Why Should We Make Shale Economic?
Data Science & Analytics

Why Should We Make Shale Economic?

Rosemary Jackson  •  

Petro.ai: Enables the oil and gas industry to make accurate predications for inventory maximization in your bounded shale reservoir.

Petro.ai: Provides the only AI tool to accurately weigh trade-offs between economics and drainage in your unconventional reservoirs.

Oil and gas companies are our front-line defenders against a revision of the world as we know it. Against a change to the detriment in the balance of geopolitical order. Against the creation of new haves and have nots. Right now, we own the opportunity to build a future that’s based upon vision and not just circumstances or rapid reaction or market forces. Why should we make shale economic? Because with the energy resource that has put our nation ahead as one of the largest producers of oil, we can set the pace of change in forming a world built soundly on expert resource management. While we wait.

Every morning at Petro.ai, we have a remote standup with our Houston and Canadian offices. Frequently Dr. Troy Ruths, our CEO at Petro.ai reminds us of our mission, “It’s very important to the world to make shale economic.

The whole industry can be efficient with our first-ever AI tool that really works, that will save shale as an oil and gas resource. How do we continue to make energy so our lives can be maintained without interruption or political chaos? By making shale economic. And we’re doing it.”

The answer lies in hydraulic fracturing with the new science of geomechanics. With that understanding, drainage can be determined, and pads can be optimized. “The inventory is dwindling,” Ruths explains, “We’re not adding to shale. We’re drilling it down without adequate application of new knowledge that will maximize that huge, bountiful resource.

“I’ve talked to lots of companies, and they think they’ve figured it out. But they haven’t. Applying the same solutions with the same set of type curves isn’t absorbing the frontier information that will transform your concept of shale and open up the opportunity to maximize your inventory.

“The industry has been hammered by low oil prices and we’ve gone through a downturn. Everyone feels beaten up. They’ve done as well as they can. Companies ask themselves, what can I do now with prices moving upwards but still anticipating the cyclical nature of a future downward trend? The answer is figure out your pad economics within the drainage and stress scenarios that exist now, in the rock that you have already interrupted.

“That means something like Pad Designer in the Petro.ai platform. We built this as an optimizing tool, created with premier AI and cutting-edge research. You can experiment and learn and determine all at the same time.”

Shale has to be economic. We know that neither natural gas nor oil are permanent solutions. They are, according to the Pickens Plan “a bridge fuel…buying us time to develop new technologies that will ultimately replace fossil transportation fuels.”

Shale and the complexities of bounded development must be addressed with the right prescription so that our lifestyles will be altered reasonably, so we can decide what we want our future state to look like rather than legislating reactively against options that we don’t understand. Our new front line workers, oil and gas employees, can make a difference in what our new world will be. While we wait to onboard alternative energy in whatever form that we know or are still waiting to discover, we need to frac on carefully and acknowledge what shale has provided.

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