like again

33:26 like I go back to ultrasounds because you know a lot of people understand that that analogy you know, when I was, when I was, my mom got an ultrasound of me, she could, they couldn't really see

33:37 much. Like they could barely make, bake out the image, right? But then 20 years later with the same technology, we're building 3D models of babies, right? And the one, it's a, it's a totally

33:46 different, you know, the technology has shifted so much, even though you're measuring the same thing, it shifted a lot. So technology changes is a big deal. But there's actually a really

33:54 interesting, um, another really interesting piece to that, to that question is that the subsurface can change So most of the time, geologic time happens over millions of years. I mean, we're

34:07 looking at things that happened hundreds of millions of years ago. And that's the time scales are just mind blowing. You think about that scale? That's crazy. It's crazy to think about. It's very

34:17 hard to imagine. It's very hard to, to kind of put in perspective. But when we think about the scale of which humans change things, it's very rapid. So when we pull oil out of a reservoir and

34:29 let's say it's a conventional reservoir that's And what happens when you evacuate that space, it starts to shrink because the oil is holding it up, right? So you get subsidence, you get changes in

34:40 the rock, in the rock above it, which is called the overburden. And you kind of get these features that collapse. So what a lot of companies do, especially in offshore, is they go back and shoot

34:50 over the same area, and then they measure the effects of those changes. It's called forward e-size mech. So they measure the effects of those changes, and that's becoming really popular now for a

34:59 number of reasons, one, because you want to understand what's left, right? You understand what's changed, what's still there. And two, we're talking about going and injecting CO2 back into the

35:10 earth, so you want to see how it's changed and see, okay, well, this is really depleted. Do we think that there's space to come back in and inject another fluid back into the ground in the same

35:21 spot? So that's actually, it's a very relevant question Yeah, yeah, I would have never thought I was I don't know what I have in mind for like sites and oil rigs and all that stuff. I actually

35:35 didn't even know oil looked like that. I don't know what I thought. That's why I brought it. I don't know if it was like olive oil in my mind. Yeah.

35:42 I think I just always had this idea that once you look at a site, if there's nothing there, you just move on to the next. And that's why there's all these myths and rumors about how we're running

35:55 out. But when you think about evolution and just how things are constantly changing, I guess I just never put two and two together So that's really interesting. Yeah, I mean, there's lots of

36:05 potential to go back and look at other formations and look at other areas that we didn't have to acknowledge it looking before. So absolutely, in areas that have opened up because of regulatory

36:16 reasons, silly things like that. I mean, if you look off the coast of Florida, for instance, I mean, it's basically an untouched, you guys know there's one of the most prolific area in the

36:28 United States is the Gulf of Mexico, for violent gas And Florida is a first lead. Untouched area and you know for a lot of reasons right people don't want all rigs in the background They don't want

36:37 potential for spills on the beaches and things like that but there's a lot of there's there's Tons of will out there. So there's a lot of areas that are just untouched for those reasons And you know

36:48 maybe with future technology and future safety protocols and ways to extract it Without having you know risk of spills that those areas one lock and and it's gonna be really important to have

37:01 Scientists to characterize those areas and to tell you where to go where to drill and how to understand you know Where this where this rock is located and what it looks like so is that like the

37:11 Florida the state regulates that like you can't touch Yeah, it's a well I think I'm not sure if there's federal regulations around it But I definitely know the state doesn't doesn't want you to you

37:19 know go drill around yeah around there. They're offshore areas

37:24 I've seen size makeover there. I'm like, oh, yeah, there's you know

37:30 It's like a visible line, you know, which crossed that line. You can't do anything, but I've seen some seismic that goes over the area. And same with the East Coast. I mean, the East Coast,

37:39 you know, we thought it was going to open up for, for drilling a few years ago. And, um, and there's been some kind of, you know, back and forth about regulations, but, but a number of

37:49 companies went in and shot a bunch of seismic over, over the area. And of course there's tons of potential, um, in the Atlantic margin. So

37:59 Cool. That is, do you guys want to move into rapid fire? Just do you want to take rapid fire? Sure. All

38:05 right. Andrew. In

38:09 your opinion, in your opinion, what is the biggest misconception of, um, hold on. Let me redo that. It's okay. Uh, what is the biggest misconception in the energy industry? Oh, we entered

38:22 that. We all hate the environment because I'm. In fact, I think you'll find more a higher concentration of environmentalists in a single industry than you will anywhere else. Because we all love

38:32 industries, especially on the geoscience side. Like we're all nature lovers, we love getting out. We don't wanna see our home and our world polluted. I mean, I've always felt like I was an

38:41 environmentalist growing up, I was in Boy Scouts, I was just very conscious of that. And so it pains me to see people like, you hate the environment, you hate the world, like it just, it drives

38:51 me nuts. So that's something that I really wish we could do a better job at explaining to people. Yeah, that's why we started this podcast to educate them 'cause they just don't know, you know.

39:03 Why should we care about energy? Oh, energy, one, it's tied directly to,

39:13 it's tied directly to,

39:16 sorry, it's like spacing out. You're good. It's tied directly to wealth and prosperity I mean, energy is required for prosperity. So we have to have energy to be a developed nation and other

39:31 nations need energy to be developed nations. And it doesn't really matter how we get that energy, but it's just, it's inherent. I mean, it's required in our society. And if we can bring energy

39:45 to people and lift the world out of poverty, who knows what type of technological advancements and

39:53 what types of things we'll see coming out of these other places, where people are living hand to mouth and can't escape poverty and can't escape

40:03 their situation. I think we'd have a much better, much cleaner, much safer world if we had more abundant energy. Yeah, good answer. In your career, what is your most embarrassing story? Oh God,

40:19 I don't know if I should talk about that on a podcast

40:24 A embarrassing story. A embarrassing story. And.

40:30 Yeah. Do you have a lot of them? Yeah, you know, it's so hard to choose because I've had so many slip ups. I would say, you know, I would say one thing that I have a very, I've

40:41 always had a very strong personality. And when I came into oil and gas, which is dominated by like a lot of legacy, right? There's a lot of, there's a lot of really, you know, really smart,

40:54 really established people in the industry. I think that I thought I knew a lot more than I did. And I was thinking like, oh, I'm gonna, you know, I'm gonna, you know, I'm gonna push my way

41:07 through this and I'm gonna be, you know, gung ho about everything and be the best in no time. And it's kind of that like that a lot of software companies, you know, kind of train software people

41:16 to think that way.

41:18 quickly realized through a number of embarrassing situations, which I won't detail, but it's good to know for people who are starting out there.

41:26 Listen as much as you can and take on as many mentors as you can who will keep you reigned in, especially if you're very ambitious, because those mentors know a lot more than you do and will teach

41:38 you a lot and walk in with open eyes and open ears. And I think you have a very successful career because I made those mistakes early on. And I have fortunately had some really great mentors who

41:50 kind of picked me up and said, no, no, stop that. They will say, well, humbly. Yeah. Humble you very fast. I had a fantastic mentor. I'll mention him here. Hopefully he listens, Doug Cook,

42:00 who would always humble me and we're very good friends now. And he's retired now, but he would, he had no problem from the very beginning from my very first internship humbling me and putting me in

42:11 my place. And, and not that everybody needs that, but it's just good to know that, you know, there's a lot to And there's a lot to absorb and you'll always, that's one of the fun things about

42:22 this industry is you'll always be learning. So try not to be too confident and try not to, you know, overstep your bounds too quickly.

42:33 Well, thank you, Andrew. This has been awesome. Our team will actually be at the image conference on August 30th at the gathering place. So you can find us there. Where can we find you? Oh,

42:43 yes, for our listeners

42:47 Are you on LinkedIn or? Yeah, I'm on LinkedIn. LinkedIn's the easiest way to get to me. And then, you know, I'm at most conferences. So you can just walk up and talk to me whenever you want.

42:56 Yeah, you'll be at the image conference. I'll be at image, yeah. Awesome. And we'll be sponsoring the booth at Fuse. So we'll be at Fuse. Oh, amazing. And we actually just had you guys

43:03 present over at Energy Tech Night in Oklahoma City too. We did. Yeah, Zach was awesome. He actually talked really highly of you. That's nice. I'm getting you out here. So we're super excited to

43:11 have you. Yeah, I was really sad I missed that, But I wasn't Hawaii, so I can't be too sad.

43:17 Yes, I lived down the street, yeah. Oh, cool. Wow, we'll see. Come see us at Image Conference, and he was sitting at the George R Brown, at George R Brown, and we'll catch you guys next time.