athollywood

Airthings! It’s great.

I bought a fairly expensive air quality monitor. Accuracy wasn’t what caused me to go with a more expensive model. I wanted CO2 readings, which most models under $200 don’t provide.

Texas electric prices have been capped at $9000/MWHr for the last few days. Average is about $35/MWhr. The Texas electric bill is about $10 billion per day right now.

The pay is good enough but their are other constraining factors when it comes to extreme rapid growth in an area. Housing shortages are one example.

Speaking as an employee at one of the largest independent E&P’s, we haven’t relied on debt and equity financing in the last few years because we have had enough free cash flow. The only thing slowing us down really is things like pipeline takeaway and labor shortage.

My natural gas furnace doesn't vent to the outside, and neither does my stove. Natural gas has orders of magnitude less pollution than coal.

I guess I'll explain how the business side of drilling a well works. An operator (think Chevron) will decide where and when the well is drilled. They will then hire a drilling company (say H&P) that owns and operates rigs to drill the well. Even though the drilling company operates the rig, they basically drill it however the operator ask them too.

So to answer your question, any operator requires these services, though most dont know it. A company called Pason is the leading company in the drilling data industry. Their bread and butter is just data measurement and streaming, though they recently have entered the analytics space. Their technology seems pretty promising.

All of our data is proprietary unfortunately. This leads to another start up idea: a data consortium company for this type of work. I don't think we would mind giving the data up if there was a legitimate way to do so and if there was some benefit for us (I.e. advancing the rate of progress in this field).

The oil and gas industry is ripe with potential start ups. Here are a few that come to mind:

1. A better system for automation and measurement. Current solutions aren't ideal when it comes to setting up new systems as well as updating and maintaining existing systems. We build several million dollar facilities a month and each one has automation and measurement equipment that has to be individually set up and programmed. Each technician does things a slightly different way, and the end result is a different set of automation and measurement logic at each facility.

2) Fiber optic DATS (distributed acoustic and temperature sensing) data handling and interpretation. This is a fairly new type of technology in which a fiber optic line is installed in the wellbore. The fiber optic line basically acts as a 15,000' strand of thermometers and microphones placed every 3'. The data from one installation is on the order of terabytes per hour. Oil and gas service companies that offer this service don't know how to handle this amount of data. The problem could probably be solved with S3 or something.

3) Drilling optimization. Create a software suite that utilizes ML/AI to help drilling engineers figure out the best way to drill a well is. It's a perfect ML/AI application. Lots and lots of training data available, easily defined input and output parameters, etc. Drilling engineering is full of hard, non-linear problems and humans are just really bad at it. The only way to be good at it is to drill lots and lots of wells and then listen to your gut.