Big Digital Energy

00;00;00;02 - 00;00;29;18
Unknown
Welcome, Clyde. We are, on a Friday here and Clyde Studios. Chuck says he's off selling software somewhere. I do know there was pretty late night night shenanigans going on, but, he's been working hard, selling software and, we're going to do a special edition today, and we're happy to have Hawk Dunlap, who is a candidate in the Republican primary that day is March 3rd.

00;00;29;19 - 00;00;52;10
Unknown
March 3rd. Welcome, Hawk. Why don't we start out with the, the Hawk Dunlap origin story and the, the elevator pitch. I'm a sixth generation Texan. Bought generation oil and gas bill. Started working in the oil field as a worm. And in 1991, as a summer job while I was going to school at Stephen of Austin.

00;00;52;12 - 00;01;16;21
Unknown
Fell in love with it. It was, you know, growing up in, in Longview in the East Texas oil field. You know the history there. It's hard not to be romantic about it, but oil and gas, you know, when you when you grew up with all that history surrounding you, in the family legacy and, I was fortunate enough to work for a small service company that vacuum trucks wreck tanks and work over rigs.

00;01;16;21 - 00;01;39;02
Unknown
And so when it was when it was time to go back for the fall semester, I wanted, I wanted to stay on. And, I was I was blessed enough to that, you know, the boss. He said, you know, as long as you go to school, you have a job. You know, I already had a CDL and, started driving back in trucks at night on saltwater and holy frack tanks sneaking across the border of Louisiana at night.

00;01;39;05 - 00;01;56;16
Unknown
And then I'd, come in and take a shower to shore up, drop 65 miles and knock it out. Just go to school. And in between semesters, I'd get to work on the rigs. And that carried me through to when I graduated. They didn't, didn't think I belonged in the East Texas field do. But they said, you know, this field is going to die.

00;01;56;16 - 00;02;15;00
Unknown
And and you need to get out and see the world. So I had some help and I got on with Halliburton and snubbing pipe. And I didn't know exactly what snubbing was. I, I know it paid, who paid nine, 25 an hour and that they said they were going to send me around the world and, and so my hard on with them.

00;02;15;02 - 00;02;33;18
Unknown
Five weeks later they handed me a passport and, and a plane ticket, and they said I was, where am I going? And they said, you're going to Holland. And I had to call my mom, find out where Holland was. So we, there were several of us that went in, and none of us had been anywhere where we were just just old country kids or born kids.

00;02;33;18 - 00;02;52;12
Unknown
And so we we put on our stars, wranglers and our stars, button downs and black felt hats and hopped on a plane in Oklahoma City and went to Chicago and got lost in O'Hare airport, and finally got on a flight to Amsterdam and and landed in Europe and walked out. And everybody was staring at us and we couldn't figure out why.

00;02;52;12 - 00;03;24;16
Unknown
I guess I'd never seen any black veiled hat over, over in Europe. It sounds like, that was the same uniform we, we grew up in, in South Texas as well. So. And we ended up, ended up working in the North Sea. And continental Europe, worked on some gas. Cameroons and, South France was great in, in October got to, lay on central Bay beach with the, fur cut off corals and, they'd work as eight days and give us four days off.

00;03;24;16 - 00;03;52;00
Unknown
And so we got to, to around Europe a different kind of or and that started, pretty much a 27 year, international career for me. And so I ended up working for boots and Coats and, then, wild oil control and, lived and worked overseas for 27 years and traveled, worked and traveled to to over 100 countries, which is, amazing.

00;03;52;00 - 00;04;08;24
Unknown
Since when I was in high school, they were they voted me unofficially, most likely never to leave Gregg County. And, so we proved them wrong on that deal. I was living in Bali, Indonesia. I lived in Bali for 15 years. Still got the house there on a golf course. I had the view of the Indian Ocean.

00;04;08;26 - 00;04;29;08
Unknown
Wow. Which golf course is no good to go right on the peninsula out it. Ulu to and till. That was pretty much my days. Unless I was, I don't get called out on the job, and I've been called numerous times. I've been on but on the golf course and have a job, go in and have to go home, grab a gear bag and jump on my.

00;04;29;11 - 00;04;46;07
Unknown
Your company was based in Singapore, right? Well, Boots and Coats was here. Here in Houston. I formed my company in 2020, in based in Singapore. Okay. Right in the middle of Covid, when it's a good idea to start a company. And what does that we'll get into kind of why we're here, but what is I'm just curious.

00;04;46;07 - 00;05;10;18
Unknown
What is that? What does that well control cadence internationally that, you know, you you see the higher profile events. Yeah. But world wide. But we did a lot of kinds of. Yeah we did a lot of risk management too. We did a lot of, well control equipment audits for folks. We did, surface wellhead audits. They even sent me out one time.

00;05;10;20 - 00;05;29;11
Unknown
We had we had a HSC division, and one of our safety guys was, was going to be a dad. And, they needed somebody to fill in. It's a safety mans. They they sent me to Vietnam to be a safety man, which, you know, wasn't a good idea. And, got twist his ankle and came to me wanting to do a safety report, and I go, I didn't see it.

00;05;29;11 - 00;05;52;08
Unknown
So it did happen. The horrible safety man. But, you know, we I never I never turned down a job, and, and it didn't matter what what the task was, and and and we did, and we got quite a few blowouts, underground blowouts. I was fortunate enough to the guys that are that are still in the business now at various companies.

00;05;52;08 - 00;06;12;10
Unknown
I got to come up underneath them and I was I was taught, you know, it wasn't like watching a video, you know, I was taught and and I listened to the stories and I listened to to their histories and, yeah, it got sent out on the job by myself and a kind of the first time being out on your own, and you don't really know what to do.

00;06;12;10 - 00;06;27;29
Unknown
And you pick up the phone, you call in, and there's a kid right there. He said, you're going to have to make these decisions. Each of you can't make them. Then you need to get on a plane and go home and hung up on me, you know? And tough love and and, you know, ended up getting the job done and.

00;06;28;01 - 00;06;48;05
Unknown
Sounds like my first drill superintendent. Yeah. You know, and I came up again underneath a bunch of great guys and, but most respect for them and still to this day, they, they, they taught me a lot. You know, I think one of the, one of the things that they, they, they instilled in us is when, when we show up on the job, it's our job.

00;06;48;05 - 00;07;09;05
Unknown
And, we ended up having three types of customers. You had the customer that like. And Papua New Guinea, we landed there or you guys boots and coats and I said, yes sir. He said, well, she's all yours. And he we got off the helicopter and he got on the helicopter. We never saw him again. And then he had the, the customer that, that is I'm glad you're here.

00;07;09;05 - 00;07;23;18
Unknown
This is what we did and this is how you're going to fix it. You know, one of the one of the guys told me, he said, don't ever let the guy that mess it up tell you how to fix it. And then. And then you had the customer that you see. Then you have the customer that you love to work for.

00;07;23;18 - 00;07;43;26
Unknown
And, those are the guys. Hey, I'm glad you're here. This is our problem. How can we help you? And we had a lot of the partnership. Yeah, yeah, that was, but we did an awful lot of risk. And when we started well, control management in 2020, we built, equipment for our customers. We had, we built some 80 wagons.

00;07;43;26 - 00;08;00;04
Unknown
We built some other stuff for them. And then we did a lot of, blowout contingency plans, you know, just starting small, you know, the low hanging fruit. You know, when you're when you're a small company and you're trying to compete against the big ones, you don't, you know, you're not going to get all the big blowouts.

00;08;00;04 - 00;08;19;23
Unknown
And and we knew we couldn't work for the big operators. We couldn't, couldn't meet the insurance requirements. So, you know, we work for a lot of smaller companies around the world. And, and we were we were doing well. And in November of 21, got to get a phone call at 130 in the morning about a blowout in Nigeria.

00;08;19;23 - 00;08;38;24
Unknown
You know, they never happened to, you know, regular business hours and, I was on a plane to Lagos by 8:00 at morning, and, my business partner was a little bit, upset with me. We didn't we didn't have any paperwork signed. We didn't have, you know, he didn't even know who the client was. He just knew that, you know, I'd gotten on a plane and took off and went to Nigeria.

00;08;38;24 - 00;09;11;16
Unknown
And, you know, everything worked out. I mean, we got paid. We, you know, was there for three weeks. There was a couple more jobs going on over there. And I figured since I was there, I'd try to catch them. And, but we didn't, so I decided to go home and I got to Doha, Qatar, and, and I get the, you know, when you're working international and you get text messages from families, it's call home, you know, it's not 1 to 1 so called my sister and my mom had to have a heart valve replaced, so flipped around from, from Doha and came to Houston and all that worked out.

00;09;11;16 - 00;09;30;03
Unknown
Well, I hadn't been in the States in four years, so I thought I'd hang around through, Thanksgiving, 1st December and try to get home and and the Omni Crown variant Covid and and I got Covid locked out and, I could go to Jakarta and stay in a hotel for two weeks, but I couldn't get home, so I thought I'd wait it out.

00;09;30;05 - 00;09;59;17
Unknown
Waited through all of December and. And the 1st of January, was when the crane guys are blew out, and, and that's was my entrance into, the zombie. Well, if you will, when I'm going to and and they, they called me and asked if I'd come help. And you got to understand, my my sister's my hero, and she's she's six years older than me, but currently, right now, she's somewhere in Katy doing a 48 hour run.

00;09;59;20 - 00;10;19;18
Unknown
She's crazy. And I love her to death. But I had been underneath her, her thumb and, like, like a literal 48 hours. No, no, they're running for 48 hours somewhere around here, Katy. In fact, I'm a little leery about being here today because she might see me and try to make me run as well. My my son in law, one of my sons in law is an endurance runner, and they're a little insane.

00;10;19;18 - 00;10;36;19
Unknown
Right. Exactly. I don't I don't want to go anywhere near that place. And I wouldn't run across a parking lot for a free cheeseburger just to get that on the record. But but nonetheless, they they called me and asked if I'd come help this land owner. The railroad commission had told them it was a water well, and the landowner was going to be responsible for it.

00;10;36;22 - 00;10;57;23
Unknown
And I said, yeah, I said, fly me out there, get me some all sorts of burritos and hot peppers. Give me what I need to work with. I'll come out and do it for nothing. Ended up being a Chevron. Well, was, they call it, CT 112, the court desk, 112 and they handed it over to Chevron, but I had already made the trip out to the container ranch and started looking around for what they had going there.

00;10;57;24 - 00;11;24;28
Unknown
And, I had I had heard the stories and read the reports of that since 24 and 31.69 and all these things I had been following it, and I was when I was there, I knew something was wrong, but I didn't exactly know, I knew that mosquitoes don't die. You can't kill them. And and driving around the ranch that day, there was a lot of dead mosquitoes.

00;11;24;28 - 00;11;41;19
Unknown
And when I. Me dead mosquito it not not just mosquitoes without leaves on it. I mean, you could walk up to them and just snap them. Growing up in East Texas, we didn't have to deal with that. But you heard the stories. You know, you can't. You don't kill mosquitoes. And so I had I asked the question, I said, y'all spray out here.

00;11;41;19 - 00;12;02;14
Unknown
And I said, no, we don't we don't spray out here. And there were some anomalies that surface some, some wells that were allegedly plugged that had a eight and five eight switch back to two inch with a with a valve on top of it. And you don't let plug wells like that? Nope. There were some wet spots in different areas.

00;12;02;14 - 00;12;34;06
Unknown
There was water wells that were flowing brine, and really, at that point in time, I couldn't put my finger on it. But with the blowout that was happening just down the road and, and then with all the troubles that they had had, it, it was concerning and I looked at it as an educational, you know, I had never heard of this kind of pressure at these kind of depths and, or plugged wells spewing water, order of magnitude.

00;12;34;06 - 00;12;56;23
Unknown
What? What kind of pressure? Yeah. Well, what kind of pressure were you saying? I think I think it was 750ft. It was 500 p.s.i. And, you know, that was an anomaly. That's that's just impossible. You know, it's not natural. So, I hadn't I hadn't looked into all the injection in the area or anything like that at that point.

00;12;56;26 - 00;13;19;18
Unknown
Eventually, ended up catching another blowout in, Nigeria. They ejected five joints, a drill pipe, and, you know, got all wrapped up in the Derrick. And, we went and we took care of that and then came back, the decision was made to just do it. They'd asked me previously, how do we know we're not going to have any more failures?

00;13;19;21 - 00;13;43;28
Unknown
And I said, well, the only way to know is we got to dig them up. And so how we dug them up, I said, well, you got a backhoe. We just use that. So when I returned from Nigeria from another blowout, what time frame was this for? That would have been September of 22. Okay. We, we started excavating wells, and, the first seven wells that we excavated reference this with.

00;13;44;00 - 00;14;12;10
Unknown
They wanted to dig them up. They wanted to look. I had in my head and I said, yeah, we'll probably have 25% fail. Okay, I get it. I've been around long enough. There's fence posts and poles and things shoved and shoved in wells. And I, I would assume that we were 25%, we're going to fail the first seven wells that we dug up were all leaking and they were looking produced water.

00;14;12;12 - 00;14;43;29
Unknown
There was oil, there was gas. It's not the kind of discovery rate, you know, and and I was literally dumbfounded, I realized that we had a much bigger problem. And what I had thought, and then over the course of, 22 until December of 22, we just went big excavating. We moved down ranches, 22,000 acres. We moved down on the south side and started digging up wells there and finding, finding some of the same things.

00;14;43;29 - 00;15;09;00
Unknown
And, we we ought to have one. Well, that we had excavated, and had come back, had looked at it, had some fluid in it, walked away from it for, about a month, came back to check on it in the cellar was full of water. Then in December of 22, landowner filed a lawsuit against Chevron.

00;15;09;00 - 00;15;33;12
Unknown
So for the next three years, we we litigated heavily, doing discovery. So the operator record was operator Chevron on oil was Chevron and, and go on the hook for about 120 of 100. We ended up digging up 150 wells on a, on a ranch. They were on the hook for 120. There were several other operators that picked up the slack for the rest.

00;15;33;15 - 00;16;01;20
Unknown
But it was a and out of those, out of those 150 plus, what was the I cannot say, after looking at all of them, that any of them were plugged. And that was from visual inspection, from pressure, data recording. We even implemented a hydrophone that we would clamp on to, to the surface casing and, and record noise.

00;16;01;22 - 00;16;22;25
Unknown
And you can hear it, we, we tested there were some wells that were open that were not capped, that you could visually see that were, bubbling and flow. And so you could actually clamp the hydrophone on the surface casing of these wells and put the headphones on and, and stand over it and look, and you can identify other different sounds, whether it's, bubbling or fluid movement.

00;16;22;26 - 00;16;47;20
Unknown
Something's moving, something's moving. You know, you shouldn't be able to hear anything. And and of course, Chevron said, you know, this is new technology. Well, you know, we've been using hydrophones since World War two. They had them on on submarines, you know. Yeah. And I'm, I'm always willing to try something new. And that was, one of the, one of the fun things is that, you know, we we had something new.

00;16;47;21 - 00;17;05;23
Unknown
We had something to prove up. And to me, it was it was simple. You stand on a on top of the open oil that's flowing, and you clamp a hydrophone on it, you listen to it. And not only do you have a, an audio, reference, but you also have a visual reference. And, so that that was neat.

00;17;05;23 - 00;17;30;04
Unknown
And, it was a great way to prove things up that we couldn't actually get into. And we thought that Cerebral Wells, you know, was, and were able to, to record pressure data and we recapped them, lots of lots of strange anomalies that are whale plug in 1968. And we got into it was wet, contaminated cement.

00;17;30;06 - 00;17;54;09
Unknown
And we, we kept it back up and started monitoring pressure. And over time it get up to 1200 psi, and then it dropped down to 300, and then it go back up to 900 and it go to 600. And we had a big debate over, over temperature. And oh, it's, you know, it's, it's it's temperature changes and ended up and I'm, I'm still convinced that there's, there's 5 or 6 offset injection wells to the south.

00;17;54;11 - 00;18;20;09
Unknown
And as it was cycling, I'm still convinced that we were reading injection pressure from from across the highway, Bob. Miles away, which. Well, we're never was determined. And that pressure bleed off. Was that fluids going somewhere else? Right? Yeah. Right. So that, you know, that wrapped up, unfortunately, the, litigation ended late last year with a settlement, and it all kind of came out this year.

00;18;20;09 - 00;18;38;23
Unknown
We're we're supposed to be in. Yeah, we talked about that last week. We were supposed to be in trial the 1st of January. I really wanted to, take the stand, and and I wanted to have my my two days on the stand made 2 to 3 days on the stand. And, the that never happened.

00;18;38;23 - 00;19;02;11
Unknown
But, you know, I learned a lot. And I, I learned that these companies will spin landowners into bankruptcy before they they let yourself be held accountable for for their mistakes. So we used, we used to say everybody can hold their head under water for a minute. Let's say you can do it for ten. Yeah. Exactly. And you know, the railroad Commission has just said sit alongside and watch them do it.

00;19;02;13 - 00;19;25;20
Unknown
And they made one trip out and the district manager made one trip. He looked at 14, 15 Wells one morning. And we never saw him again going just that was it. And, you know, it just kind of sat with me. We've got a regulatory body who knows what's going on, who can come out and see these things.

00;19;25;23 - 00;19;50;24
Unknown
Yeah, they just settle on the sidelines and watch and see how it plays out. Because, you know, they don't want to do their job. I mean, the magnitude of what we're talking about statewide is, you've talked about it a lot and it it's still, you know, having dealt with the subsurface for a lot of my career and a lot of it was injection of CO2 and water and water and, you know, our projects.

00;19;50;24 - 00;20;32;02
Unknown
But 30 million barrels a day, almost a billion barrels a month. Yeah. We're putting away in a year, roughly what I think Bruno based, produced over its history in terms of crude and condensate. Those are those are big volumes, big numbers, big numbers. And the Earth is full, you know, and for the most part, we don't have any kind of reliable modeling or description of what's, what's going on and what those volume metrics look like, what you know, what disposal formations are, or, you know, what do they look like from frack radiant standpoint?

00;20;32;04 - 00;21;01;21
Unknown
All of those things that, you know, you go down there and and bust that right gradient and then you've, you know, where is the problem traveling. Right. And I think when one, one guy kind of put it to me, kind of simply, he said, you know, my neighbor has an injection. Well, and they're getting paid, by the injection company, and I'm the neighbor.

00;21;01;24 - 00;21;23;06
Unknown
And I'm pretty sure that water's moved on onto my acreage. And he said, it's it's like, especially if there's a pressure sink or in the form of an abandoned. Well, he said, if if I have a house with a basement and I don't use the basement, and my neighbor knows about it, and he digs a tunnel under my fence and he starts storing all his junk in my basement.

00;21;23;08 - 00;21;40;01
Unknown
And I don't know, because I never go down there. And then I get ready to sell the house, and then the next thing you know, we figure out we've got all this junk in our basement, and it all came from the neighbors. And who's responsible for that? Yeah. And that was a that was a huge concern that he had.

00;21;40;01 - 00;22;03;11
Unknown
And it made a lot of sense to me. You know, where exactly is this water going? You know, where how are we keep it in a place? I mean, obviously, mine was cold a couple of days ago about two more zombie wells that, that that blown out south and south of Midland. Obviously we're not keeping it in place and it's going wherever it wants to go.

00;22;03;13 - 00;22;24;27
Unknown
It's just too easy to get permits for or injection and and studies are not being done. They talk about doing studies, but or actual real studies being done to, to track where there's water is going and is it is it staying in place. And it's a it's a massive kind of historical data challenge. Yeah. Well it's all self-reporting.

00;22;24;27 - 00;22;52;17
Unknown
So I mean here you don't you don't really know exactly how much, you're putting away. And, but the industry has and the commission itself has enough data to start. Yes. We were talking about it earlier with the with the Callide team about, you know, the things that I remember as a young reservoir engineer, where you have a lot of good data, you can do some pretty basic volumetric things.

00;22;52;17 - 00;23;38;02
Unknown
We were more interested in sweep efficiencies and injection profiles and things like that. But you know, when you see it visually and you have a, somewhat of a, you know, pretty big error band around it because we're talking about subsurface and nothing is precise. But you do have an order of magnitude understanding of the three dimensional system based on your injection or your production data based on rock properties, fluids, permeability, all those things you can you can do a good baseline, of what it might look like, but let's let's look in in reality and, and the bottom line, the reason why this is not being done is because nobody really wants to know.

00;23;38;05 - 00;24;05;03
Unknown
I think they they've gotten gotten it's gotten away from them so far that if they start to model this, I think it's going to be a bad look for everybody. And so they, they really don't want to know. Well, as we said, you know, one of the reasons that the settlement happened and took the form that it took is that that's a precedent that that can't be allowed to to see the light of day.

00;24;05;07 - 00;24;37;01
Unknown
Right. And it's, it's it's it's unfortunate. I'm, I'm not going to be quiet about it. I know what's out there. I know what I've seen, and I know the work that's been done. It's it's as far as I'm concerned, it it's not going to go away from, from from my point of view. And that's just one ranch that we, we think about all the injection that's happening in the state, throughout the state and all the all the ranches that could be affected by this.

00;24;37;03 - 00;25;00;08
Unknown
Now we're just go, go on some more to prove it up again. And that's, that's the only way until until you beat this thing and beat it and beat it and beat it and somebody starts saying, waking up. A look at where we started four years ago, and everybody thought we were crazy, and I was a traitor to the oil and gas industry and blah, blah, blah, all that.

00;25;00;10 - 00;25;23;24
Unknown
And I look at where we are today, where we've shared the message. People have received the message, they've done some of their own research, and they're starting to get on board or they've they've seen it theirself, and had experienced experiences with it. We we made some long strides. Was it done immediately? No. What did we do?

00;25;23;24 - 00;25;44;05
Unknown
We get beat up a lot. Yes. But, over the last four years, we we started turning steer and and lay it over, if you will. The public is becoming more educated. The press has been real good to us. There's more and more people talking about. And it it's not just here in Texas, you know, in Muskogee County, Oklahoma.

00;25;44;06 - 00;26;15;10
Unknown
I've been talking to a family up there that, they say 15 years to to buy my house, and they spent half a million on a house I like. They've got 175,000 into it. And, one day the the guy's daughter runs into daddy, daddy to the bathroom flooding. And as a dad with with kids, you know, you think, well, she flushed something down the toilet, so he strolls in there, but nothing's coming out of the toilets, coming out of the walls, and ends up being a well that was drilled in 1947.

00;26;15;15 - 00;26;36;16
Unknown
And there's injection in the area. And so they they've had to move out of their house. They've had to rent a house. The Oklahoma Corporation Commission is kind of goes to them. They're not, not getting any help. And, so it's not just a Texas problem. We're starting to see these things crop up, all over the United States.

00;26;36;16 - 00;27;18;20
Unknown
And it's, it boils down to injection. Injection seems to be the common denominator. Yeah, that well, let's talk about kind of issues. And it sounds like injection and water disposal and all the trade offs and consequences of that are really a defining issue for you. I think that, you know, we have been distracted. Just general public has been distracted over the past 5 to 10 years where we've had a singular emissions focus and the industry has responded more responsibly, doing things like, routine flaring, mitigation.

00;27;18;22 - 00;27;43;19
Unknown
We'll get into CCS here in a little while. And your thoughts on that? But if you had to, if you had to delineate kind of the top 2 or 3 things, you know, what is what is hot as a railroad commissioner going to be urgently focused on well, injection. Most definitely. And look, we're we're not going to stop it, okay.

00;27;43;21 - 00;28;05;03
Unknown
We can't right. As an industry okay. We're always going to have to put waterway. That's just the nature of the beast. There's people out there that can recycle this water and we can use it or other purposes. And I'm real big on that, how that looks and how the scale is going to be and how they're going to be able to build it, to scale how quickly they can do it.

00;28;05;06 - 00;28;24;27
Unknown
You know, that's where the that's where the, water recycling people to, to determine but want to give it back is true, is that we have way too much injection in this state, and we're going to have to look at other ways how to how to handle the water. And it's going to have to be in a way that, doesn't hurt production.

00;28;24;27 - 00;28;53;18
Unknown
It doesn't, it doesn't damage the bottom line too much. And, of course, you know, I have ideas. You know, I want to, I need to fund our open. Well program. And so up I've said, you know, we put a ten cent administrative fee on every barrel of produce, water that we injected, put that money into the Orphan Well fund, and start trying to incentivize the the water recycling people, trying to help them get that price point down.

00;28;53;21 - 00;29;15;22
Unknown
Encourage operators to start, you know, let's let's recycle this water. Let's start using it for, I mean, East Texas paper mills, you know, data centers, whatever type of industry that uses a lot of water, we need to try to find a beneficial use to to this produced water. Yeah. There was a data center that I just saw a glimpse of it where I think it was outside of San Marcos.

00;29;15;22 - 00;30;01;22
Unknown
That got shelved because of pushback on on water. Right. And you're seeing in the data center, you know, sweepstakes, you're seeing a lot more pivoting to liquid called closed loop. And looking at the notion of I did a quick query last night, you know, how how much does a 50 megawatt, data center with the latest, you know, GB 300 chips and assuming what, whatever kind of is standard for the pool, there's a lot of different things that go into the cooling.

00;30;01;22 - 00;30;31;10
Unknown
But I want to say it was like almost 13 or 14,000 barrels a day in an evaporative cooling. As I understand it, that's got to be darn near zero quality type of water, which then starting with produced water to get it to that quality is not trivial, both from a process standpoint and certainly from capital standpoint. So these are these are really, really extreme challenges.

00;30;31;13 - 00;31;01;08
Unknown
I haven't seen anything and maybe I've missed something in terms of is anyone doing a commercial scale or even a scale pilot, taking produced water, I would think I would think that operators that have a water disposal issue, that if there was something viable, I mean, if you got water, gas, you can turn that into a higher value outcome with, you know, just for our generation.

00;31;01;10 - 00;31;25;05
Unknown
If, if then I could take some pressure off of of the water disposal issue of my produced water, my formation water, why wouldn't I do that? I think the issue is one process technology as it stands today, to be able to handle some of the most problematic water there is, which is formation water, and then the capital that is required right to do that at scale.

00;31;25;05 - 00;31;51;14
Unknown
I know there's quite a few pilot projects going on. And they've been going on for some time, and I did talk to some people in industry and I said, well, we're without without, you know, crying to me about your financial and your funding. What do you need? What would you need for me to, to be able to get you guys build a facility to scale, to store and let me do this?

00;31;51;14 - 00;32;13;26
Unknown
And I said, you know, we need a mandate. You know, we need, a rule. You know, we're unfortunately we're going to have to get we're going to have to sit down to start making these hard decisions, either. Well, nobody really mandated you go out and spend billions on direct air capture. Right. But there are companies that have done that right or are doing that are doing it.

00;32;13;26 - 00;32;35;18
Unknown
Yeah. And CRS yes, that's that's a whole nother thing with me. But you know, it's it's we're going to have to sit down and start doing something with this water. And it's, it's going to have to be a tough decision whether it's we start reducing, we quit, reissuing permits for older injection wells and start, you know, let's let's look at it like this.

00;32;35;23 - 00;32;56;00
Unknown
And, you know, I grew up with both parents smoking in the house, and I did too. Okay. And and, you know, the the surgeon general came out with his warning, you know, smoking's bad for you, and you probably didn't have car seats either. No, no, I rode in the back window. You know, the surgeon general came out with his warning.

00;32;56;03 - 00;33;14;25
Unknown
Maybe a few people dropped out, but probably not. And then they started going up. They started increasing the tax. And, you know, people, it was getting too expensive to smoke, but there were still a lot of smokers around. And then they started making it inconvenient for people to smoke. So you can't smoke in a bar anymore. Can't smoke in the restaurant.

00;33;14;27 - 00;33;33;22
Unknown
I was one overseas with the last three rows in an airplane. We were smoking section and it was it was great for us because the guys coming home from Saudi would always give us their business class seats so they could go sit in economy and smoke, you know, so it worked out well for us, you know, but it got more and more inconvenient and, and more and more pricey.

00;33;33;22 - 00;33;54;22
Unknown
And then the more and more people were, were realizing that this was a health concern and they were quitting smoking. And now it's it's kind of taboo. Not many people smoke anymore. And I know that's putting it simply, but eventually we're going to have to look at produce water injection that way, and we're going to have to find a better use for that water.

00;33;54;25 - 00;34;16;18
Unknown
And it's not going to happen overnight. But you and you're and you're and you're talking about now we can talk about the Permian specifically. You're talking about a region that is not long on freshwater endowment. No natural. But you look over at East Texas and you look at, you know, Louisiana has reduced the amount of produced water they can inject.

00;34;16;20 - 00;34;32;04
Unknown
So they send it over the border. So they send it over the border. And you know as well as I do, you know, subsurface, does it recognize state lines. And so it's, you know, it's all going away. And so in East Texas and Washougal and Carnac area, they're starting to see some produced water intrusion in some of their water wells.

00;34;32;04 - 00;34;59;05
Unknown
You know, their sulfates are going up and TDs is going up. And, you know, and that's that's the beginning of it. And so we really have a problem that, you know, it can't be seen. And it's not being talked about enough. And I believe heartedly, wholeheartedly that we have people in the industry that have the solution. I can say this is the problem and this is what I want to do.

00;34;59;08 - 00;35;28;13
Unknown
Now, go get it for me and let's make it happen. And what do you need for me to make that happen? And we have to keep a balance with our operators because we don't want them, especially the smaller guys that are running on these really, really, tight stream margins. The shoestring margins, if you will. You know, we don't want to burden them with with, additional costs that, you know, would put them out of business.

00;35;28;13 - 00;35;50;22
Unknown
So, there's a lot more people than me that can sit down with the, with an Excel spreadsheet and, you know, with more knowledge of how we can get this done and we can kind of meet in the middle to to start progressing this, to making it happen. And it's just not going to be, wake up one morning and this is what we're going to do.

00;35;50;25 - 00;36;21;13
Unknown
So you don't you don't think there's any way that, this awareness is not going to build that we've, you know, we've got a problem that we're going to address, you know, like, and Tina, is not it not an isolated case. Talk a little bit about the commission's program. What what is that focused on? You know, do they have the capacity to keep up?

00;36;21;15 - 00;36;44;15
Unknown
Because there's a lot of a lot of wells, and I assume that's mostly. And you can correct me with the with the proper terminology. But an orphan well, is that you've got no responsible party, right. So whatever, responsibility has been severed through bankruptcy, insolvency or they just went away. And so you're left with the problem that the state deals with.

00;36;44;15 - 00;37;10;21
Unknown
Is that the focus of what the Railroad Commission does actively in its in its own pay program? Yes. And I will preface, this by saying, have excavated some of the wells that the, Railroad Commission plug under the statewide plugging program, and they're leaking. So that tells me that maybe there's a, specification or a standards change.

00;37;10;24 - 00;37;35;24
Unknown
No, I think that they're not. They're putting a cookie cutter solution to the orphan. Well, problem. And, each one of them is different, right? Pumping cement into wells is not plugging. Well, we'll give you a case in point, because they never got below 500ft, they added too much calcium chloride into their, classy cement. And it blasted on them.

00;37;35;24 - 00;38;01;23
Unknown
And they submitted to work stringing the hole, and they end up having to shoot it off and drill it out. And it never went back below 500ft. And their experience, shallow cross flows and north into Pecos County, they there's no, delineation or remediation of the surface after they leave the pump jacks, the rods, the tubing, the tanks, the flow lines, and tell the landowner not to touch it.

00;38;01;25 - 00;38;22;01
Unknown
That is property of the Railroad Commission who stays out there for years and years and years, and nobody ever goes back. There's no end game to their operation. They want to get the numbers up and so they run in. No set up to three plugs a day. Cut the wellhead off, cover it up and tick the box that they they've got another one done.

00;38;22;03 - 00;38;43;02
Unknown
And and they'll even say, you know, they go to the cheapest bidder and you get what you pay for. And so you've got a lot of plug in contractors out there. And I'm not knocking them, but they're doing what the railroad commission said. If they want to get to work, what level of detail is required in a post plugging report that needs to be filed with the commission that I'm sorry.

00;38;43;02 - 00;39;11;13
Unknown
So what level of detail I haven't I haven't looked at what operators file after. They've although they follow W3 a it's approved and and that's it done. But how much details on that w3 I I I can I've read through a lot of w threes during the during the time and and Tina and I can I can tell you without a shadow of doubt I could get more information from a Shanghai newspaper than I could from a W3 profile.

00;39;11;13 - 00;39;31;16
Unknown
W3 it's a piece of paper. Yeah, it's a piece of paper that. And they say that, I mean, I'll give you a I'll give you a good instance. I read a W3 Chevron went into it. They're supposed to be three, three plugs in oil. They reentered. Well, the first two plugs weren't there. But on the W3 there were those plugs were there.

00;39;31;16 - 00;39;56;07
Unknown
They the only plug that they. Had they ever been there? Probably not. Yeah. Yeah. So I mean it's, just a tick the box pencil with paper trail. And so the, the third plug was, was found and but it was they were some of the same it up. About eight sacks were dumped by all on top of the cast iron bridge plug.

00;39;56;07 - 00;40;16;13
Unknown
And it came back look like kitty litter. So it was contaminated. I suggested to work that out and let's go around and tag the cast iron bridge plug. And I think Chevron's response was, you know, we don't want to call it the oil control incident. You know, something asinine. So, you can't believe what's what's on the W3.

00;40;16;15 - 00;40;39;11
Unknown
Now saying it, there are some fantastic operators out there, you know, and I know and that actually do things the right way that would, that you could pretty much taken further work on. And I met a bunch of them and those are the folks that, I'm not really trying to to lump into the egg basket.

00;40;39;14 - 00;41;05;14
Unknown
These these are the people. It's end of life. Nobody wants to pay for a funeral. They want it done as cheap and efficiently as possible and cut the oil, head off and leave and follow the paperwork and be done with it. And we've been plugging wells to the same way for decades. If you go back to 19, dug up wells that were plugged in 1968 all the way up to 2023, and they only and just classy cement.

00;41;05;14 - 00;41;39;14
Unknown
They, little bit of calcium chloride. But we have so many load in and all these cement companies I love this. And when I, when I talked to Orville people about it, they they all agree all of these companies have a little mad scientist in their cement lab, and they kind of keep him hidden from the rest of the world because he's he's kind of that strange guy, and he's in the lab and his lab coat and his little horn rimmed glasses, and he's mixing different blends of cement and mixing that's, you know, you can imagine the lightning going off over these, and, and that's, that's true for our industry.

00;41;39;14 - 00;42;02;03
Unknown
We we've all got that little lab rat and we come up with all different kind of cement blends and different types of material, and it doesn't get proven and it doesn't get approved, for, well, abatement. And I've got, I've got a landowner out West Texas has 200 open wells on his ranch. What a what a perfect laboratory this would be to try a different matter.

00;42;02;03 - 00;42;27;20
Unknown
I mean, they all belong to state. They're not ever going to be returned to service. They, you know, they've got every imaginable complication, whether it be hardy casing holes in casing fish, they've all got, shallow subsurface flow and all. What would be I can't imagine a better laboratory than to go out and let's start proving new materials that we we use thermoset, which is an epoxy.

00;42;27;23 - 00;42;50;21
Unknown
Offshore Saudi Arabia years ago, that on, on some high pressure, high temperature stuff. They use it in Norway quite a bit to understand and it's very expensive. Why not try to use it? Why not try to prove up some of this new material instead of trying to. Well, this may what what would something like that add to oh oh, a standard 50 to $75,000 peanut.

00;42;50;23 - 00;43;09;23
Unknown
Yeah, it's definitely going to it's definitely double it. Definitely going with thermoset. Yeah. It was it was quite expensive. When we when we use it back then I mean it was like liquid gold. I don't know where the price point is right now, but but there, there are other materials that might not be as, cost prohibitive, but that still carry some of the same properties.

00;43;09;25 - 00;43;31;27
Unknown
And a lot of these folks who have reached out to me and said, if you can get us on a well to prove our stuff, well, you know, we'll throw in our time and our material for free just to just to get it approved. You know, as it stands right now and, and well, on the container ranch, they wanted to use a class H cement and it took them nearly, ten business days to get it approved.

00;43;31;28 - 00;43;57;20
Unknown
I mean, they, they gave they waited three days. They let the rig down. That went on another well and started working on another well before a class H. I mean, it's not that big of a decision. So to, to effectively get to where we're plugging these things for a lifetime instead of for 70 years, we definitely got to start looking at other material to, to start plugging more resilient materials.

00;43;57;20 - 00;44;18;27
Unknown
Yeah. Include some mag oxy to include some, sodium silicate, you know, just just some just some basic, additives to, to where we know we're going to and there's going to be some instances where, you know, of course, you got to pull the production string if you can, you separate and pull it. Sometimes you can't. There's going to be some section milling involved so you can get a rock, rock, steel.

00;44;18;27 - 00;44;38;08
Unknown
I mean that's time and money, but you don't have to come back in a, you know, 50 years and dig them up and reenter any time to or in the case of year 2023. Yeah, I already have a problem. Right. And it was already it was already re plug. Yeah. So it was plugged in 21. That came back and plugged it again in 23.

00;44;38;10 - 00;45;01;28
Unknown
And it's leaking again. And so now you just think of the cost astronomical or what it's going to be to have something like a deeper root causes. Yeah. Let's get to CO2 real quick okay. Because that's been a I think, a topic that you've been pretty vocal on as you've you've been out talking to folks. I was particularly compelled by your CO2 snubbing experience.

00;45;02;01 - 00;45;33;17
Unknown
Yeah. And what that all means, because everybody looks at carbon capture, is this noble thing. You know, there's major operators that have stood up, complete business units and spending billions of dollars and talking about, you know, sequestering anthropogenic CO2. And, but talk a little bit about what the what the hazards are. Well, that's and, I ran a CO2 flood role, and in the central basin platform for a while.

00;45;33;19 - 00;45;58;18
Unknown
And you just you think of CO2 as inert, you know, it's, you know, it's corrosive when it mixes with water, etc.. But talk about CO2 and what my first real experience was, in New Mexico and snubbing basket and we were we were coming out. Oh we were pipeline I said two slips and a pipe crushed. And that is not something that you want to see under pressure.

00;45;58;20 - 00;46;36;13
Unknown
But oh looked over. So rather than basketball looked over as what now? He said, we die. And we got obviously we got through that. And then, in Sumatra, South Sumatra, in Indonesia, we, we worked on a lot of wells with high CO2 content. Of course they were. They were using chrome pipe and, but it was, those those were my operational, experiences with it when the carbon capture started coming in, you know, and I looked into it and I didn't study at that date, but it to me, it and I've been saying it across the state, it's a taxpayer funded scam.

00;46;36;16 - 00;46;58;05
Unknown
Okay, I realize you're talking about the 45. Q yeah, and I realized that that, you know, CO2 has been used for decades for enhanced oil recovery. I you know, I get that, what up? And I went, but you're not disposing of it. No. You know, and I mean, look, in Texas, we can't keep our produce water in place, okay?

00;46;58;05 - 00;47;32;09
Unknown
So now we're going to go ahead and we're going to add a gas to the system. And of course, you know, once it once it contacts water, you know, it turns into carbonic acid and eats everything. What what is concerning me the most about it? The predatory tactics of some of these companies, like going into, Newton County, Texas, or Jasper County were, these folks are, economically disadvantaged or, you know, the timber industry was real big there, paper mill sawmills, that kind of thing that that stuff's kind of kind of moved off.

00;47;32;09 - 00;47;49;23
Unknown
And, and a lot of people are having to drive to Orange or Beaumont, you know, to work. And they're coming in and telling people they're going to do all these great things. And, you know, I speak with Wood County officials about it, and I so they ask them for their drilling program, you know, asking for their completion program.

00;47;49;23 - 00;48;10;11
Unknown
And I said, I'm a guarantee they're going to tell you is proper out there. And these are the things that I'm concerned with. And I don't believe that, they're taking this, they're selling it as an environmental, as an answer to our environmental problem. If they really want to be environmental about it, let's start cleaning up. Produced water.

00;48;10;13 - 00;48;27;03
Unknown
Let's start getting it. That's that's our huge problem. We know all this CO2 is going to lose it. They might keep it in place for a while, but eventually it's going to end up like produce. What are they going to over inject. You're going to frack. It's all self. It's compressible and it has higher mobility than water subsurface.

00;48;27;07 - 00;48;56;03
Unknown
You know and I've been saying it I said it to the EPA. You know all of this is going to be self-reporting. And self-reporting only works on the golf course. And that depends on who you're playing with. So there's a sidebar issue that, you know, I think the the CCS project sponsors have been frustrated by the EPA because that's, class six injection permitting in Texas is one of the few states that is currently, I guess, battling for primacy now.

00;48;56;04 - 00;49;17;03
Unknown
I think they got it. I really did get it. Okay, goodbye. And I'm upset. And that's why I changed my tune. So I. You think that's a good thing for Texas to talk over primacy if, if, if the railroad Commission can, get on board with with what I'm saying about about, about how dangerous this can end up being.

00;49;17;03 - 00;49;43;05
Unknown
And they use that that power, respectfully. I'm afraid, as the commission is right now, you know, it's going to be pay to play. I would but let's but let's start with the bigger problem with us, which is produced water and salt water disposal. And get that process right. Let's get our water under control before we start injecting, gets in the ground and and and causing another problem.

00;49;43;05 - 00;50;04;12
Unknown
I mean, why why should we be having 3 or 4 different problems going on and run around like, our personal power? Address one thing at a time. I mean, you work on a. Well, you have one issue. You take care of that issue and you move on to the next, even though you might have 4 or 5 different things going on.

00;50;04;14 - 00;50;33;27
Unknown
You know, you take the most risky thing first and you address that, and you deal with it, and then you move on, down the line. I mean, we've, I'd, I was betting positively that it would happen that one of the, one of the biggest things they could do during the Dozier era. And I think it tells you a lot that 45 Q could have gone away, I think under executive order, but we'll let the lawyer in the room.

00;50;33;29 - 00;51;15;05
Unknown
Well, I'm in on that, but, that didn't happen. And so, you know, federally, it's, backdrop of all this as far as CO2 is concerned. You know, there was a big, event last week. EPA secretary came out and said, you know, they've successfully, rescinded or revoked the the, endangerment finding and, and the actual statistics for the US is that we've kind of lead here on greenhouse gas emissions reduction over the last 20 to 25 years.

00;51;15;07 - 00;51;48;15
Unknown
And we did it mostly on a market based solution where you substituted natural gas for coal and PowerGen. Sucker. That was about 60% right of the reduction. And it's gone down per capita despite GDP growth from, I don't know, 13 to 28 trillion over that. Contemporaneous time frame. And we've done that without kind of this aggressive CCS posture.

00;51;48;22 - 00;52;18;27
Unknown
So all that's happened without grabbing more CO2 out of processes or straight out of the air and putting it back in the ground. And so, it just seems like I'm leaving it to more of a kind of practical and market based solution. Has worked. But I think what we're seeing and I've thought about this the other day, we talked about it a little bit after we talked about Container Ranch last week.

00;52;18;29 - 00;52;46;03
Unknown
I think, as you probably know, the AG filed a lawsuit against, Kirkland, Washington based fiberglass recycling company that has dumped, you know, like over 3000 wind turbine blades in these facilities where the requirement was to be able to do that, that you had to prove that you're recycling 75% of the material. Of course, that wasn't going on the padlock.

00;52;46;03 - 00;53;18;13
Unknown
The facilities in 2020 and the the landfill and kept kept going. And so the state has very proactively gone after this polluter. Whereas, you know, here's another issue that people can see subsurface. It's not something that, you know, there's a lot of I don't mean this in a pejorative way. There's just ignorance because people don't don't know about it.

00;53;18;13 - 00;53;47;06
Unknown
It's not you know, it's not high on on their awareness. I mean, I'll give you I'll give you a personal reference. I have, with, myself and four other family members, three of them I've never met, have some property in Bernard Parish, Louisiana. Last year or year before last, a through a lease. That's, for carbon capture and I sent it to an attorney, read through.

00;53;47;06 - 00;54;10;23
Unknown
And it was a good lease. I sent it back to the family. And, you know, I don't read long emails, but I wrote a very long email and explain in my position on, on, why this is wrong and why we shouldn't be doing it. And the, potential that it has to, contaminated groundwater and, and and really, that was probably the longest email ever written in my life.

00;54;10;25 - 00;54;30;06
Unknown
And sent it back. And, you know, I basically told him, I said the the attorney said the lease is great. It's one of the better ones he's looked at. You'll do what you want. Leave me out of I don't want your blood money. And luckily, the family listened to me. And, you know, they passed on the deal and that company moved on.

00;54;30;08 - 00;55;05;08
Unknown
Unfortunately, when in the case of, like, Newton County, you know, those those people don't have a lot of options. Yeah. I think, one of the county commissioners told me the, the average, salary, yearly salary for some of those folks is like $11,000 a year. So they're incredibly, economically disadvantaged. So, you know, a chunk of, leasing property and paying you, so much per ton, you know, is is enticing to them.

00;55;05;12 - 00;55;35;05
Unknown
Sure. And I don't understand. They they know that this is a short gain and they need it and they need it to survive. I get that, but they're not looking at the long term effects of what it could be, what? It could happen to them. Yeah. And and, you know, fundamental to all this is that what happens in the subsurface doesn't respect surface borders or boundaries and certainly doesn't, stay contained within, a particular lease.

00;55;35;07 - 00;56;03;22
Unknown
And so there's collateral impact that could happen and is arguably based on the evidence that the two looked at firsthand. That is happening. So we've got a potentially kind of mushrooming total cost impact of the stuff that's, indirect, hard to see, but meaningful in terms of, you know, what the long term trade offs and consequences are.

00;56;03;24 - 00;56;28;04
Unknown
Let's talk about one other issue. I was a bit amused at your, at your notion. I think you led off one of your your recent discussions with, you know, what are you gonna do first? First thing is, you know, from a big media issue is obviously the issue, but a name change for the railroad commission. Yeah, for sure, for sure.

00;56;28;06 - 00;56;52;13
Unknown
I, I look, you know, I grew up in a business in, in East Texas field, and everybody knew what the railroad commissioner and I never, never questioned it. Never. I assumed everybody in Texas knew what they did. I left, went overseas, and I came back. And it's still the railroad commission. Okay, fine. And I know what they do.

00;56;52;15 - 00;57;12;18
Unknown
I did not realize how kind of like a time capsule, you know. And I come back over here, you know, $40,000 pickups or $100,000. Now, you know, that kind of thing. And so many people have moved to Texas and they don't understand what what the railroad Commission does. And, you know, a few hundred thousand every year over the last five years or six years.

00;57;12;24 - 00;57;39;02
Unknown
And and was that an event recently, at a campaign event and a lady in her, in her late 70s came up to me. I had lived in Montgomery County right up the road, had had lived there her whole life, walked up to me and said, I have to cross. I have a railroad crossing. When I go to town, I have to cross railroad, and there is a limb that's hanging out, and I can't really see down the track because of that loom.

00;57;39;08 - 00;57;59;21
Unknown
And those trains come by really fast. Who do I call it? The Railroad Commission to get that loom trim. And I had to explain to her that it's been over 20 years since the railroad Commission did anything about trains. And the name is not only misleading, but it's also used to hide the fact of what they actually do.

00;57;59;23 - 00;58;20;25
Unknown
And it it can't be changed by the railroad commission. It's going to have to be, legislatively changed. And I don't know why the legislature hadn't woken up and said, you know, this people need to know what this agency does. And I think they do that on purpose. So that way nobody really focuses on on what they do.

00;58;20;27 - 00;58;41;18
Unknown
And look at my social media and daily, sometimes 2 or 3 times a day. What does the railroad have to do with oil and gas? And these are both from out of state, out of country, and interstate as well. And if you're going to be a state agency, you need to have a name that accurately reflects what you do.

00;58;41;20 - 00;59;09;26
Unknown
If it's oil, gas, mining and pipelines. Yeah, right. Texas, the Energy Commission, it's very clear what their responsibility is. And I always, you know, I grew up in the same kind of industry echo chamber, but also always looked at it somewhat with somewhat amusement that this is just more kind of unique Texas folklore and culture that, you know, to an outsider, it's like being an Aggie, which I am.

00;59;09;28 - 00;59;33;26
Unknown
I can't explain it to you and you can't understand it. Right. But it's always got that, you know, kind of lighthearted amusement. But it's it is an important thing from, you know, messaging and symbolism and visibility standpoint that then I think raises the profile and the awareness of, okay, this is what this agency is charged with doing, what it should be about.

00;59;34;04 - 01;00;10;17
Unknown
And central to all that is the extremely important business of what they do in the oil and gas industry from a regulatory standpoint. I mean, folks have job titles and the job title has a job description and the taxpayers paid. Yeah. And and so you kind of know if you're if you talk to a business development guy, you know, that his his job is to develop business and you kind of know it, it should be even more recognizable in a state agency by the name of what they, they actually do.

01;00;10;20 - 01;00;28;14
Unknown
And it's not in a yeah, it's a, it's a disservice to the, to the people of Texas and who knows? You know, our generation goes away and, and they start losing. More and more people start to become and, you know, not being ugly, but more and more people become ignorant and not understanding of what the railroad Commission does.

01;00;28;14 - 01;00;44;08
Unknown
We grew up in it. We know, as more people move in, they're not going to understand and they're not going to pay attention. They're stakeholders in the deal. I mean, they're they're paying the agency to to work for them. So it's, it's going to have a naming contest. I don't know, I think you should, I really do.

01;00;44;08 - 01;01;02;05
Unknown
I think, you know, the only with the oil and gas industry, they come, you know, they come up with post-merger names that sound like it'll end up being pharmaceuticals. Every time I hear some of these names, I hear in my head, ask, your doctor of so-and-so is right for you. The oil industry will come up with an acronym that that they can put in their book of 250 acronyms.

01;01;02;09 - 01;01;11;23
Unknown
I'm an Exxon heritage guy. I'm an excellent heritage guy. And I tell everybody that you know the name of the company is pronounced Exxon. The Mobil is silent.

01;01;11;26 - 01;02;04;16
Unknown
All right. One last item on the future. And you are singing our tune, talking about the future of AI and and sophisticated, data capability, and particularly as it, as we've learned here, as we're going deep into enterprise solutions for oil and gas, the way I look at it, growing up in the oil and gas industry as an engineer and later as much, much later as a CTO trying to get our arms around all this digital big data analytics progress from business analytics and to really some amazing AI capabilities that can take language based data, which I think most technically oriented professionals never looked, at least in terms of equal value.

01;02;04;16 - 01;02;49;02
Unknown
I've got all of this language, you know, post track reports, anything that, you know, pumpers, notes that are in well, file all of the text based history. Now you can do something with that as we're proving. And there's a lot of value to that. It seems to me like there is potential for the railroad commission that we're talking about here to kind of explore that capability and helping it understand the the really the reality in the, in the, in the, the physical reality of what's going on.

01;02;49;05 - 01;03;16;07
Unknown
Because there's a ton of. Well, histories that are out there and, and a disparate collection of files, some of them handwritten, some of them in PDF, whatever. What what's your what's your intrigue? What's your view on on what the potential and future of that looks like. So, give me a little backstory, and, I'm always, like, new stuff.

01;03;16;09 - 01;03;34;29
Unknown
I, I was fortunate enough to to to work for Renault. Well, control guy, he seems crotchety, and I'd say old. He's probably. I'm 55 now, so he was probably my age then. Are you talking about. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not going to say no. I'm not going to mention it. I love him to death. He's still around.

01;03;35;01 - 01;03;58;15
Unknown
He, we had started taking HSA. You guys with us on jobs? Which was. It was good in two ways. Number one, they they kind of baited the heat for us, and they kind of kept the company, like, pros. And number two, of course, it was an additional source of revenue. And we were going we were in the Middle East and we were fixing offshore.

01;03;58;17 - 01;04;15;16
Unknown
The rig had taken a kick, blew the bottom out of the. Well, we had we had an underground blowout. They were they were trying to pump some nut plug and plugged up the drill pops right up cold tubing and running the robot with a quarter and got a quarter of and stuck. And so, you know, it was it was a good job.

01;04;15;19 - 01;04;36;09
Unknown
And my boss, it asked me to ask this man. He said, for the customer that you're going out for, it's going to be very safety intensive. It would be a good idea, if you, would just mention, why don't you guys take a safety man with you? Because there's going to be a lot to do, and y'all don't really need to be doing that.

01;04;36;09 - 01;04;56;13
Unknown
Y'all need to be on the well. And, dumb kid. Okay? And so I went and asked. That's all right. Why don't we take a safety man with us in here comes about you and and I'm not taking one of them worms with us, and we're not padding to take it. We know what we're doing. Get on the plane and fly to Doha and go to the customer's office.

01;04;56;13 - 01;05;14;18
Unknown
And we explain to the person part of the operation that we want to do. They all kind of agree, and then they come with a binder about that thickness. They drop it in front of this man is what is it? So well, that's the risk assessment. And we really need you to risk assess every step of the way until, until we're happy with it before we'll let you go.

01;05;14;18 - 01;05;36;19
Unknown
Sure. And he leaned over me to get that damn safety man on the plane. Get him over here. You know, and that's what it took to start trying something new. Some of these older guys, you know, thought, well, you know, I always want to try something new. So when I, when I started learning about AI and I'll be the first day, I don't know much about it.

01;05;36;21 - 01;05;59;24
Unknown
I've, I've watched shows also, posted and videos and, and I read a little bit about it and I'm very intrigued by it. You know, the, the way that the way I envision it on, on, on these orphan wells and these will issues is to be able to put well, data all we can get for every orphan.

01;05;59;24 - 01;06;26;02
Unknown
Well, that's on the list and include environmental factors. Like my hometown of Longview, there's orphan wells near an elementary school. You know, there there's there's parks with orphan wells. We need to include an injection profile. Where are these wells located? Or are they within a certain radius of of, some high volume injection? And and cost and input.

01;06;26;02 - 01;06;47;10
Unknown
Historical cost of what it cost to plug those wells and then Pickens County, there's one. Well, it costs $960,000 to plug. And then just across the fence because another 350,000 on another. Well, so these are really high cost plug in jobs. And I want to be able to take all this data. And I want to feed it into AI.

01;06;47;12 - 01;07;04;21
Unknown
And I want I to spit me out a risk assessment and said, this is where you need to focus your, your resources and start plugging these wells where these are the most high risk. These are the ones that are going to end up costing you the most if you continue to wait. And I believe we can do it now.

01;07;04;22 - 01;07;38;00
Unknown
Honestly, I don't know how. And but there are people that can understand what I'm doing and it can make it happen. And that's that's what's most important. A lot of that, that kind of causal attribute or relationship is buried in, a grossly disparate format, data like we see, you know, and, and completion reports that may be several hundred pages of PDF.

01;07;38;00 - 01;08;06;06
Unknown
We'll see table formats change. And I was really good at at language based data machine learning for the quantitative stuff or for the numerical data. But it's getting a lot better. Very quickly. And before if you had that idea, you knew where that you kind of knew what form the data was in. It was maybe in 15 different places that you had to go find it and then aggregate it and then synthesize it and then hunt and peck through it.

01;08;06;06 - 01;08;39;17
Unknown
You maybe put a spreadsheet together to do some of the, the, the root cause analysis. You can do it very quickly by querying to the extent that you have that, that we call it vectorized data, which is very, very, there's good contextual hygiene. It's very precise and accurate in terms of, of being within that context. So you can do a lot with that, that you otherwise you throw up your hands because doing it manually would have been just untenable.

01;08;39;17 - 01;09;08;10
Unknown
It would take you forever. Things you can do now in seconds and minutes because you've you've conditioned the data, all the relevant data. You've done, all the chunking, segmenting and and created that, that vectorized data set that now I can go through and do what it does. We got people here that are much better equipped to, to go through all the technical explanation, which you can, you can sit there and query it in that in your natural language.

01;09;08;12 - 01;09;38;02
Unknown
And if you have curiosity about, okay, what your examples of the $960,000 and a next to a 340,001, what were the factors and attributes and then map those to the candidate from a risk assessment assessment standpoint. Then you can you can quickly at least intuitively develop based on some data and some seemingly correlative if not causal things, that okay, this is this is the risk profile of this particular instance.

01;09;38;02 - 01;10;07;08
Unknown
I mean, the railroad commission basically stuck in the 1980s. Okay. And doing these risk assessments manually, you know, looking at how long the world has been awful and how long it was idle before that. I mean, if if we put the complete, well, history and in the time frames in there and, and we map what's surrounding the area because we already know that, you know, offset injection is causing a lot of problems.

01;10;07;11 - 01;10;36;00
Unknown
In field history. And I would like you said, if we input cost, what is it cost for each of the wells historically in the area that that they had plugged on the open wheel program? And, and come up with this risk assessment to where okay, this well, this well, these are the most. Right. It's got to be way more economically feasible to do that than just wait for them to fail catastrophically at surface and then call a rig out and go, okay, now we got to reenter this thing.

01;10;36;04 - 01;10;55;28
Unknown
Yeah. You want to get you want to get to predictive. The longer that these will stay unplugged, the more they're going to rot. And and the more expensive that is going to be for the state to plug them in if the technology is out there. And even though I don't understand it and I'll make that clear, I don't exactly know how this works, but I know that it works.

01;10;55;28 - 01;11;18;15
Unknown
And I've seen enough that that I can visit with someone and I can say, put these parameters in there. And I want to know what it spits out. I'm fairly confident that it's going to spit out something that's going to be a value and is going to be correct. And that's what I need to know. Yeah, I don't need to know how it works and how the little chips and everything are all tied together.

01;11;18;21 - 01;11;33;24
Unknown
What I need to know is I want this data put in into this model, and I want to know the result, and then I want to go out in the field, and I want to check it and make sure that it's that is proved up. And if and it may not be correct, there may be some anomalies here and there.

01;11;33;24 - 01;11;54;22
Unknown
Nothing's going to be perfect. But until we actually start applying this new technology and in exploring it, I mean, it would go back to antenna. We were using a railroad commission GIS system to try to locate wells. And one of the wells that we were looking for was 303 or 400 yards away from where we were digging. I mean, look like a mass grave.

01;11;54;22 - 01;12;20;28
Unknown
If you flew over an airplane, you'd think I had a mass grave out there. I'm going to give you a little glimpse of what's possible, from a visualization standpoint, with a ton of well and surface information. Ultimately turning into a, a very easy to use kind of map based, capability or tool. We've, we've gone longer than we normally do, but,

01;12;21;00 - 01;12;44;03
Unknown
Well, I'm enjoying it. Sorry. And I, I know you got a lot of stops between now and March 3rd. What, how many, how many more do you do you estimate that you've got? I'm going to I'm going to run hard until the 27th, and then, then we'll go home and wait it out, and, I left, I left West Texas February 1st.

01;12;44;05 - 01;13;03;27
Unknown
Hadn't been back. I mean, I've been I've made a few stops out there, but hadn't been home since February 1st, and so I've been getting it since, January 4th. I had a, had a few days middle of January, and then I got home in time for the eyes. That never really showed up out there, but showed up over here, north of us.

01;13;03;29 - 01;13;23;25
Unknown
So I've got a couple days there and then, after that, and I've just been on the road, so, you know, being on the road, something you're used to. I've been on. Yeah. It's it's like a hitch, you know? It's like a long. It's it, I was able to, you know, put support together to handle the political stuff, to handle the noise.

01;13;23;25 - 01;13;39;04
Unknown
I don't want noise in. You know, in the past, we've on jobs, we had a project manager, and they would deal with the customer. And if the customer needed something for me to go, the project manager and a project manager would come to me and vice versa. And that's the model that I, that I kind of put together with this campaign.

01;13;39;04 - 01;13;59;20
Unknown
I don't want to deal with the noise. I don't want to deal with the politics. I'm going to buy gas and go out and run and do my thing in front of people, and it's worked out real well. So, you know, we'll wait and see what happens on March 3rd. Hopefully we'll get in the runoff. And we'll continue until May and see what happens.

01;13;59;22 - 01;14;18;22
Unknown
Well, best of luck and safe travels. And, it's clear you never get tired of talking about this stuff because it's important. It's important. And, you know, I love the oil and gas industry, and, I've got a I've got a couple of teenagers that that are showing interest in it as well. And I want, I want to make sure that the pit generation has a as a place to go.

01;14;18;26 - 01;14;42;16
Unknown
And we would invite any of your competitors in the primary or in the runoff to come on and, and talk about their, their views as well. But, I'd love to have you back. You know, regardless of whether we're talking about the railroad commission or I can envision a series, I'm we can tell stories. I had a I had a smattering of kind of expat life.

01;14;42;16 - 01;15;03;03
Unknown
I don't think I got within a fraction of 100, countries in my life, but it was also something that I never envisioned when I was a kid. I thought, you know, I'm I'm kind of confined to Texas and mostly South Texas, but I ended up because of this industry, ended up seeing much more of the world. I love it that it's given me a fantastic career and a lot of good stories.

01;15;03;03 - 01;15;34;02
Unknown
And, and I think good for a lot of people, great people and good perspective coming back and focusing on issues in the domestic industry. Right. There's there's a lot of useful perspective that I think, is helpful, for people who may have been living a more kind of insular, provincial life. So, Haug, thank you. Thank you for having me on closure.

01;15;34;02 - 01;15;39;26
Unknown
Pleasure to finally meet you in person. And, best of luck the rest of the way. And safe travels. Thank you.