Energy Crue
Welcome to 'Energy Crüe', the podcast that dives deep into the heart of industry innovation, entrepreneurship, and personal growth. I'm your host, JP Warren, and each episode, we embark on a journey to uncover the passions and motivations that fuel industry leaders as well as industry trends. We're not just talking business here; we're exploring the personal drives, the triumphs, and the challenges that shape today's pioneers.
Energy Crue
From the Table: Infield Wet Sand: A Story of Problem Solving
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In this 2024 Crue Club Operator Roundtable debrief, we break down how an operator gets squeezed by frac sand consolidation and responds by vertically integrating with an in-field wet sand mine to regain cost control. We also unpack the messy field reality, the chemistry traps of produced water recycling, and the bigger lesson: simpler systems often outperform polished “best practice” inputs.
• sand scarcity turning into supplier leverage and price pressure
• in-field wet sand mining as a vertical integration play
• last-mile logistics math where trucking drives delivered sand cost
• real-world failures from broken equipment, clay, and winter freeze-ups
• ditching engineered box systems for belly dumps and loaders
• contractor leverage when only one vendor has the equipment
• service company adaptations and reduced silica dust exposure
• why non-uniform sand may act as a natural diverter underground
• produced water treatment with oxidizers breaking friction reducers
• the need to run water, sand, and chemicals as one system
• future move toward slurry pipelines to remove trucks
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For recent Operator Insights from Crue Club Operator Roundtables head to www.crueclub.com
The Frac Sand Supply Squeeze
SPEAKER_01Welcome to Energy Crew Podcast. I'm your host, JP Warren. And if you're joining us, this is something new that we've been doing. We're living in this cool age where we can take all these transcripts from these multiple roundtables that we have throughout different basins. And pretty much the goal of these roundtables is to have some intentional connections with some strategic conversations, with challenges, topics, themes, trends that are on the operators' minds that we're not just not getting at conferences or we're not getting at uh industry papers. So this is a great dive into what actually operators and service companies are talking about when you strip away the transactional conversations. This one is from 2024 in Austin, Texas, where some would say my BFF Cole Thompson, the COO over at Petro Legacy, shares his company's experience pivoting to infield wet sand mining and produced water recycling to combat rising costs and supply chain bottlenecks. This is a great conversation. Cole is probably one of the smartest cats out there. And the way he's able to look at problems and come up with these innovative solutions is uh fascinating. So I hope you enjoy this uh episode. And if you don't know, that we are uploading 2025 and 2026 operator roundtables to crew club.com. That's C-R-U-E-Club.com, where you can take a deep dive on round table summaries, operator intelligence reports, quarterly intel reports, as well as market trends and signals. And you can find every single audio debrief like the one you're listening to now at CrewClub.com. So sit back, relax, and if you're enjoying these, please share this with those around you. I think these are a great way to uh gain some education and grain some knowledge and strategy on what's happening uh in the minds of uh operators today. So hope you enjoy and let's get ready to take a listen.
SPEAKER_02Imagine uh for just a second that you are running a massive multimillion dollar industrial operation.
SPEAKER_00Right. High stakes, totally locked in schedules.
SPEAKER_02Exactly. You've got these rigorous drilling schedules, you've got investors breathing down your neck, and then suddenly the absolute lifeblood of your project, the raw material you need to make everything work, it just starts evaporating from the open market.
SPEAKER_00Oh man. I mean, that is the ultimate nightmare scenario for literally any operations director.
SPEAKER_02Aaron Powell It really is. The entire supply chain just seizes up. Right. And we're talking specifically about frac sand and the oil and gas industry today. Because of all these mega consolidations happening across the sector, uh the massive multi-billion dollar companies are eating up all the traditional reliable supply lines. Trevor Burrus, Jr.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, they just swallow the market whole. Trevor Burrus, Jr.
SPEAKER_02Right. So the smaller and the mid-cap operators, they are getting completely squeezed out. Suddenly, suppliers are rationing sand. Operational efficiency is dropping off a cliff.
SPEAKER_00Aaron Powell, which means money is just bleeding out of the project.
SPEAKER_02Aaron Ross Powell Exactly. And the service companies that you rely on, well, they're using this scarcity as leverage. They are jacking up prices across the board.
SPEAKER_00Aaron Ross Powell Because suddenly uh sand stops being just this simple line item material, it transforms into a literal weapon of leverage.
SPEAKER_02Aaron Powell Yeah. And you can't just pause a multi-million dollar drilling program while you wait for the market to calm down, you know?
SPEAKER_00Aaron Powell No, absolutely not. The meter is always running.
SPEAKER_02Aaron Powell Right. So if you're the operator we are profiling in today's deep dive, you don't just bite the bullet and pay those extortionate rates.
SPEAKER_00You do something drastic. Trevor Burrus, Jr.
SPEAKER_02You completely rewrite your supply chain from scratch by aggressively vertically integrating. You actually go out and build your own in-field wet sandmine.
SPEAKER_00Aaron Powell Which honestly is a brilliant, highly counterintuitive pivot. I mean, to survive that market squeeze, they decided to completely cut out the middleman and just take control of their own destiny. Trevor Burrus, Jr.
Building An In-Field Wet Sand Mine
SPEAKER_02Yeah. And look, we are taking you inside a closed-door, high-level crew club operator roundtable today.
SPEAKER_00Oh, the good stuff.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, this is a space where the microphones are usually off, right? There is no corporate jargon in this source material, no PR fluff. Trevor Burrus, Jr.
SPEAKER_00Just industry insiders being totally honest.
SPEAKER_02Trevor Burrus, Jr. Exactly. It's the actual operators and the service leaders talking bluntly about what actually works in the dirt.
SPEAKER_00Aaron Powell, which is so rare to get access to.
SPEAKER_02It is. So our mission for today's deep dive is to explore the incredibly messy reality of pulling off this uh let's call it a farm-to-table sandmine. Trevor Burrus, Jr.
SPEAKER_00I love that phrase, farm-to-table industrial sand.
SPEAKER_02Right. And we want to pull out the crucial operational lessons that apply to literally any industry that is struggling with supply chain leverage.
SPEAKER_00Aaron Powell Well, to understand the fix, you have to understand the traditional model in this industry first. Normally you rely on the dry sand market.
SPEAKER_02Aaron Powell, which means buying heavily refined sand.
SPEAKER_00Trevor Burrus, Jr. Exactly. Operators buy perfectly dried, heavily refined sand, and then they pay a logistics company to truck it miles and miles across the basin to their well pad.
SPEAKER_02Aaron Powell But you know, with private equity backers hyper-focused on bottom line well costs, this operator had to slash their capital expenditures like yesterday.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, the pressure is immense. So they looked down at their own feet.
SPEAKER_02Literally.
SPEAKER_00Literally. They had about 1,500 acres of surface acreage, and they realized they were sitting right on top of their own solution.
SPEAKER_02Aaron Ross Powell So they brought in a third-party contractor who had access to this specialized, scarce mining equipment.
SPEAKER_00Right.
SPEAKER_02And they just set up an active wet sand mine right there on their own lease.
SPEAKER_00And I mean, on paper, the economics are just undeniable. You own the raw deposit, so your base material cost absolutely plummets.
SPEAKER_02Okay, but I'm looking at the physics of this, and I really have to push back a little.
SPEAKER_00Okay, hit me.
SPEAKER_02Wet sand has a moisture content of anywhere from like 10 to 15 percent.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Yeah. That's accurate.
SPEAKER_02So if you are loading up trucks with this raw, unrefined material, you are essentially paying to transport heavy, useless water. You are. I mean, a 40,000 pound load of sand might have four to five thousand pounds of water just sitting in it.
SPEAKER_00Which sounds completely counterproductive.
SPEAKER_02Right. Pumping wet sand sounds like a great hack until you realize you're wasting tons of fuel just hauling liquid across a job site.
SPEAKER_00But see, that moisture penalty completely vanishes when you run the actual last mile logistics math.
SPEAKER_02Wait, how does hauling water save money?
SPEAKER_00Because the true cost of sand in the MVV industry isn't the sand itself, it's the trucking.
SPEAKER_02Ah, the freight costs.
SPEAKER_00Exactly. When you buy traditional dry sand, you are paying a massive fleet to haul that material 60 to 100 miles across major state highways. Right. And on those highways, they are subject to Department of Transportation weight limits, heavy highway traffic, waste stations, and just insanely long turnaround times.
SPEAKER_02Aaron Powell But by mining the sand in field, right in their own backyard, the operator circumvents the highway system entirely. Trevor Burrus, Jr.
SPEAKER_00That's the secret. The trucks are now only hauling the sand maybe five miles.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Just five miles.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. And they're driving exclusively on private back-leased dirt roads.
SPEAKER_02Aaron Powell So the highway rules don't apply.
SPEAKER_00Exactly. Because those DOT weight restrictions no longer apply, the operator can completely overload the trucks. They are packing in two to three times the normal capacity per trip.
SPEAKER_02Aaron Powell So you are carrying some water, sure, but the volume is just massive.
SPEAKER_00Aaron Ross Powell Right. You're carrying vastly more total volume over a dramatically shorter distance, all in a continuous rapid loop.
SPEAKER_02Aaron Powell Which does what to the price?
SPEAKER_00Transportation costs drop from$50 or$60 a ton down to under$20 a ton.
SPEAKER_02Aaron Powell That is insane. I mean, a structural advantage like that is huge.
SPEAKER_00It's game changing.
The Execution Nightmare In The Dirt
SPEAKER_02But you know, reading through the actual transcript of this roundtable, it becomes brutally clear that designing a brilliant logistical pivot in a boardroom is a far cry from successfully executing it in the dirt.
SPEAKER_00Oh, yeah. The deployment was an absolute nightmare.
SPEAKER_02Aaron Powell Let's talk about that messy reality. Because the specialized mining equipment brought in by the contractor arrived in total disrepair, right?
SPEAKER_00Total disrepair. The crews were constantly fighting just to keep the belts moving.
SPEAKER_02And then they hit the actual geology of the site.
SPEAKER_00Aaron Powell Right, because natural dirt isn't perfectly sorted.
SPEAKER_02Exactly. The raw material had a massive amount of clay in it, which just gummed up all the processing.
SPEAKER_00And then uh weather became their biggest enemy?
SPEAKER_02Aaron Powell Because of the delivery systems, right? They tried to use these high-tech box systems.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. They contracted these highly engineered, expensive systems to transport and deliver the sand.
SPEAKER_02Aaron Powell And it sounds incredibly efficient on paper. Perfectly measured, modular boxes of sand arriving at the pad.
SPEAKER_00Does sound great. Until winter hits.
SPEAKER_02Oh no. Because of the water.
SPEAKER_00Aaron Ross Powell Right. That 10 to 15 percent moisture content turned those high-tech modular boxes into giant, completely unusable, solid ice cubes.
SPEAKER_02You literally couldn't get the sand out of the box.
SPEAKER_00Nope. And even when it wasn't freezing, the operators at the round table described the material as sand soup.
SPEAKER_02Sand soup. That sounds awful.
SPEAKER_00It is. The wet sand would just cling to the inside of these expensive boxes. So trucks would return from the well site to the mine, and the boxes would still be a third full of sticky damp sand.
SPEAKER_02That's pure waste. I mean, you are paying for volume that never even makes it into the blender.
SPEAKER_00Exactly. And because of all these mechanical and logistical failures, the operators started severely missing their initial volume targets.
SPEAKER_02Aaron Powell, which is a huge problem. Because the private equity guys funding this are looking at a rigorous drilling schedule.
SPEAKER_00Oh yeah. They have strict well budgets.
SPEAKER_02They do not care about the nuances of an experimental sandmine, do they?
SPEAKER_00Aaron Ross Powell Not even a little bit. They just want the wells producing on time.
SPEAKER_02Aaron Ross Powell Right. So the operator found themselves in some incredibly tense conversations with their financial backers just to keep the project alive.
Simpler Logistics Beat Fancy Systems
SPEAKER_00Aaron Powell And they realized they had to pivot again. Because those high-tech boxes kept freezing and failing, the operators were forced to abandon their contracts.
SPEAKER_02They completely changed their operational philosophy.
SPEAKER_00Yes. They realized a core truth complexity is the enemy of execution.
SPEAKER_02Aaron Ross Powell Complexity is the enemy of execution. I love that. So what did they do?
SPEAKER_00Aaron Ross Powell They looked at the overly engineered box systems and just scrapped them entirely. They switched to a dead simple belly dump method.
SPEAKER_02Aaron Ross Powell Belly dump, like standard construction trucks.
SPEAKER_00Exactly. They hired standard dump trucks that literally just drop the sand from the bottom right directly onto the ground.
SPEAKER_02No fancy modular boxes? Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Nope. They drop it on the ground or onto a basic conveyor belt system. They were literally just piling it up on a dirt dance floor and scooping it up with a front end loader. Trevor Burrus, Jr.
SPEAKER_02Which is incredibly primitive.
SPEAKER_00It is primitive, but it worked flawlessly out in the elements.
SPEAKER_02It really proves it out in the dirt. Elegance usually fails. You have to strip out delicate systems in favor of what bluntly, reliably functions.
SPEAKER_00Absolutely.
SPEAKER_02But you know, it makes me wonder about the contractor in all this.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_02I mean, imagine hiring a crew to paint your house, and they show up with broken ladders, they buy the wrong paint, and they miss every single deadline.
SPEAKER_00You'd fire them.
SPEAKER_02You'd fire them on the spot. Why didn't this operator just terminate the middleman and find someone who could actually deliver?
SPEAKER_00Well, uh, they couldn't.
SPEAKER_02What do you mean they couldn't?
SPEAKER_00This highlights a massive vulnerability when you try to innovate in a tight market. That contractor they partnered with was quite literally the only game in town.
SPEAKER_02I mean, wow. They were the only ones with the gear.
SPEAKER_00Exactly. They had the specific type of wet sand mining equipment ready to deploy. Firing them meant the entire multimillion dollar operation would just grind to a halt.
SPEAKER_02Aaron Powell And the insiders at the roundtable pointed out a critical failure here in the contract structure, right?
SPEAKER_00Trevor Burrus Yeah. The agreement didn't have nearly enough financial penalties built in for underperformance. Trevor Burrus, Jr.
SPEAKER_02Right. A contract without massive financial teeth is really just a fence you can easily climb over. Aaron Powell That's a great way to put it.
SPEAKER_00But uh there is a silver lining that shows the messy reality of these industry partnerships.
SPEAKER_02Aaron Powell Okay, what's the silver lining?
SPEAKER_00Aaron Powell Despite the broken equipment and the missed targets, that contractor really hustled.
SPEAKER_02Aaron Ross Powell How so?
SPEAKER_00Well, when their own mine couldn't produce enough volume, they quietly went out to the open market and sourced supplemental wet sand from other nearby operations to cover the shortfall.
SPEAKER_02Oh, so they basically bought sand from competitors to make up the difference.
SPEAKER_00Exactly. And that sheer hustle meant the operator never actually had to shut down their frack crews.
Service Company Response And Safety Wins
SPEAKER_02Aaron Powell They kept the beast fed, even if the diet was unconventional. But handing a pile of clumpy, unrefined wet sand to the highly calibrated service companies, I mean the guys running the billion-dollar frack fleets, that seems like a recipe for a massive dispute.
SPEAKER_00Oh, totally. By supplying their own sand, the operator was actively stripping a massive revenue line item away from those frack companies.
SPEAKER_02Because normally the frack company makes a margin on the sand logistics.
SPEAKER_00Exactly. So the operator walked into those meetings expecting a massive fight. I mean, you're literally taking food off their plate.
SPEAKER_02But surprisingly, the blowback on the equipment side was practically nonexistent.
SPEAKER_00Which shocked everyone.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. The modifications needed to handle wet sand were incredibly cheap. For like$10,000 to$15,000. The service companies just removed some auger screws and converted their highly engineered blenders into simple open tubs.
SPEAKER_00And here's the crazy part: the frack crews actually ended up championing the change. Really? Why? Because managing hundreds of dry sand trucks a day creates a chaotic, super dangerous bottleneck at the well pad. Wet sand solved that entire logistics nightmare.
SPEAKER_02Plus, it completely eliminated the massive toxic silica dust plumes that usually choke a site.
SPEAKER_00Right, which is a huge win for air quality and crew safety. OSHA loves wet sand.
SPEAKER_02Aaron Powell That makes total sense. But you know, it shows that the era of service companies just selling generic off-the-shelf products is dying.
SPEAKER_00Aaron Powell Oh, it's completely dead. They can't just hand an operator a catalog anymore.
SPEAKER_02Trevor Burrus, Jr. Right. To survive, they have to become bespoke solution providers. They have to tailor their services to exactly what the operator values in that specific location.
SPEAKER_00Aaron Powell Even if it means permanently modifying their own equipment to handle weird wet sand.
SPEAKER_02Aaron Ross Powell Though the insider's Riley noted something funny about the margins.
SPEAKER_00Aaron Powell Oh, yeah. The service companies absolutely made up for that lost sand revenue by quietly increasing their margins on the chemical packages and the pumping equipment.
SPEAKER_02Aaron Powell Naturally. Cost shifting is inevitable. You squeeze a balloon on one end, it expands on the other.
SPEAKER_00Aaron Powell Always.
Why Cheap Sand Can Perform Better
SPEAKER_02Aaron Ross Powell Okay. But I am still hung up on the subsurface physics here.
SPEAKER_00Aaron Ross Powell Okay, let's get into it.
SPEAKER_02We're talking about taking a highly engineered, mathematically modeled process and injecting a completely unrefined, cheaper material into it. Right. It feels like taking chunky, unrefined, generic grocery store coffee grounds and forcefully shoving them into a$10,000 Italian espresso machine.
SPEAKER_00That is a perfect analogy. Aaron Powell Right.
SPEAKER_02I mean, pumping dirty, low-grade sand should absolutely destroy the conductivity and the performance of these multimillion dollar wells.
SPEAKER_00Aaron Powell And you know what? Every single reservoir engineer at the company made that exact argument.
SPEAKER_02Aaron Powell I bet they did.
SPEAKER_00But the most fascinating twist of this entire roundtable discussion is that the wells performed equally well. Trevor Burrus, Jr.
SPEAKER_02Right. Equally well.
SPEAKER_00In several cases, production actually increased.
SPEAKER_02Aaron Ross Powell Using the cheap, chunky stuff resulted in better wells.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. It completely forces a reevaluation of deeply held industry assumptions. Aaron Powell How is that even physically possible? Aaron Ross Powell Well, the prevailing theory is that the broader, messier distribution of the cheaper sand acts as a natural diverter underground.
SPEAKER_02Okay, let's break down that mechanism. Yeah. What does a natural diverter actually do?
SPEAKER_00So when you pump fluid at immense pressure to crack the rock, the fluid inherently seeks the path of least resistance, right?
SPEAKER_02Right. Water is lazy.
SPEAKER_00Exactly. If you use perfectly uniform, expensive round sand where every single grain is identical, you get a very clean, simple single-lane fracture.
SPEAKER_02Trevor Burrus, Like a straight highway.
SPEAKER_00Yes. The fluid just shoots straight down that lane. But wet mine sand is a chaotic, unsorted blend of large and small grains. Trevor Burrus, Jr.
SPEAKER_02What the industry calls a 41-40 mix, right?
SPEAKER_00Exactly. So instead of a uniform flow, you're pumping a chaotic traffic jam into the rock.
SPEAKER_02A traffic jam. Okay.
SPEAKER_00The varying green sizes jam up and block certain pathways. And when the fluid hits that blockage, it violently forces its way into new directions.
SPEAKER_02So instead of one clean crack, it creates a much more complex, shattered spiderweb network of fractures in the rock.
SPEAKER_00Exactly. The rock down there is naturally so incredibly tight that chasing mathematically perfect conductivity with pristine, spherical, wildly expensive sand is basically an illusion.
SPEAKER_02Raw volume and the sheer complexity of the fracture network matter far more than the purity of the sand.
SPEAKER_00Nailed it.
SPEAKER_02So perfect is the enemy of good. And in this case, perfect was just vastly more expensive.
Produced Water Chemistry And Silo Failures
SPEAKER_00Right. And since they figured out the sand, they decided to apply the exact same ruthless efficiency to the water. Aaron Powell Okay.
SPEAKER_02This part of the transcript was wild.
SPEAKER_00Oh, the water situation was intense. They decided to run their frack operations using 100% produced water.
SPEAKER_02Aaron Powell Which, for those who don't know, produced water is the incredibly harsh, briny liquid that comes back out of the earth alongside the oil and gas.
SPEAKER_00It is nasty stuff. It is not something you want to touch.
SPEAKER_02Aaron Powell Not at all. We are talking about water with a staggering 200,000 parts per million of total dissolved solids.
SPEAKER_00Trevor Burrus It's basically liquid salt.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. And it carries dangerous H2S gas and severe bacteria issues. It's incredibly corrosive.
SPEAKER_00Very corrosive. So to make millions of gallons of this hypersalian water usable for fracking, the operator had to aggressively chemically treat their holding ponds.
SPEAKER_02They had to kill all the microscopic bugs and bacteria. So picture a massive chemical warfare operation taking place in these giant outdoor ponds. To sanitize the water, the treatment companies had to dump in incredibly harsh oxidizers.
SPEAKER_00Chemicals like hydrogen peroxide and chlorine dioxide.
SPEAKER_02Right. It's essentially like taking a massive dose of a broad spectrum antibiotic to cure an infection.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_02But it accidentally destroys your entire immune system and gut biome in the process. Fixing one problem triggered a catastrophic operational domino effect.
SPEAKER_00Because chemically, those harsh bacteria killers didn't just stop at killing the bugs. Let's look at the mechanism of what an oxidizer actually does.
SPEAKER_02Okay, what does it do?
SPEAKER_00It aggressively steals electrons, tearing apart molecular bonds. And in the frack process, the crews desperately need to use friction reducers or FRs.
SPEAKER_02Right, which are essentially long polymer chains added to the water.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, they make the highly viscous fluid slippery enough to be pumped deep into the rock at high speeds.
SPEAKER_02Because without the friction reducers, the water is too thick.
SPEAKER_00Way too thick. Pumping it requires massive amounts of horsepower, which just burns out the engines on the surface.
SPEAKER_02So how did the oxidizers interfere?
SPEAKER_00Aaron Ross Powell Well, the oxidizers in the pond acted as what the industry calls breakers. When the sanitized water hit the frack blenders, the leftover chlorine dioxide aggressively attacked those friction reducers. Oh my. It literally chopped those long polymer chains into tiny, useless pieces.
SPEAKER_02Aaron Ross Powell So the water treating company was actively destroying the chemistry of the frack pumping company.
SPEAKER_00Exactly. It fundamentally came down to a massive breakdown in communication.
SPEAKER_02Trevor Burrus Because they were all isolated. The company managing the water pits, the company selling the sanitizing chemicals, and the frack crews pumping the friction reducers. They were all working in total isolation. Trevor Burrus, Jr.
SPEAKER_00Completely separate silos. They didn't realize they were chemically at war with each other.
SPEAKER_02That is wild. The water tech would dump oxidizers in the pond, and an hour later, the frack engineer, two miles away, couldn't understand why his fluid pressures were dangerously spiking.
SPEAKER_00And his pumps are just redlining.
SPEAKER_02Right. It shows that treating complex operations as separate line items on a spreadsheet is a massive vulnerability.
SPEAKER_00Aaron Powell You cannot compartmentalize a site like this.
SPEAKER_02No. Yeah. You have to treat the entire operation, the water, the sand, the chemicals, the pressure pumps, of one holistic interconnected ecosystem.
SPEAKER_00Exactly. If a tech changes a variable in a holding pond on the surface, leadership has to know exactly how that chemical reaction will affect the pressure pumps two miles underground.
The Future: Slurry Pipelines Not Trucks
SPEAKER_02Aaron Powell Seeing the whole board is the only way to execute this level of efficiency. For sure.
SPEAKER_00And if we project where this ruthless drive for integration is heading, the experts at the roundtable see a very clear, undeniable frontier.
SPEAKER_02Which is what?
SPEAKER_00The industry is moving toward hyperlocal in-field sourcing to eliminate the pain of trucking, right?
SPEAKER_02Right.
SPEAKER_00Well, the next logical step is completely eliminating the trucks themselves.
SPEAKER_02Getting heavy vehicles off the lease roads entirely.
SPEAKER_00Exactly. We will very soon see operations where wet sand isn't loaded into a dump truck at all.
SPEAKER_02What will they do instead?
SPEAKER_00It will be mixed into a fluid slurry right at the mine and then pumped directly through temporary pipelines straight to the well pad. Wow.
SPEAKER_02That completely erases the last mile logistics cost.
SPEAKER_00Yes. And it removes the safety hazards of constant truck traffic.
SPEAKER_02Aaron Powell It's transforming a clunky transportation problem into a highly efficient fluid dynamics problem. It's brilliant.
SPEAKER_00It really is.
Final Takeaway: Question Gold Standards
SPEAKER_02Which brings me to a final thought. I want you to mull over as you go back to your own business, your own projects. This operator achieved absolutely superior best-in-class results by utilizing what everyone else considered inferior, unrefined local sand and incredibly dirty recycled water.
SPEAKER_00Trevor Burrus They rejected the expensive, polished industry standard. Trevor Burrus, Jr.
SPEAKER_02And proved it wasn't just unnecessary, it was actually holding them back. So look around your own operation. If the perfect, highly engineered, wildly expensive. Of materials aren't actually required for optimal performance. Right. What other deeply ingrained gold standard requirements in your industry are just expensive illusions waiting to be disrupted by a simpler, cheaper, messier alternative.
SPEAKER_00Sometimes the billion dollar machine just needs the cheap, chunky coffee.
SPEAKER_02Exactly. We'll see you next time on the deep dive.