Oil and Gas Startups Podcast

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0:57 What's up guys, welcome back to another episode of theWilling Yeah Star Wars podcast. Man, I was just talking about doing this thing for a long time, getting into it. So, glad to have a new

1:09 friend, Stephen Fipke, in flow control here with me in the studio. Stephen, welcome. Thanks, glad to be here, big fan. Recently discovered you guys though, mostly around the Fuse event that

1:21 you hosted here recently, which opened my eyes to the whole space that you guys are working in. I was glad to be able to participate in that. Well, thanks for coming out, man. Well, walk us

1:32 through really quickly kind of high level, what is it that inflow does, and then we'll kind of dive into your backstory. Sure, sure. We're kind of a cross between an oil field service company and

1:44 a technology company, in the sense that the company's headquarters in Norway and a little fishing village on the south coast of Norway, by three founders. We developed a really cool way to manage

1:60 your reservoir autonomously, and we call it the autonomous inflow control device, right? Just like a little valve you can put down your reservoir. And if you're producing oil, it's wide open,

2:10 and if your water gas starts to break through, it autonomously senses that fluid viscosity and starts to restrict that flow. So we're about 10 years old at this point, but still very much, you

2:21 know, start up growth phase. Myself, I'm the only employee here in the United States of America, but I love it because it's a blank slate for me to find opportunities to utilize this technology

2:34 for different types of assets and reservoirs. So what is the use case? Is this something that it makes sense to install in every well? Is there certain. No, not conditions. And not every well,

2:47 but. Yeah, there are certainly conditions. We have to do a lot of background work before we decide if it's a suitable application. So that's where we have a team of. 10 reservoir engineers on

2:58 staff. Most of them in Norway, they collect operator data, do a well bore simulation and say, yeah, okay, this looks great for your reservoir. Or no, we need to try something else, something

3:09 different. But the best case scenario is like a water flood where you've got a lot of water breakthrough problems or

3:18 a new oil field with a high water cut due to a strong aquifer drive where water just breaks through everywhere or just in one area and you wanna be able to control that to get more oil out of that

3:29 reservoir more quickly.

3:32 But here in Texas, I actually have four wells in the ground now with just the oldest of the oldest brown fields. This Greta Friotrand is just like an hour south of here near Victoria. And another

3:45 field that's just on the south side of Houston, we have actually five wells in Texas where the oil was depleted in the 1970s. You know, old Exxon fields, the blue down the gas cap in the 90s to

3:59 get that out of the ground. And the Gulf of Mexico has gradually like recharged the reservoir hydro dynamically. So where there's actually a thin layer of oil at the top that's left. There's a few

4:12 operators, none of the mages are interested in this, but they'll go in and buy up this acreage and try to find that little cream that's left at the top of the reservoir by drilling a well very close

4:22 to the top of the structure Danger is, if you're anywhere near that water, it's a water well, right? So these valves have been showing to be able to control that water, so you're not making 10,

4:32 000 barrels of water a day, you're making 2, 000 barrels of water a day, but also keeping the oil production up for longer. So how does it actually work? So it detects, we've got some

4:43 breakthrough, the water cut has changed drastically, what happens next? Okay, so each little valve, You kind of invisualize a multi-stage freck where you got packers. fracks leaves, before the

4:57 plug-and-perfence cemented liners, it was mostly packers and fracks leaves. Swellable packers. And instead of a fracks leave, you've got a little section of screen with an autonomous inflow

5:09 control valve in there. So the valve has two main flow paths, one which can produce 100 barrels of oil per day if it's open, and then a little siphon tube off the side, call it the pilot flow.

5:21 That tube is constantly sampling the viscosity and density of what's coming from the reservoir into the well bore. So it's viscosity sensitive, and if it's, you know, anything above one centipwise

5:33 oil, so pretty light oils, will keep the valve completely open. But if water breaks through in that compartment of the well, because it got multiple valves and multiple compartments, the valve

5:44 says, okay, obviously the viscosity has dropped because there's water or gas coming in here, and I need to start choking it back. And it does this without cables, without control lines, without

5:54 batteries, it's just. simple fluid mechanics.

5:60 So how, yeah, I didn't tell you how it works. So is that proprietary or? Yeah, we have patents in the, well yeah, I mean, the boss. Give me, like without telling me the sauce, how does it,

6:10 is it just, is it shutting it down? Is it just choking it in a way? Is it? It's all public. It's all well patented and protected. You can go on the website and there's YouTube videos. We have a

6:21 YouTube channel that explain this, how it works in depth. Gonna put those in Collide Pro I'll lecture series, they're in. They're in. Okay. Yeah, I signed up last week. Yeah.

6:32 So, in layman's terms, when that pilot flow, it has two flow elements, right? A laminar flow element, which is a long thin tube, by nature, any flow through that long thin tube will be laminar.

6:43 Laminar flow, the pressure drop for laminar flow is typically a function of viscosity. Then after it goes through that long thin tube, it comes back into the valve and exits the valve into the

6:54 tubing or the. production liner through what we call a turbulent flow element, now turbulent flow mens. The equation for turbulent pressure drop is a function of density. So we can fine tune those,

7:06 the laminar pressure drop and the dent in the turbulent pressure drop to create enough of a difference between the two to create a back pressure under a piston. And the piston, once it's, if it

7:16 sees any back pressure underneath it, it will move up into the closed position and start choking the well. Let's not on off. It doesn't immediately close at the first drop of water gas, but as the

7:28 water cut gradually increases, that pressure that pushes the piston up to close the valve gets stronger and stronger and stronger until it's 100 watered out and then it's up and it's like mostly

7:38 closed position. So that's how we can control the well without any wires or gadgets or gizmos down there, just fluid mechanics. So then maybe this is a little, a little educational, but assuming,

7:51 so this whole process happens, right? It essentially chokes it down. How do we, how do we get it back to where, to where it was? Is it, I mean, are we having to go in and

8:02 we have, people always ask if you need a sliding sleeve to be able to have like a manual default close off position. And no, we've never had to do that, Jake. It's because even if the valve goes

8:14 into its closed position, it's just, it's a dynamic positioning of that piston, right? If there's water there, it'll stay up and it's choking position. But if oil comes back, for whatever

8:24 reason, you shut the well in for a week and things move around in the reservoir, you get some oil concentration back, some oil saturation, and then, well, that pilot flow never closed. That

8:35 pilot flow's always sampling the reservoir, all right? So if you do get oil to return to that part of the well that you're controlling with the autonomous inflow control valve, AICV, then it'll

8:46 sense oil viscosity again and open back up.

8:51 Okay, so this is more just a reservoir engineering question outside of just shedding in and allowing the, I guess, the oil density to, to kind of grow. How do you do with those situations where

9:01 you just have a massive amount of water all of a sudden take over? Yeah, it'll choke that well. If it's just, if it's all coming, if it's like, what are the other solutions outside of that?

9:09 Like, pass the, pass the valve. Yeah. That's a very pertinent question, because if you have a little bit of water breaking through it to heal, choke that back, you get more oil from the toe and

9:19 it'll horizontal well, right? Yeah. It stands to reason. But if it's all oil everywhere, all at once, I'm sorry. You know, you've got a bigger problem. And that has happened, right? You've

9:27 drilled wells straight into the water and it's like, you'll never. Well, we did that on a well for a small operator. I'm not going to name names, but there's a great project where they drilled

9:39 south of Victoria here in Texas. It's the old Greta Frio trend and they drilled a screen well. They've been doing this for maybe five or ten years. It's the old Frostwood business model, if you

9:50 will, of buying up this depleted reservoir and trying to drill. as well as the top and just rip on it with a big ESP and try to get whatever you get, right? Yeah. It's hit or miss, you know,

10:02 four to ten assets are economic, but you got to, there's money to be made there. So what this company did was they drilled a horizontal will with screens and just regular sand screens because it's

10:14 an unconsolidated formation that will produce sands. They put the screens in one will and on the same pad, they put AICV autonomous devices and a well that's right beside it, side-by-side

10:25 comparison, one of the very few that exist in the world. Unfortunately, they were both in the water, right? So they switched on this screen well, you know, a 2, 500 foot long lateral, you

10:37 know, they had 40 or 50 joints of screens in this well, 5, 000 barrels of water and no oil. This is despite having drilled like a vertical delineation well that showed good oil saturation as part

10:50 of the rock They're optimistic they found a good spot to drill. Like, oh, oh, this isn't good. Then, well, we'll switch on this AICV well beside it and see what happens there. Well, wasn't

11:02 great. It wasn't anything to write home about, but that well has been online now for about three years. It only ever makes about 2, 000 barrels of water per day. But guess what? It's been

11:12 hanging in there at 60 or 70 barrels of oil per day. Steady, flat line. Let's go to wine. Let's go to wine. Sellable oil, right? Probably this company's only commercial cash flow at this point.

11:24 But it stayed that way. And I still have really good friends with the reservoir engineer for that company. And he's like, this is an oil finder. You're not wrong. It's not the real premise of how

11:37 we design these wells, just to find whatever residual oil saturation is down there. But in this case, that's what it's doing. That's exciting. So how did - OK, give me a little more of your

11:46 budget background. Let's go to the more background of the company. I'm curious, is this the only thing you guys do? Where do you guys want other things? How did this kind of come about? But

11:54 let's go more into your background. You get a little bit of an accident here. I'm going to assume you're probably from Calgary. There you go. Well, Vincent. Okay, yeah, a little bit of rudder.

12:03 You mentioned you've been on Goshie's podcast. Shout out to Justin, love you, dude. Yep, Justin and Rox. Yeah, so do you need more background about you? Sure. Graduated petroleum engineering

12:14 in 2000, I guess. Yeah, so really dating yourself there. A while ago, yeah, should have said that But I tell my friends, I've been in oil and gas since I was five years old. Child labor.

12:26 Child labor, so my dad was always in the industry. I really can't trade out a high school. He was more technical though, a smart guy. But he worked for Amor at a Hiss when I was a kid, right?

12:36 So ever since I was five years old, I'd go out and check the gas wells and the Wilson Creek well filled with him. I grew up with the smell of gas condensate all around and riding my bicycle around

12:46 the, it's all in the country, right? We didn't have paved roads. So we'd go to the plant and ride around the cement tracks on our bicycle because it was smoother. That kind of thing, right?

12:57 So yeah, then I He started up a couple of companies after that a little bit of an entrepreneur

13:04 he started up a pump jack optimization company and then a plunger lift company and then finished his career consulting as a Facker, you know, Wells company men Did that for probably 15 years? So

13:18 when it came time for me to go to engineering a lot of my buddies were going into civil and he said no son No son of mine is gonna be a civil engineer You shall apply to the petroleum engineering

13:30 program and then thank you dad. Yeah, you helped me a lot there because it's been a great career Unfortunately when I graduated in 2000 was kind of a downturn I don't know the Canadian markets a bit

13:41 more sensitive than the US market in the sense that the oil prices for heavy oil or discounted from West Texas intermediate. So when we get a downturn, it bites harder in Calgary. And, you know,

13:55 the guys who graduated from petroleum engineering the year prior

13:60 in 1999, they were bartending still because they couldn't find a well in gas jobs, or they're out in the field, you know, drilling and stuff. But I got lucky. It wasn't my plan A, but I had

14:12 done an internship with Halliburton. Actually, it was Sperry before Sperry was Halliburton. So I had done MWD in the field. You know, they didn't usually hire. I was like a co-op student, an

14:25 intern, if you will, with Sperry. They created a new lower pay grade for guys like me who were still students. Sent us all over. I would drive thousands of kilometers between jobs from northeast

14:38 British Columbia down to southeast Saskatchewan. Just MWD,

14:44 measurement while drilling for those who don't know it. And that's, you know, dirty rig work for the most part. Once you get your stuff set up, you're just sitting there taking surveys, steering

14:52 the wells for the directional drillers. So I had this background in directional drilling, which was nice because when I got out of school, I was qualified for this weird little mini PSL,

15:03 Halliburton calls them product service lines, PSLs, called multi-laterals. And so I don't know what this is, but hey, it's a job. Assign on with them and turns out this little team of like six

15:14 guys in Nisku, Canada, shout out

15:19 to Nisku, was running the entire global product line for multi-lateral junctions, doing wells with multiple legs off of them, and one vertical hole, and then do stacked multi-laterals in different

15:31 layers of the reservoir, or drill two different directions like this, or pitchfork, or crows, but there's a bunch of different multi-lateral well architecture So I got to do that and learned.

15:44 really fast, developing new technologies. It was still kind of the Wild Wild West for multi-lattles. We were building stuff in the workshop, testing it out, and then running it in the field

15:53 immediately. No vetting of anything. Let's just go try this in someone's well, which was a lot of fun.

16:01 And that led me after

16:18 a few projects in the Middle East. I spent a lot of time in Saudi in those days, a little bit of time in South America. And then one of the hotspots was Venezuela And Venezuela was blowing and

16:20 going in the early 2000s right,? Hugo Chavez was already the president, but he was still playing ball, you know what I mean? So I started working with those guys a lot more to get this new

16:26 technology deployed to do these multilateral junctions a little bit better, 'cause they're notoriously risky, right? You can run into heavy duty fishing operations really quickly when you do a

16:37 multilateral junction and something, the littlest thing goes wrong. You're now gonna spend weeks fishing the stuff out of the hole. So I was helping those guys out and that led me to a full-time

16:46 position down there in 2004. Yeah. So I moved to Venezuela as a 26-year-old guy.

16:56 How was that? From Canada. Ah, pretty awesome. Yeah. I was like, paradise found, right? Yeah. Going from the Canadian winters to a tropical paradise with, you know, I can't say beautiful

17:07 ladies, but I married a Venezuelan lady, so I can say that, I guess And then, you know, 25 cents for a beer, two bucks for a bottle of rum the size of your arm, you know? It was great times.

17:19 And when that - Well, how long have you done that? I was not four years old. Okay. Yeah. And then the final bell for me was kind of like when Chavez wanted all those international oil companies

17:33 to switch over to majority peta vase ownership. So they pushed out Exxon immediately, Just like, no, we're going home.

17:41 Um, conical and negotiated for a little while. And I was working primarily on the petros, a lot of field, which was a conical field. They all got on the same plane back to Houston on May 7th.

17:50 And is it predominantly onshore option? That's a little unsure. So onshore, it's the heavy, heavy oil stuff, right? Okay. So all that expertise I had gotten in Canadian heavy oil applied itself

18:01 really well to the Canadian fahad or no-go stuff, which is three to 5, 000 centipois. Almost bitumen in the reservoir. That's why the multi ladder was worked So good. If you drill a single well,

18:12 you might get a couple hundred barrels out of it. It's like a single horizontal lateral. Just the fact that it's thicker. Yeah, you need, you need some gravity drainage to get that stuff to even

18:21 flow into your well bore. So they would do a, like a fish bone style multi lateral well with up to 18 different branches off of it and then get two or 3, 000 barrels a day. So conical was all in

18:33 on this stuff. And it was really cool. They had there's probably three or four hundred multilateral junctions in that feel How much was it a drawing as well? Oh, back in those days, it was

18:43 probably with the multilateral hardware, uh, five or six million bucks, but it was cheaper because they wouldn't complete the laterals. They just directional drill them. Yeah. And then the main

18:54 junctions would be tied back with a cemented junction. That's my part in the process, but the laterals were just open hole. And, uh, yeah. Is that standard for the heavy oils or is it? Yeah.

19:06 Okay. You can still do that in Canada to a large degree is still a lot of the cold production, not the thermal stuff. Yeah. It has to be cold production, but they do a lot of, we call those

19:16 level one multi-lattles, where you just, you know, turn the directional drilling pH over BHA over to the side and then push out and create a new hole. It may collapse, it may not, but it still

19:27 connects up these different, you know, reservoir compartments. And it makes, I've never heard of that. That's awesome. No. Oh, it's good fun. Yeah. I'm not an engineer. So

19:38 yeah. Uh, so then. I had to leave whenever everybody else left. I was probably one of the last expats in Matherine, Venezuela, 'cause I was pre-committed. And if it weren't for Hugo Chavez, I

19:50 would probably still be there

19:54 having a great time, but all the international companies pulled out and a few months later, I landed here in Houston, Texas. So is the really quickly a side tangent, is the state of the industry

20:06 there in Venezuela the same as it was when you left? Oh, yeah, it was fun to be there, right? 'Cause you'd get these petavasa guys that were nominated by, became a political organization,

20:16 Petavasa, Petrolios de Venezuela. So that means state oil company. They'd come in and say, We're gonna grow this businessto five million barrels a day. At the time, there were about 35 and it

20:27 looked feasible for them to get to five million barrels a day in 2006,

20:35 2007, until it just became inhospitable to international companies. And so they all pulled out. And then oil pricing was still strong up until a wet about the global housing crisis probably did

20:50 that man, right? The global recession 2008, nine, 10. Because then there was less demand for oil and Chavez was taking all their funds and diverting it into social projects and free heating oil

21:03 for the poor folks in the Northeast of the United States, right? And subsidizing Cuba's energy and they just didn't have any cash after that stopped investing in the infrastructure. And I wanna say

21:16 2010 and it's just been a slow motion downward death spiral since then to where when I was there was 35 million barrels a day for the country,

21:26 up until the sanctions came off in Venezuela a couple of months ago, they were down to a few hundred thousand barrels per day of oil exports.

21:35 Even with Chevron and now sell oil again, 'Cause they got that sanction removed or. waved from the State Department. They're only able to get it up to about 700, 000 barrels a day. And that's

21:47 mostly coming from the light oil fields. Jake, the heavy oil stuff is all shut in. So have they sort of played nice and recent years to get the exons and the other guys to come back in? Well,

22:01 they're trying too, but it's like, well, we've already been bit by this once. Yeah, once bit and twice shy. So the condition for these sanctions being waved was for Maduro Chavez's successor to

22:13 host free and fair elections, right?

22:17 Is that penned out? Did he do that? Absolutely not.

22:22 Yeah, nobody voted. And the only way he could get the few people to vote that did vote was by threatening to annex, you know, two thirds of Guyana's landmass. Landmass. Don't know if you know

22:31 the relationship between Venezuela and Guyana? Not really. Guyana's the whole hot spot. Pretty close to each other

22:37 Yeah, we actually went and toured. Exxon's campus with some friends who were on the GANNA project and so that was just like the top of top to the town and Yeah, I was down in Guyana in October for

22:49 a workshop with a lot of the Exxon guys there. Wow. Yeah, it's tiny There's more people and you know well ten times as many people in Houston as there is in Guyana That's like seven hundred

22:59 thousand. We're like seven million here, right? Yeah, I did that. It's crazy. I mean a hundred times anyway

23:06 Yeah, a lot

23:11 of those oil fields offshore oil fields in Guyana You know if you were to draw a line straight off the coast. Mm-hmm. They would belong. They would fall under the Zondere skiba Which based on a

23:17 1899 treaty with treaty with the Spanish and the British belongs to Guyana? The vote that Maduro did on the weekends just on Sunday just past weekend was one of the questions Referendum questions was

23:31 shall we recognize that treaty? No, or no

23:37 Yes or no, but Clearly everybody voted, you know, for the spirit of nationalism to reclaim the Arizona Eskiba, which will never happen because, you know, it's probably pretty well predicted by

23:48 the US. Navy

23:50 given all the ExxonMobil infrastructure off the coast there.

23:55 So yeah, I don't know if the sanctions are going to stay waived, but they are for the time being, which makes Chevron quite happy because they've been investing in that country for 40 or 50 years,

24:06 and haven't been able to get anything out of it for a path. Well, the Trump administration put the sanctions in place probably in 2018. I feel like there is so much opportunity internationally,

24:19 but the top of my risk is always the political risk of these governments that are not stable, leaders that are not stable. You can get kicked out at any point in time A couple of years ago, there

24:31 was the whole Sitco 5 here in the Woodlands and the whole bribery thing that went down. It was just like. If you look at it, it was like they were kind of my understanding, doing business the way

24:42 that business is done down there in order to make things happen. There could have been some things that were kind of obviously like, kind across the lines, but the US Justice Department came down

24:50 there very heavily. And I know one of the guys who was involved in the investigation on that and it's interesting. It's another all in prison. So it's like, I don't know, it doesn't really like

25:02 make you want to go outside the borders and just invest a ton of cash into something You know, it's very discouraging to foreign direct investment, right? And that's what they need at this point.

25:11 They do not have the cash to rebuild the Venezuelan oil and gas industry. I have a huge community of Venezuelan people that I'm friends and family with, right? And they're all waiting for their

25:22 chance to go back, they're loyal to the country and to the industry, talented people. They had a fantastic reservoir engineering program for the folks that came out of Pédé of Asa in the 80s and

25:34 90s, so good engineers, good geologists, they all want to go back and it. But they can't do it, though. Money. And who's going to invest? Well, the only one who's still there playing ball is

25:45 Chevron at this point and shell to a tiny degree. Everybody else is like, No, we're out of here. And I needed to correct a statement that I said earlier. The Hamaka field is one of the

25:56 traditional Chevron heavy oil fields that is still operating. I don't know to what extent, what production levels. It's going to be a long road for them to get back to where they were. And they

26:09 have the world's largest oil reserves. If you jiggle around their recovery factors for extra heavy oil, which Chavez did.

26:18 And they say the last drop of oil this world ever consumes will probably come out of Venezuela. The problem is, what's the timeline for that? How long are we going to be interested in extra heavy

26:27 oil from a South American dictatorship? What is the what is the SMN reserves in Guyana? You know, in Guyana, I don't know. 'Cause they're still doing discovery and appraisal and a lot of Guyana

26:39 stuff, right? But they're up to what, 28 discoveries? And they announce a new one every month or so. And it's all offshore, right? All offshore, yeah. Which is safe, right? You can't get

26:48 taken over as easily. Yeah, you're off shore, right? Much harder. Much harder. But, you know, this whole theme of, oh, come on in American oil company invest in our country, build up a

27:00 great oil field Ecuador is a classic example, right? Texaco built that oil industry And once it looks good enough to where the president at the time says, oh, that's lovely, I'll be having that.

27:13 Good luck, see you later. You know, they just write off the investment and go to international business court and spend 20 years trying to get a settlement, which is what Texaco had to do, right?

27:23 No, when conical left that, pictures a lot to feel, they wrote off 14 billion and a quarter in Q4. 14 billion, that's wild. It's a huge number Yes, they had already. made a profit on that

27:36 investment. I'm quite sure. But I had a lot of investing. All right. So you leave the one full land of Venezuela, you land back in Houston. What was nice? Yeah, back in Houston got married,

27:46 started a family. And then, uh, yeah, Houston wasn't my destination of choice, but it is, in my opinion, the global capital of oil and gas. It is happy to be here. And now of all kinds of

27:59 energy, as I learned from Fuse, this is going to be the hub for hydrogen. It really is. Uh, CO2, all that stuff is going to happen here. I love that. Um, but no, um, I, I liked Houston and

28:13 Halliburton offered me an opportunity then to go to the Middle East, which I had still had strong connections to from before, but they sent me to Dubai in 2010. I only hear amazing things about

28:24 Dubai. Yeah, it's pretty amazing. 10 years ago, this was a, it was still early then. It was still early. There's still, there's still empty sand. You two early sections between the giant

28:34 malls, right? But it was nice. It still had a kind of a local feel. You can still, I went back last year in February for meetings and it's Manhattan. You can't move, there's people on top of

28:47 you. It's stressful. Like the old Dubai was kind of relaxed and I missed that. But that was a good place to live, especially at that point in time. You know, the kids were little and they had a

28:58 nanny The things that you don't typically do living in the US. So it was great. But at that point in time, I was 10 or 12 years with Halliburton and I was kind of at a fork in my career. So keep

29:13 doing this. They were offering me a position as like a business development manager in Kuwait. And I was interested, right? But I thought, you know, if I go into that level of Halliburton

29:25 management, it's the profit loss pressure and you're only as good as your latest thinking forecast. And that's your life, you know? So I took a bit of a sabbatical and went to work for Saudi Ramco

29:38 in

29:41 2012. Were you in Saudi at the time or you're here in the States? That was a funny thing. That was in, so I hired on while I was still in Dubai and Halliburton's like, oh, I wish you well,

29:52 thank you. Shout out to Halliburton, they never treated me bad ever. 'Cause you want to work for an operator and they're gonna treat you well on the way out. So they put me in Saudi for five or

30:02 six months just to get trained, quote, unquote. But then the idea behind the group that hired me, which was the upstream RD group, X pick arc, research and development, 300 scientists and

30:16 engineers developing new technology, very academic focused, to be honest, very patentable IP focused They wanted to have. It makes no sense that they hired a Canadian to do this, but a person in

30:33 Scotland to work as a liaison out of a satellite research center and scout the North Sea for new technologies. It was cool to shed Jake.

30:46 So they move you from Saudi to Aberdeen. So you just hung out in Aberdeen. What was your day-to-day? Were you, because you said technology is kind of specifically? Yeah, upstream. So I was

30:59 with the production technology team within the Expec org organization, which has its own building in Saudi. They are very associated with the University of

31:10 Kingfod and all that stuff. But I was in a new office that they built out for us by myself for a while, because I was the first one they'd hired for this role And I just started talking to folks in

31:23 Scotland who were doing acoustic telemetry for down whole data. started talking to folks who were doing, you know,

31:33 downhill sensing reservoir resistivity and pressure measurements distributed through the reservoir. And then one of the things that really caught my interest was autonomous ICDs. So when I say ICDs,

31:49 inflow control device is kind of the broadest category. And then you can narrow that down into autonomous ICDs as an error category Those are the ones that in ICD chokes your wealth in a planned way,

32:02 but it's just a fixed nozzle. You're basically putting a hole in your pipe that gives you the flow rates that you want at a certain drawdown pressure. Autonomous is the ones are the ones that can

32:11 change based on what you're producing. That caught my interest in 2013. So how long were you with Saudi Renco? As good as that job was in a year and a half was all I lasted, even though they had

32:25 me on this wall. wonderful compensation package to live in the northeast of Scotland.

32:31 It was a little bit hard to implement change in an organization as big as Saudi Aramco. You know, I was getting great technology ideas. I was taking them back to the kingdom and saying, guys,

32:41 look at this. This could make a difference. Yeah. Okay. That's a great idea. Um, there wasn't enough engagement between expect arc and the assets. And I've said that before. And I'll say it

32:52 again. So what was the point of the position? Uh, just just harvesting new ideas and technology. Yeah. But if there's no like utilization of the idea of like the ideas that you find. I'd say I

33:04 could have got those ideas pushed through, but it would have taken me longer than I was willing to wait because I'm impatient. I want to, you know, here's the idea. Let's de-risk it. Let's plan

33:15 a job, let's do a test, let's do a well. And that takes you think that's purely just the nature of the size of the company and so you think you would anticipate you'd probably have the same

33:24 problems today. a Halliburton or on the operator side Exxon or Chevron, or is that more exclusive to Saudi Aramco? The way I put this typically is, I wanted to work for an operator. The world's

33:37 largest NOC was a poor choice, because they are the slowest ones to implement change. Very progressive now, now more than they were 10 years ago. I'll give them credit for that. Very much more

33:49 progressive and quick adopters. But it's a very large crude container that needs to be steered miles and miles before it docks at port. So it was hard to get things through. But I'll tell you that.

34:04 The personal reason for leaving Scotland was the weather. And my Scottish friends will hate me for saying this. But Aberdeen gets like one day of sunshine a year. I couldn't do it. I couldn't do

34:14 it. And my wife is Venezuelan, bro. She's like, yeah, didn't know what to do, didn't know how to dress. It was torture. So we wanted to get back to Houston anyway. Yeah, so what I did was I

34:24 found the coolest AICD company to work with at the time and get myself a position back here in Houston. And that was in 2014. And so have you been, is that was it inflow that you landed with or was

34:35 it another company at first? No, I had met with inflow multiple times, but they were, that was their startup phase. They were just three guys working out of the garage. Very promising tech. I

34:46 fell in love with this tech because of them. Not because of the company I went to work with, which is, which was 10 deck at the time now, Taka.

34:55 But they had the most commercial product. They were in the troll field in Norway and a big way, controlling gas. So that's an interesting field where they drill this thin oil rim underneath a

35:06 massive gas cap. So when you have gas breakthrough in those wells, you shut the well in and those are sub-sea offshore wells. You don't want to shut those in. These are200 million wells, right?

35:16 So they really need this solution for gas control in that field. So 10 deck it was blowing and going They brought me in at the Houston office, and I populated it out throughout the Western

35:26 Hemisphere, 'cause no one was talking about autonomous ICDs in the Western Hemisphere. So we got to run the first ones in Canada, the first ones in Alaska, the first ones in Columbia, Peru, and

35:36 Ecuador, and then later on in Texas.

35:41 So yeah, it's been a fun journey for sure. So you could be probably one of the world's most experienced peoples in this technology. Thanks for saying that. In theory

35:54 Of the ones that are still doing it? Yeah, maybe, but there's a lot more to do. There's a lot more to do. It's still early days for this technology. What, I mean, you've spent a lot of the

36:04 time, you said it's been what, 10 years now, kind of working with these kinds of companies. What excites you about this? Finding different reservoirs? So my boss just had me do a study of all

36:16 the unconventional basins in the US, 'cause they have no idea, Norway None, right? They just know that like the Permian makes a lot of water. Say, okay, let me do, I'll compare the Bakken to

36:27 the Permian, to the Hanesville, 'cause I know these reservoirs, basins, not as well as the frackers do. But I spent a little bit of time in frax, like I know a little bit. And trying to find

36:38 ones that where the viscosity sensitive device can actually work. And it's not all of them, right? We can't go out to your West Texas well and shut off all your water. Sorry, the light tight oil

36:50 that comes out of an unconventional shale or sandy shale reservoir has a pretty low viscosity. And we have to have the oil thicker than the water. Otherwise, the device does the opposite, right?

37:05 So the only unconventional play where it really works, and my view is the Bakken. But we just did a two-wheel Bakken pilot project where we increased their oil rate. I mean, it was watered out,

37:15 so it was pretty bad rod pump, it was only making, you know, six barrels a day. And we brought that up to 30 barrels a day. That's good. Yeah. It's not nothing. And it's a little pilot project

37:27 demonstrating proof of concept. So we were really thrilled about that. We just put that case study up on our website. Is that the paper that you're writing? That's a different paper, but yeah.

37:37 We'll publish that hopefully next year. 'Cause this is hot off the presses. Okay. Yeah. The one I'm writing right now is about carbonance. Naturally fractured carbonance. I don't even know what

37:47 that means. You know, limestone, right? But instead of fracking it, like we're prone to do in this industry, in the US, particularly, you know, if you're a hammer, everything looks like a

37:57 nail, eat frack it, frack it, frack it. But some of these reservoirs have natural fractures. So that's Austin chalk, Saratoga chalk. And up in Montana, it's

38:11 the Mission Canyon reservoir of the Cedar Creek anticline. So small independent, mid-size independent came to me. a couple years ago and said these wells are making way too much water, we know

38:22 there's more oil in the fractures, but once a natural fracture, you know, from geological stresses, once it waters out in a carbonate, the water dissolves the walls of the fracture and the

38:33 fracture gets wider and wider and wider until it's a superhighway for water and they can't get any of the remaining oil out of these fractures

38:43 So we put some AICV completions in there last fall, what a year ago today. And so we don't know where the fractures are, we don't have a way of logging those. So we'll just divide this well up

38:55 into 150-foot compartments. I picked that number, you know,

39:00 and we'll see what we get. And lo and behold, we cut their water production down by about half in both wells. And

39:08 one well, it was pretty played out, it was a retrofit, a well it already produced for like three or four years. So it was kind of, yeah, I already made 200, 000 barrels. And we kept it on at

39:18 the same oil rate with less water. Great technical success, but no incremental oil. That's how we want to promote this technology is incremental oil, you'll make more oil. Yeah, less water and

39:28 less gas, but you can also get more oil. So that was kind of a wash, but the new well we drilled had a 5, 000 foot lateral with 30 compartments, soil packers and valves. And yeah, we got all

39:41 the water decline, like the oil rate decline curves for every well in the field And this is by far the best well they've ever drilled. Head and shoulders above every pier in the entire play, and it

39:52 still makes about half as much water as an offset well. But the real kicker for this paper is that the Matt McConnell, shout out, buddy, he calculated the volume of original oil in place,

40:07 reservoir engineers call that O-O-I-P, based on the structural enclosure of each of these wells. It's a faulted reservoir. So you can say this is one side, this is the other, this is the

40:18 thickness. Therefore, I have this volume of rock times porosity, that's your O-O-I-P. And do you only get that if you have the two faults on the other side? Yeah, it's only works in structural

40:26 traps. You couldn't do this for unconventionals, right? And he said comparing the offset wells to our AICV well in the first 300 days, our AICV completion had recovered 8 of the O-O-I-P in that

40:42 time period In the same time period for all the offset wells, the best, let's say the average was about 4. To

40:51 double the average. Double the average, what does that mean? The first documented case history in the world of accelerated oil recovery from any reservoir based on inflow control technology. So

41:03 we're pretty excited about the paper. That is exciting. 'Cause everybody talks about it, like oh yeah, you can get your oil out of the ground faster. Can you prove it? No. It's just a theory,

41:12 right? So yeah, that'll be a good one. That's super exciting. Congrats. Thank you. Let's see if anybody reads it. Probably get more people in this podcast paying attention. Well, if you guys

41:25 are listening, you want the paper, reach out to us. We'll be published at the Canadian Energy Technology Conference in March in Calgary. Perfect. Man, this has been super exciting. I'm actually

41:37 learning a lot.

41:39 Where can people go to find out more about you? You're on LinkedIn, you're on Clyde as well under that Yep, we're gonna learn more about you at the company. Oh, inflowcontrolorg. No, sorry, I

41:50 got that wrong.

41:53 inflowcontrolno for Norway, right? Okay. We would love to have the inflowcontrolcom main name, but we don't. That's a different organization related, but not our company.

42:07 inflowcontrolno has videos,

42:10 case studies, you name it, papers, galore. 30 published papers now in this space. But I would say even better than the website is our YouTube channel. Yeah. Our YouTube channel has all the

42:26 produced videos that we have to just show really quickly and simply how the valve works. 'Cause I can't explain it with words as well as I can visually. And then there's actually a lecture series on

42:38 there. Like step one, you know, horizontal well Step two, inflow control, ICDs, and a horizontal well. Step three, autonomous inflow control. And it goes through nine two minute videos that

42:50 are fun to watch on, you know, what state of the art is in this type of inflow control space, which you didn't know existed until today. That's interesting, yeah, if I'll get the link from you,

43:03 we'll actually upload all those into the search engine as well, so that discoverable. So if you guys are subscribers at CalliPro, you search anything around inflow control, you'll find those

43:12 videos. If you're not, and you want a free trial, reach out to me. We'll hook you guys up. Steven, this has been great. It's been a lot of fun. I've learned a lot, learned a lot about

43:19 Venezuela. So let's do it again sometime. Oh yeah? Yeah. You can do a follow-up.