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: How the O&G industry will look in 2040
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We debrief a closed-door operator roundtable on what the oilfield might look like by 2040, from extreme drilling precision to the hard physics that cap “faster and cheaper” promises. We wrestle with public perception, grid reliability, and the real role of AI when mistakes can turn into safety and environmental failures.
• time compression after 2020 and the push to do more with fewer people
• drilling precision explained through a “flying blindfolded” analogy
• continuous pumping and lean operations driving massive cycle-time cuts
• thermodynamic limits of steel, friction, heat, and pressure
• riggless rig concepts and automation on the rig floor
• laser drilling and spallation as a non-mechanical pathway
• branding crisis shaped by outdated stereotypes and industry secrecy
• energy density, baseload reliability, and policy driven by sentiment
• AI vs machine learning and why “hallucinations” matter in the field
• screen outs during frack jobs and the need for veteran judgment
• emissions reductions through natural gas powered fleets and field gas capture
• data quality as the key competitive edge for service companies
• advice for young talent to avoid narrow degrees and stay adaptable
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Welcome And Crew Club Preview
SPEAKER_00Welcome to Energy Crew Podcast. I'm your host, JP Warren. And for those that are tuning in for the first time, thanks for joining us. And those that are kind of visiting back as you've really enjoyed the last couple episodes that have been released from our crew club operator roundtables, thank you for the feedback. It always keeps me motivated and inspired to continue to figure out different ways to kind of uh get this information out there, what operators are talking about behind closed doors in candid settings. For those that you don't know, I host these operator roundtables where we have about 20 people in the room, a lot of leadership uh in the room, kind of talking about the challenges, trends, and opportunities surround the oil and gas uh industry. And this, these aren't uh, you know, conference panels, these aren't industry um uh conferences or anything like that. These are very candid conversations happening around the table. And I'm releasing most of the 2024 roundtables that we've had just to give an idea on what we're talking about, the depth that we're talking about around the table. Uh the one you're about to listen to right now is a good buddy of mine, Ryan Keyes, one of the sharpest, brightest uh uh minds in the industry, the co-founder of Triple Crown Resources. He actually came to the table with a unique um uh question, a unique uh kind of topic of what does the oil field look like in 2040, in 2044? That's a couple years from now, but things will be vastly different. Um, this was at the start of, I guess, the introduction of the AI stage. So I'd be curious to have this conversation again in 2026, what it actually looks like. But if you're enjoying all this stuff, um I'm excited to announce that um later in Q2, I am dropping um uh we're building out the digital content at crewclub.com, that's cruclub.com, um, to have kind of round table deep dives, operator intelligence reports, where you can see the themes, signals, and trends. Um, we'll also be releasing quarterly pulse reports, um, deep dives into certain subjects, whether it's AI, uh fluids, uh, fracking, and all that stuff, and also access to exclusive webinars. That's gonna be coming out in Q2, and I'm pretty excited about that. And here's a taste of the uh the audio debriefs that you would get from the crew club round tables. And I hope you enjoy. And if you are enjoying this, please feel free to share. It always inspires me to kind of uh hear the feedback and hear how people are what they're taking away from these conversations. So I hope you enjoy and uh get ready, buckle up, and here's a quick uh high-level audio debrief of the Crew Club Round Table in Houston, Texas, with Ryan Keys as the topic facilitator.
SPEAKER_01Okay, let's unpack this. Imagine uh trying to fly like a commercial jet, only you are flying it completely blindfolded.
SPEAKER_02Oh man, that sounds terrifying already.
SPEAKER_01Right. And you're not in the sky. You are flying this jet underground, just tearing through solid rock for miles. Wow. And here is the real kicker. You have to keep this jet perfectly level within a 10 to 42 foot window. That is essentially the height of like a one-story building. If you dip outside that window, you know, you've completely failed your mission.
SPEAKER_02I mean, when you put it in those terms, the margin of error sounds virtually nonexistent.
SPEAKER_01Oh, absolutely.
SPEAKER_02You're describing a scenario where just a fraction of a degree in deviation over several miles results in total operational failure.
SPEAKER_01Exactly. And the crazy thing is, it isn't science fiction. Like this is what modern drilling operators do every single day in the energy sector. They're navigating these massive mechanical systems miles underground to stay within very specific geological strata, you know, the oil-rich pay zones.
SPEAKER_02Aaron Powell, it's an intense level of precision.
SPEAKER_01It really is. Yeah. And that reality is exactly what we're getting into today. So welcome to this deep dive. We are taking you behind closed doors, pulling back the curtain on an exclusive, highly guarded crew club operator roundtable.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, this is not your average conference panel.
SPEAKER_01Aaron Powell, not at all. This was a room filled with top-tier operators, the real industry insiders sitting down to project what the next 20 years of their sector actually looks like.
SPEAKER_02And you know, what makes the source material so incredibly valuable for you to hear is the complete absence of corporate jargon.
SPEAKER_01Yes, thank goodness.
SPEAKER_02Right. These are not polished public relations statements prepared for shareholders. This is a look at what the people who actually keep the global grid running are saying when the microphones are uh supposedly off.
SPEAKER_01Exactly. We are exploring the raw realities of global energy demands, the absolute physical limits of human engineering, and of course, the highly unpredictable wave of artificial intelligence entering the industrial space.
SPEAKER_02Aaron Powell It's a lot to cover.
Time Compression And Fewer People
SPEAKER_01It is. So let's start with a major theme that basically dominated the room: time compression. The operators discuss how, particularly post-2020, the expectations placed on the workforce have just skyrocketed. Time is acting like a vice, and the pressure to produce more with fewer resources is well, it's unrelenting.
SPEAKER_02They described it as a constant squeeze on every front. And the data they shared to illustrate this is honestly, it's pretty revealing.
SPEAKER_01Oh, the employment number is swear.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. If you look at direct employment in this sector per barrel of oil produced, the workforce is down by roughly 75% compared to just a decade ago.
SPEAKER_01Aaron Powell That's insane. 75% fewer people per barrel. 75% fewer.
SPEAKER_02And despite that massive reduction in headcount, overall production has more than doubled.
SPEAKER_01Okay, wait. I want to make sure I am visualizing this correctly. You have a quarter of the people doing twice the work. How do you physically shave that much time off a massive engineering project? Like how is that even possible?
SPEAKER_02Well, the operators pointed to a fundamental re-engineering of how a well is constructed. A decade ago, a standard drilling operation might have been budgeted for, say, 115 days.
SPEAKER_01Okay.
SPEAKER_02Today, the norm is pushing that timeline down to just six days.
SPEAKER_01Six days from over a hundred.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. They achieved this by applying extreme lean manufacturing principles to the oil field. They moved to uh continuous pumping operations.
SPEAKER_01Meaning they don't stop.
SPEAKER_02Basically, yeah.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Historically, a crew drilled a certain distance, stopped the machinery, manually added another section of the drill string, which is that miles-long sequence of steel pipes connecting the surface to the drill bit, and then they started the pumps again.
SPEAKER_01Lots of starting and stopping.
SPEAKER_02Exactly. Now they have engineered systems to make that process virtually continuous. It eliminates massive amounts of human downtime.
SPEAKER_01Okay, so they optimized the human element out of the delay, but I have to imagine there's a ceiling to that, right? You can only work so continuously before the physical materials you were using start to, well, fail.
SPEAKER_02What's fascinating here is that this was actually the major source of anxiety in that room. They have essentially pushed the limits of current physical capabilities.
SPEAKER_01Because you're still dealing with rocket steel.
SPEAKER_02Right. You are still dealing with steel, rock, friction, and extreme subterranean pressure. Operators are being asked by their boards and investors to shave off another day, to cut another million dollars from the budget. But you can only optimize a physical process so much before you collide with the undeniable laws of physics.
SPEAKER_01You just hit a wall.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. You cannot ask a steel drill bit to grind through solid rock faster than the thermodynamics allow. If you spin it too fast, the friction generates so much heat that you risk a catastrophic material failure downhole. Everything just melts or breaks.
SPEAKER_01It sounds like they are trapped in this cycle of diminishing returns.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Like, if I can use an analogy, it feels like they have spent the last decade trying to selectively breed a faster and faster horse.
SPEAKER_02Aaron Powell, that's a good way to put it.
SPEAKER_01Right. And they succeeded. They engineered the fastest horse in history, but now the investors are asking the horse to break the sound barrier. At some point, you don't need a faster horse. You need to invent the car. If we've squeezed all the juice out of the turnip, what does the car actually look like in this scenario?
Physics Limits Force Radical Ideas
SPEAKER_02Aaron Powell Well, the ideas discussed at the roundtable get incredibly radical when you force engineers to look past incremental improvements. When asked what happens when we simply cannot shave off another hour using traditional methods, the conversation shifted to completely outside the box concepts.
SPEAKER_01Aaron Powell Like what?
SPEAKER_02One major topic was the riggless rig.
SPEAKER_01A riggless rig sounds like a complete oxymoron. How do you drill a well without a rig towering over it?
SPEAKER_02Aaron Powell By completely reimagining the deployment mechanism. So instead of a massive traditional derrick structure requiring a huge human crew to manually hoist and connect pipes, they are conceptualizing automated low-profile pieces of equipment.
SPEAKER_01So it's mostly automated.
SPEAKER_02Exactly. These machines would handle the deployment of the drill string into the earth without traditional human intervention on the rig floor. But uh the conceptual leap goes even further. They discussed moving away from traditional physical drill bits entirely.
SPEAKER_01Wait, what? If you can't use steel or tungsten because of the physical drag and friction, you have to use something that doesn't suffer from mechanical wear. What is that? Are they looking at like acoustic waves or directed energy or something?
SPEAKER_02Directed energy, specifically drilling with high-powered lasers.
SPEAKER_01Seriously, lasers.
SPEAKER_02Instead of using mechanical force to grind the rock away, the laser utilizes rapid thermal expansion. It heats the water inside the rock instantaneously, causing the rock to essentially shatter and flake away at the microscopic level.
SPEAKER_00Oh wow.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. It's a process called spallation. It removed the physical wear and tear from the equation entirely.
SPEAKER_01Okay, so we are talking about utilizing lasers to induce spallation miles underground, navigating through solid rock with pinpoint precision, which honestly brings up a glaring contradiction for me.
Laser Drilling And The Branding Gap
SPEAKER_02What's that?
SPEAKER_01If you are operating at deep space levels of engineering, why does the general public view this industry so poorly? Like why do they treat it like it's a dinosaur?
SPEAKER_02Man, that disconnect was a profound source of frustration at the roundtable. The industry is facing a severe branding crisis. They feel trapped by two incredibly outdated cultural stereotypes.
SPEAKER_01The tycoon and the roughneck.
SPEAKER_02Exactly. On one side, the public envisions the greedy old oil tycoons sitting in a leather chair on the 75th floor. On the other side, they picture the uneducated roughneck covered in grease. Neither of those represents a modern operation driven by data scientists, mechanical engineers, and geologists.
SPEAKER_01But I have to push back here for a second. If the industry's product is in literally everything from the plastic in our glasses to the servers running the internet, why is it the public's fault for not knowing that? Isn't this just a failure of the industry being entirely too secretive for the last 50 years?
SPEAKER_02You know, the operators at the roundtable actually conceded that exact point.
SPEAKER_01Oh, really?
SPEAKER_02Yeah. They acknowledge that the industry has operated in the shadows by choice for decades, and now they are paying the price for that silence. The general public simply doesn't realize that petroleum products are the fundamental building blocks of modern life. Aaron Powell Right.
SPEAKER_01It's not just the gasoline in a car.
SPEAKER_02Not at all. The operators literally pointed to the plastic pellets making up the glasses they were drinking from at the table. They mentioned the soccer mom driving a minivan. The safety airbags protecting her kids rely entirely on petroleum derivatives.
SPEAKER_01Aaron Powell And the tech stuff too, right?
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Even the tech sector, which is often viewed as this pristine, clean industry, relies on petroleum for the physical components in internet servers and the insulation on fiber optic wires.
SPEAKER_01So there is a massive educational void. But according to the roundtable, what happens when global energy policy is dictated by that educational void rather than actual engineering realities?
Energy Policy Meets Grid Reality
SPEAKER_02Aaron Powell The operators argued that we are seeing rapid, highly problematic shifts in energy grids based on public sentiment rather than baseload reliability. They pointed to real-world examples to illustrate the danger. Trevor Burrus, Jr.
SPEAKER_01Like what happened over in Europe.
SPEAKER_02Yes. A prominent anecdote discussed was the situation in parts of Europe where university students in first world nations have recently had to sit in freezing classrooms wearing heavy overcoats.
SPEAKER_01Wow. So from the perspective of the operators in that room, the policy essentially outpaced the physics of the grid. It left those populations vulnerable when renewable sources experience downtime.
SPEAKER_02That was definitely the consensus of the room. And to challenge the conventional environmental narrative even further, a participant brought up a surprising historical data point regarding deforestation.
SPEAKER_01Okay, I'm curious.
SPEAKER_02If you look at regions like the United Kingdom and France today, they actually have more forest cover now than they did before the Roman Empire.
SPEAKER_01Wait, having more trees now than 2,000 years ago seems totally counterintuitive. How does the math work on that?
SPEAKER_02It all comes down to energy density. For centuries, growing human populations were clear-cutting forests simply to burn wood for heat and basic industry.
SPEAKER_01Right, because wood doesn't give us that much heat.
SPEAKER_02Exactly. Wood has a very low energy density, meaning you have to burn a massive volume of it to get the energy you need. It was the discovery and mass adoption of highly dense alternative fuels, first coal, then oil and natural gas, that allowed humanity to stop burning the forests.
SPEAKER_01That makes a lot of sense.
SPEAKER_02The high density energy of fossil fuels actually gave modern forests the breathing room to regrow.
SPEAKER_01But is it really just an education problem or is it an emotional one? Because throwing historical facts about Roman forests and energy density equations at angry people rarely works in marketing. You cannot logic someone out of a position they arrived at emotionally.
SPEAKER_02The self-awareness in the room reflected that reality. They know that trying to win a public relations battle with thermodynamics is a losing strategy.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. People make decisions based on how they feel.
SPEAKER_02Right. The industry recognizes the need to stop marketing defensively and start telling a story that connects emotionally with consumers, connected to people's daily prosperity.
AI Promises And Oilfield Risk
SPEAKER_01Aaron Powell Okay, so if the public's perception is this massive uphill battle, and human engineers are physically maxed out trying to drill faster with traditional methods, who is left to solve the efficiency problem? Is that why every conversation at this roundtable eventually turned to artificial intelligence?
SPEAKER_02Absolutely. AI is the ultimate wild card for their next 20 years. Operators are actively debating whether AI will become sophisticated enough to replace highly technical roles entirely.
SPEAKER_01Like reservoir engineers.
SPEAKER_02Exactly. However, they drew a very sharp distinction regarding the current technology. What many software vendors are currently pitching to these operators in the field as AI is actually just high-level machine learning. Oh, okay. It is pattern recognition. It is a powerful tool for analyzing historical data, but it is not truly autonomous intelligence making localized decisions.
SPEAKER_01And the stakes of handing decision-making power over to an algorithm are vastly different in an oil field compared to a corporate office.
SPEAKER_02Oh, completely. This raises an important question about the reliability of this tech in high-stakes physical environments. To illustrate the danger of overrelying on current AI, the room brought up that highly publicized, pretty hilarious case of the lawyer who used a popular AI chatbot to write a legal brief.
SPEAKER_01Oh, I remember this. The AI completely hallucinated.
SPEAKER_02Yes. It fabricated fake case law and generated entirely fictional quotes, which the lawyer then submitted to a federal judge.
SPEAKER_01Yikes. But I mean, a hallucinating lawyer results in a mistrial and some public embarrassment. A hallucinating algorithm on a drilling pad seems catastrophic.
SPEAKER_02Catastrophic is the exact word. Consider a common operational procedure called a frack job. You are pumping millions of pounds of sand and water into the subterranean rock at upwards of 10,000 pounds of pressure per square inch.
SPEAKER_01That is a lot of pressure.
SPEAKER_02It is, and occasionally the sand stops flowing into the rock fractures.
SPEAKER_01What physically happens if the sand stops moving but the massive pumps keep running?
SPEAKER_02The sand packs into the well bore. Because the fluid and sand have nowhere to go, the pressure inside the steel pipes spikes violently. This is known in the industry as a screen out.
SPEAKER_01Okay, so a screen out?
SPEAKER_02Right. And if a human operator doesn't recognize the warning signs and kill the massive surface pumps immediately, the pressure exceeds the mechanical limits of the iron piping. You get burst pipes, high pressure shrapnel flying across a location, and a massive environmental and safety failure.
SPEAKER_01Wow. So the debate is whether an AI can accurately identify the onset of a screen out, or if it will just uh hallucinate, misinterpret the data anomaly, and keep the pumps running until the iron literally explodes.
SPEAKER_02Aaron Powell That is the technological threshold they are facing. Currently, veteran operators monitor those pressure gauges. Through a combination of live data, acoustics, and hard-earned intuition, they cut the pumps a fraction of a second before disaster strikes.
SPEAKER_01Aaron Powell It sounds like putting current AI in charge of the pumps is akin to having a brilliant but dangerously overconfident intern.
SPEAKER_02That's a great analogy.
SPEAKER_01Right. Like you can absolutely use them in the back office to crunch thousands of previous well logs to find a hidden trend. But when you are on the actual location dealing with volatile pressures, you still absolutely need that veteran company man standing right there. The person who's seen it all, who knows when to look at the gauge, look at the AI's recommendation, and confidently call BS and hit the kill switch.
SPEAKER_02That captures the dynamic perfectly. The human element, the ability to apply contextual judgment to anomalous data in a high-stakes physical environment, it remains irreplaceable. AI is currently viewed as an incredibly powerful tool for the engineer and not a replacement for the engineer.
What Winners Do Differently
SPEAKER_01Okay, so what does this all mean? Let's bring this down to actionable takeaways for you, the listener. We've covered extreme time compression, the thermodynamic limits of traditional drilling, a cultural branding crisis, and the AI wildcard. For those trying to synthesize this information, what are the most innovative companies doing differently today to thrive in this environment?
SPEAKER_02For operators, the primary takeaway is that the most successful companies are relentlessly setting new benchmarks. They are proving that efficiency and emissions reductions are not mutually exclusive. Aaron Powell How are they doing that? Well, the top-tier operators are pushing their equipment to run, you know, pumping 20 hours a day. But they're doing it by transitioning to dual power or natural gas-driven fleets.
SPEAKER_01Aaron Powell Wait, how do you just swap out diesel fuel for natural gas on a massive piece of industrial equipment that is operating out in the middle of nowhere, like a remote desert?
SPEAKER_02Aaron Powell Instead of relying on a constant stream of diesel trucks driving out to the location, they capture the field gas that is naturally coming out of the well head right there on site.
SPEAKER_01Oh, that's smart.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. They route that raw natural gas directly into on-site turbines, which then generate the electricity needed to run the motors. By doing this, they are hitting 70 to 79% replacement rates. Wow. It significantly slashes their fuel logistics costs and drastically lowers their emissions profile simultaneously.
SPEAKER_01And what was the consensus for the leadership, the executives steering these companies?
SPEAKER_02Leaders must abandon the camp mentality. The entrenched mindset of us versus them, or renewables versus fossil fuels, is viewed as a losing battle. The future demands an energy addition mindset.
SPEAKER_01Energy addition, not transition.
SPEAKER_02Exactly. Global energy demand, driven by developing nations and the massive power requirements of new AI data centers means the world needs solar, wind, nuclear, and oil and gas simultaneously.
SPEAKER_01Got it. And what about the service companies? The business is actually providing the equipment and the software to the operators. What do they need to understand?
SPEAKER_02The ultimate currency for service companies is no longer just moving heavy iron. It is not just about who provides the biggest pumps or the strongest steel pipes. The ultimate currency is data quality. Operators are desperate for pristine, perfectly structured data streams.
SPEAKER_01Because algorithms require massive, flawless data sets to actually learn anything useful for the future.
SPEAKER_02Right.
SPEAKER_01If a service company provides sensors that drop out for two seconds or record a pressure spike inaccurately, that sloppy data teaches the overconfident intern the wrong lesson.
SPEAKER_02Precisely the point. You cannot run future autonomous algorithms on fragmented data. Service companies that can guarantee clean, reliable, high-frequency data streams are the ones who will win the contracts of the future.
SPEAKER_01So to wrap this up, the roundtable ended with a deeply personal hypothetical question. These are professionals who have spent decades in this industry. They have weathered massive economic booms, crushing busts, intense public scrutiny, and extreme technological stress.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, they've seen it all.
SPEAKER_01They asked each other, knowing all of this turbulence and knowing what the landscape looks like 20 years from now, would you tell your own 11-year-old child to enter this industry today?
SPEAKER_02It serves as the ultimate litmus test for an insider's true belief in the viability of their field. And the answer across the room was a resounding yes, but it came with a very specific, crucial piece of advice.
SPEAKER_01Aaron Powell What's the twist? What is the strategy for the next generation?
SPEAKER_02The consensus was to absolutely avoid pinholing yourself into a hyper-specific degree like petroleum engineering. The technological landscape is shifting too rapidly for a narrow specialty. That makes sense. The advice was to study a broader, deeply adaptable discipline. They specifically champion mechanical engineering, describing it brilliantly in the room as the liberal arts of engineering.
SPEAKER_01I love that because it gives you an understanding of the fundamental physics of the world, allowing you to apply that knowledge to almost any physical system. You approach the industry not as a traditional corporate employee, but as a creative entrepreneur looking to solve massive scale problems.
SPEAKER_02Exactly. The world will always require individuals who possess the grit and the foundational knowledge to solve complex physical challenges. If you have that broad engineering base, the energy sector will continue to offer unmatched opportunities.
The Perception Question That Lingers
SPEAKER_01Which brings us to a final lingering thought for you to mull over. Something that hovers over everything discussed regarding that branding crisis, but remains unresolved.
SPEAKER_02Let's imagine a scenario where the industry achieves the absolute impossible. Let's say tomorrow, through perfect carbon capture technology, 100% zero emission natural gas fleets, and flawless closed loop systems, the extraction of oil and gas becomes entirely emission-free. Perfect environmental execution.
SPEAKER_01The ultimate engineering holy grail.
SPEAKER_02Right. The provocative question is: if they achieve that technological perfection, would the public's perception actually change? Or has the cultural narrative against the industry become completely decoupled from the actual environmental data? Wow. It forces us to ask whether technological perfection can ever truly defeat entrenched human emotions.
SPEAKER_01If the pilot flies the jet, flawlessly blindfolded through that one-story window, but the crowd on the ground has already decided they hate airplanes, does the perfect flight even matter?
SPEAKER_02It is a fascinating dilemma and one that thermodynamics alone might never solve. Thank you for joining us on this deep dive into the raw realities of the modern energy landscape. Keep questioning the narratives around you, and we'll see you next time.