7 ms·

Where my Houstonians at? > "Rigs have gotten so much more efficient that the shale industry can use about half as many as it did at the height of the boom in 2

Where my Houstonians at? > "Rigs have gotten so much more efficient that the shale industry can use about half as many as it did at the height of the boom in 2014 to suck the same amount of oil out of the ground." Drilling rigs don't suck oil out of the ground, they drill a hole... that's why they call them drilling rigs not sucking rigs. Also, we don't call it sucking, rather "production", and that's handled by other equipment... assuming the well needs to be sucked on. The "Iron Roughneck" has been around a long time. I would like to see all the charts in this article to go back to 2000. New drilling technology is not adopted as fast as some in SV might imagine. Wells are expensive and dangerous. Innovation is rare and new tech takes a long time to gain acceptance. I'm not saying headcount will shrink over time but this industry is cyclical and demand has been increasing and will continue too as the rest of the world develops a middle class. > That means an engineer can design an oil well at his desk. With the press of a button, an automated system would identify the equipment needed from a supplier, create a 3D model and send instructions for building it out into the field, Hashmi says. “That is automation.” LOLOLOL yah, trust me that Fluor, Parsons, Jacobs and all the other oil and gas engineering firms would love this and have been trying to build or integrate things like this for a long time. The limit to automation in this industry and others is, quite frankly, how bad these companies are at making software. Thankfully for the American worker they suck pretty bad, otherwise half the white collar jobs in the US wouldn't exist. Also, this shit is complicated AF and building a petroleum plant isn't just about the chemical process it will complete. Jesus the naiveté in this article. Oh and who designs custom well heads anymore?

shiftpgdn 10y ago
Sadly the media still likes to portray Houston as a town where everyone wears cowboy hats and that oil comes out of the ground Jed Clampett style. Literally all of my surrounding neighbors are mechanical engineers for oilfield service companies and the common thing we've talked about recently IS automation. However the reality isn't robots but better engineering/process that lets a part run 50x as long with a greater prediction for need of replacement. You don't have to keep 100 hands on a drilling site for the peak demand if you can effectively schedule.
- ryanmarsh 10y ago
  > You don't have to keep 100 hands on a drilling site for the peak demand if you can effectively schedule. Exactly, which is why automation is going to kill so many white-collar jobs. "Effectively schedule" means let a computer do it, not Sally Scheduler who has been doing it in Excel only because they forced her to stop using paper and pen. This article is basically saying "the planes practically fly themselves", and I'm like "yah but do you still see two pilots in the cockpit?". There might be 50 extra people on a drill site but there's 5,000 in the back office whose jobs could be replaced with some quick programming and no robots.
  - manglav 10y ago
    Any suggestions on this quick programming? I'm a ChemE turned programmer, it would be a cool opportunity to explore. Feel free to email me, username @ gmail.
    - ceedan 10y ago
      "5,000 jobs could be replaced" "cool opportunity" what a time to be alive
      - arjie 10y ago
        Why even would someone against that be on HN? It's a place where people interested in startups are. Automating jobs away is always seen as a fantastic opportunity here.
        knn 10y ago
        It's a great opportunity for those automating. I'm totally for automation as it creates wealth and I think is good for humanity in the long run, but people suffer from automation (losing jobs, homes, provision for their families) in the short term. People suffering from automation is a major reason why Trump was elected. It's highly insensitive to not be aware of the pain that is caused by automation by technologists like us.
fizixer 10y ago
> The limit to automation in this industry and others is, quite frankly, how bad these companies are at making software. Your statement contradicts the rest of your paragraph (that the article is naive and far fetched). Because if this is really true, then it's only a matter of assembling a good software team, with one or two domain experts (who know the domain and are good s/w engineers), pair it up with the team of engineers and line workers, and a successful automated system can be built, i.e., exactly what the original post is talking about.
- leereeves 10y ago
  Automation as defined by that comment is a really low bar. It probably is possible. > That means an engineer can design an oil well at his desk. With the press of a button, an automated system would identify the equipment needed from a supplier, create a 3D model and send instructions for building it out into the field, Hashmi says. “That is automation.” I'd be very surprised if that doesn't already exist: printing a 3D model, submitting an order for the parts, and sending the documentation to the field. That's assuming the engineer has identified the parts and written the instructions. Automatically doing that might be more of a challenge.
  - XorNot 10y ago
    It's not hard to imagine a search engine which matches mechanical descriptions of parts to a proposed design automatically. Just draw roughly what you need, punch in the specs, and let the expert-system provide a least-cost bill-of-materials which comes nearest the ratings + a list of custom parts.
    - ArkyBeagle 10y ago
      Who is going to do provenance on the parts list? You know that all organizations that buy parts have an entire fleet of people to do this, right? It goes all the way from vendor accounting to physical inventory to finance to shipping to engineering to production to...
    - ryanmarsh 10y ago
forgetsusername 10y ago
>LOLOLOL yah, trust me that Fluor, Parsons, Jacobs and all the other oil and gas engineering firms would love this and have been trying to build or integrate things like this for a long time. This is the same site that, for the most part, thinks Tesla beating out Ford/GM/Toyota/Honda/Nissan/Hyundai/Fiat/Google/Apple is a done deal.
- icebraining 10y ago
  Be careful with your sampling biases. Those of us who are sceptical but don't have a strong opinion are much more likely to say quiet.
ufmace 10y ago
Yo! I even worked on a software project for automation once upon a time. Main thing IMHO is that the industry uses a lot of hardware that has payback periods of decades. Nobody's going to spend money on high-end new automated gear unless they have high confidence that there's going to be enough business in the next few years/decades to pay it off. The offshore operators tend to buy in first, both because they have the capital, and because the cost and risk of keeping more people offshore is so much higher. Land operators tend to get this kind of stuff at a trickle. The headcounts will fall, but not as much or as fast as some would have us think, both for that reason, and because this stuff is hard to get right. The project that I worked on mostly put more people on the rig just to keep all of the stuff running. There were only a handful of rigs in the field with enough automatic hardware to use our system in the first place.
ghaff 10y ago
>Drilling rigs don't suck oil out of the ground, they drill a hole... One of the clever pieces of writing/directing in Deepwater Horizon was at the beginning when the daughter of the character played by Mark Wahlberg did the thing with the coke can to demonstrate how an oil well worked (or didn't). IMO, it was a brilliant piece of non-exposition exposition, whether or not a lot of the audience really picked up on it. The basic concept was pretty important to the incidents of the movie but to explain it during the normal course of the movie would have been really tough to make seem natural. (I can't come up with a great CS example off the top of my head, but it would be like two programmers making a statement like 'You know, we have to remember that these programs are actually translated into 0s and 1s.')
- ryanmarsh 10y ago
  Yah, just saw the movie last week. Definitely a useful "non-exposition exposition". I thought it was hilarious when everyone became a structural/petroleum engineer overnight when the well head was still spewing weeks after the incident. Everyone had a simple solution. Like when baby Jessica fell down that well in Texas. I'm like "you do realize methane hydrates crystalize at those pressures right?"
whyileft 10y ago
This is typical HN clickbait automation porn. I always complain about it and just get censored like this comment will. Some programmers and tech people unfortunately get some kind of sick satisfaction thinking(incorrectly) that blue collar labor will be automated away with physical robots before white collar workers are automated away via software.
- prawn 10y ago
  I think that's unfair. I think many of us read and submit stories like this because the changes hitting society are fascinating, not because we delight in people losing their livelihood. For every automation story, there's one on basic income.
ArkyBeagle 10y ago
"...frankly, how bad these companies are at making software." Yep. And hardware, and knitting together the boxes, and power, configuration management, and networking and... If you can't do it with a pipe wrench, why it ain't worth doing :) The problem with software there isn't the software people. It's the requirements gathering. I don't expect it can actually be resolved. You should see what passes for MRP around Houston. I believe I first heard about the Iron Roughneck in the '80s, just in idle chatter.
- ryanmarsh 10y ago
  Totally. Typical company: let's hire a body shop who will fly in a bunch of people who barely know English and pay them crazy bill rates to write reams of completely unreadable "specs" Programmers cost more than pipe welders but you don't see them getting unintelligable 200 page Word documents instead of certified blueprints from an expert do you?

shiftpgdn 10y ago

Sadly the media still likes to portray Houston as a town where everyone wears cowboy hats and that oil comes out of the ground Jed Clampett style. Literally all of my surrounding neighbors are mechanical engineers for oilfield service companies and the common thing we've talked about recently IS automation. However the reality isn't robots but better engineering/process that lets a part run 50x as long with a greater prediction for need of replacement. You don't have to keep 100 hands on a drilling site for the peak demand if you can effectively schedule.

ryanmarsh 10y ago
> You don't have to keep 100 hands on a drilling site for the peak demand if you can effectively schedule. Exactly, which is why automation is going to kill so many white-collar jobs. "Effectively schedule" means let a computer do it, not Sally Scheduler who has been doing it in Excel only because they forced her to stop using paper and pen. This article is basically saying "the planes practically fly themselves", and I'm like "yah but do you still see two pilots in the cockpit?". There might be 50 extra people on a drill site but there's 5,000 in the back office whose jobs could be replaced with some quick programming and no robots.
- manglav 10y ago
  Any suggestions on this quick programming? I'm a ChemE turned programmer, it would be a cool opportunity to explore. Feel free to email me, username @ gmail.
  - ceedan 10y ago
    "5,000 jobs could be replaced" "cool opportunity" what a time to be alive
    - arjie 10y ago
      Why even would someone against that be on HN? It's a place where people interested in startups are. Automating jobs away is always seen as a fantastic opportunity here.
      - knn 10y ago
        It's a great opportunity for those automating. I'm totally for automation as it creates wealth and I think is good for humanity in the long run, but people suffer from automation (losing jobs, homes, provision for their families) in the short term. People suffering from automation is a major reason why Trump was elected. It's highly insensitive to not be aware of the pain that is caused by automation by technologists like us.

fizixer 10y ago

> The limit to automation in this industry and others is, quite frankly, how bad these companies are at making software. Your statement contradicts the rest of your paragraph (that the article is naive and far fetched). Because if this is really true, then it's only a matter of assembling a good software team, with one or two domain experts (who know the domain and are good s/w engineers), pair it up with the team of engineers and line workers, and a successful automated system can be built, i.e., exactly what the original post is talking about.

leereeves 10y ago
Automation as defined by that comment is a really low bar. It probably is possible. > That means an engineer can design an oil well at his desk. With the press of a button, an automated system would identify the equipment needed from a supplier, create a 3D model and send instructions for building it out into the field, Hashmi says. “That is automation.” I'd be very surprised if that doesn't already exist: printing a 3D model, submitting an order for the parts, and sending the documentation to the field. That's assuming the engineer has identified the parts and written the instructions. Automatically doing that might be more of a challenge.
- XorNot 10y ago
  It's not hard to imagine a search engine which matches mechanical descriptions of parts to a proposed design automatically. Just draw roughly what you need, punch in the specs, and let the expert-system provide a least-cost bill-of-materials which comes nearest the ratings + a list of custom parts.
  - ArkyBeagle 10y ago
    Who is going to do provenance on the parts list? You know that all organizations that buy parts have an entire fleet of people to do this, right? It goes all the way from vendor accounting to physical inventory to finance to shipping to engineering to production to...
  - ryanmarsh 10y ago

forgetsusername 10y ago

>LOLOLOL yah, trust me that Fluor, Parsons, Jacobs and all the other oil and gas engineering firms would love this and have been trying to build or integrate things like this for a long time. This is the same site that, for the most part, thinks Tesla beating out Ford/GM/Toyota/Honda/Nissan/Hyundai/Fiat/Google/Apple is a done deal.

icebraining 10y ago
Be careful with your sampling biases. Those of us who are sceptical but don't have a strong opinion are much more likely to say quiet.

ufmace 10y ago

Yo! I even worked on a software project for automation once upon a time. Main thing IMHO is that the industry uses a lot of hardware that has payback periods of decades. Nobody's going to spend money on high-end new automated gear unless they have high confidence that there's going to be enough business in the next few years/decades to pay it off. The offshore operators tend to buy in first, both because they have the capital, and because the cost and risk of keeping more people offshore is so much higher. Land operators tend to get this kind of stuff at a trickle. The headcounts will fall, but not as much or as fast as some would have us think, both for that reason, and because this stuff is hard to get right. The project that I worked on mostly put more people on the rig just to keep all of the stuff running. There were only a handful of rigs in the field with enough automatic hardware to use our system in the first place.

ghaff 10y ago

>Drilling rigs don't suck oil out of the ground, they drill a hole... One of the clever pieces of writing/directing in Deepwater Horizon was at the beginning when the daughter of the character played by Mark Wahlberg did the thing with the coke can to demonstrate how an oil well worked (or didn't). IMO, it was a brilliant piece of non-exposition exposition, whether or not a lot of the audience really picked up on it. The basic concept was pretty important to the incidents of the movie but to explain it during the normal course of the movie would have been really tough to make seem natural. (I can't come up with a great CS example off the top of my head, but it would be like two programmers making a statement like 'You know, we have to remember that these programs are actually translated into 0s and 1s.')

ryanmarsh 10y ago
Yah, just saw the movie last week. Definitely a useful "non-exposition exposition". I thought it was hilarious when everyone became a structural/petroleum engineer overnight when the well head was still spewing weeks after the incident. Everyone had a simple solution. Like when baby Jessica fell down that well in Texas. I'm like "you do realize methane hydrates crystalize at those pressures right?"

whyileft 10y ago

This is typical HN clickbait automation porn. I always complain about it and just get censored like this comment will. Some programmers and tech people unfortunately get some kind of sick satisfaction thinking(incorrectly) that blue collar labor will be automated away with physical robots before white collar workers are automated away via software.

prawn 10y ago
I think that's unfair. I think many of us read and submit stories like this because the changes hitting society are fascinating, not because we delight in people losing their livelihood. For every automation story, there's one on basic income.

ArkyBeagle 10y ago

"...frankly, how bad these companies are at making software." Yep. And hardware, and knitting together the boxes, and power, configuration management, and networking and... If you can't do it with a pipe wrench, why it ain't worth doing :) The problem with software there isn't the software people. It's the requirements gathering. I don't expect it can actually be resolved. You should see what passes for MRP around Houston. I believe I first heard about the Iron Roughneck in the '80s, just in idle chatter.

ryanmarsh 10y ago
Totally. Typical company: let's hire a body shop who will fly in a bunch of people who barely know English and pay them crazy bill rates to write reams of completely unreadable "specs" Programmers cost more than pipe welders but you don't see them getting unintelligable 200 page Word documents instead of certified blueprints from an expert do you?