Ep. #49 - Dan Arthur: From Halliburton to the EPA—A Lifetime Solving Energy Challenges

How do you go from driving a cement truck at Halliburton to becoming one of the energy industry's most respected consultants?

In Episode #49 of The Crude Cast, Travis sits down with Dan Arthur, President and CEO of ALL Consulting, to discuss a career that spans Halliburton, the U.S. EPA, global consulting, and decades of solving complex energy challenges.

Dan shares lessons learned from the field, why hands-on experience matters, the evolution of hydraulic fracturing, produced water management, well integrity, environmental stewardship, and where technologies like geothermal, nuclear, hydrogen, carbon sequestration, and AI fit into the future of energy.

Whether you're an operator, engineer, geologist, student, or industry leader, this conversation offers practical insights from someone who has spent a lifetime helping advance the energy industry.

🌐 Website: https://all-llc.com

💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dan-arthur-p-e-spec-cpg-fgs-qms-ccml-640b946

📧 Email: darthur@all-llc.com

📍 ALL Consulting
 1718 S. Cheyenne Avenue
 Tulsa, Oklahoma 74119

☎️ Office: (918) 382-7581

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Transcript

0:00

Yeah, so Dan Arthur, you're a petroleum engineer, geologist, do well integrity, you're president, CEO of All Consulting. Yeah, you got quite an extensive background from the short kind of research that I've done on you. So who are you and kind of what's your... What's your job in oil and gas? Well, first, thank you. And I'm a I am a little bit how you described. I'm a petroleum engineer and a geologist. So I've got that whole right brain, left brain thing going on all at once. I'm a registered professional engineer in 36 states. Certified PG. Professional petroleum engineer. fellow with the geological society. I get involved in a lot of stuff there. So grew up on a dairy farm in South Central Missouri, worked for Halliburton, some small independent, worked for oil and gas companies around the globe. Been doing this for quite some time. why come on to a podcast and kind of talk about oil and gas and kind of what you're doing? How does that kind of fit into recent history? I have been a public speaker for a long time, for several decades. I do a lot of work with webinars and training for variety of different groups and individuals. I'm the president of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, Division of Environmental Geosciences. So if you're not an AAPG member, I hope you join and join the DEG. But I do through that and many other things, a lot of, like you mentioned really, is webinars, podcasts, training events, all of that stuff. I've been doing this for a while, and it's something that I think is beneficial. I enjoy doing it. And I see the value in that and how I can impact others and just help things overall. Yeah, I appreciate you kind of reaching out and having you on. You've got a pretty interesting background and I'm curious to hear more about it. How did you kind of get into the industry? Kind of what steered you into your kind of educational background? Did you family that was kind of doing this or how did that work? So growing up on the dairy farm, I had an uncle that went to work for the oil and gas industry in the early 70s. And so I kind of followed in his footsteps, but growing up on a dairy farm, you work hard, you work 24 hours a day, and you just don't make a lot of money. I wanted to take a different path. So in 1980, I went to work for Halliburton Services in Oklahoma City, and then kind of went from there to a small independent and enjoyed it. And during one of the downturns, I got laid off from a small independent that I was working on when Penn Square Bank went bankrupt in 1982. And so I went to work for the US Environmental Protection Agency. And I was one of the first petroleum engineers that they had working for them and got to get involved in things throughout the United States, which was great. Did a lot of things in developing environmental regulations for the oil and gas industry and working with the industry to do things in an environmentally responsible manner. And I think I've kept that up throughout really my career. So I'm not anti oil and gas at all. I'm pro oil and gas and energy and energy transition and so many different things that are going on now. But you know, it's when you think back, you know, the safe, the EPA started in the seventies because the Cuyahoga River caught on fire. And then we started the Clean Water Act and Safe Drinking Water Act and Safe Drinking Water Act amendments. And before that time, there really wasn't a lot of regulation. There wasn't definitions of what an underground source of drinking water is. And so by doing those things, we can have oil and gas development done in an environmentally responsible manner that gives our country and our world all the things that we need to be successful to have that energy that we need. And today we're in that time where Really, we need every molecule of energy that we can get. And it's never been this critical, I think. When you go to work for Halliburton, is that post-education? Or are you kind of like a field hand and then you take a break and go get your degree? Or what was it? That. went to Halliburton direct from the dairy farm. Halliburton has interesting names for their position, so I started out as a bulk material equipment operator, which in short means that I drove a cement truck. Hahaha But it gave me a chance to get dirty, see the rig floor and how things got done and so forth. So I went from there and then got my degree after that. Yeah, I think that's pretty interesting. You know, I think a lot of people would say or have this maybe thought that you go to high school and then to college, but how many people actually go get some industry experience and then pivot back into school, you know, like it can be done. so you get a little. one of the things I tell young people especially is especially today we're kind of in a mode where people want to go to school, they want to go to college and they want to get a job. And one of the downfalls of that is you miss out on some real experience. I tell people now it's like you need to get dirty. You need to go learn. You need to get your hands dirty and do things so you can learn. And that's one of the things I think that we're missing today. I try to encourage that because it can be so, it can just be invaluable. And I do a lot of expert witness testimony, you know, in my career now and being able to talk to a judge or an opposing counsel and say, I've been up on a rig floor. I've been dirty. I've done all that stuff and I get it. Yeah, it gives you some credibility on both sides, you know, with the field and with the office and yeah, your own personal benefit of having that field experience for sure. How do you make your way into the EPA? Is that a job that is open or do you get recruited for it based on your kind of experience in education? at it's, it's a little bit of both. So when I went to work at EPA, I was, I just graduated, with my petroleum engineering degree. I, early in the year, I had a job offer to go to the North slope and work and oil hit $6 a barrel and everybody stopped the hiring. They retracted jobs and laid people off and so forth. And EPA was desperately looking for assistance. And, you know, a lot of the people that I knew didn't want anything to do with EPA. And of course, I grew up, like I said, on a dairy farm and worked around the environment and, you know, land and so forth. So a lot of those things were very important to me. And I took that job. So I did an interview. I want to say they interviewed several people. And I was the one that was chosen. I'm happy about that. Once I got to EPA, I told them that they needed more petroleum engineers and more geologists with oil and gas experience and helped them hire several people that I knew and from universities around the country, which I think helped EPA in a lot of ways, but also helped industry. And I'll say that the experience I got there, once I left EPA, I went to work for a large engineering company. I worked there about 10 years. I left as the vice president of upstream oil and gas services. But I note that because a lot of the connections that I made at EPA, had those same companies then when they found out I went into consulting that came over and hired me and hired the firm that I was working with because they had worked with me while I was at EPA and knew that I was honest and fair and just trying to do the right thing and get them to do the right thing. it was really a win-win adventure. Yeah, think it's always, I think that's the expectation or at least the feeling from, you know, just my own is, you know, consistency and fairness, you know, that's all that we. can expect or would want, worked with so many oil and gas companies too, where I'm helping them on the regulatory front or managing produce water or working with regulatory agencies or the BLM or whoever. And we all have our specialties. If you're a drilling engineer or a completion engineer and you really know what you're doing, but you may not be best communicator. You may not be the guy that understands how to put together all these other things that deal with landowners and the public and all the things that can impede energy development. I remember once in Pennsylvania where the company I was helping had minerals under a state forest. And the state, you know, you know, didn't want to didn't want oil and gas development. And we just did horizontal drilling underneath, but they still took us to to to court. And in that the lease that the forest service picked up was from 1929. And at that point in time in Pennsylvania, they they used to call oil and gas development oil mining. because they were used all the coal mining and they didn't want to lose their farm. And they knew that there was some oil and gas development there. So they had an lease that you had to utilize techniques that were available at the time. And the state forest argued that in 1929, there wasn't horizontal drilling and there wasn't hydraulic fracturing. I was able to argue in the Supreme Court that the first time that horizontal drilling was patented was 1901. It made kind of a curious thing. It's been around a while. When you look at hydraulic fracturing, The fracturing we do today is vastly different than in the past. So in, in 1929, they were using, you know, nitroglycerin and, you know, and torpedoes and so forth. And I was able to successfully argue on the Pennsylvania spring court that yes, it's, it's different, but the only difference really is how you're supplying energy. So yes, that, that nitroglycerin was dropped. It fractured the formation. That was hydraulic fracturing. And the fraction we're doing now is different, but it's because the power and the energy that we're able to supply from the surface to do those things. it's really, it's very similar. And I know, you know, I can argue with service companies saying, the first hydraulic fraction job was in the late fifties in Kansas, but I'll argue that all day long. They were doing that with nitroglycerin in the 1800s. So any, I would expect you at this point to have some sort of law background as well. I thought about, I started that I stopped, but, I've worked on as a, as an expert witness on about 2,500 dockets, for it, it, you know, like states and permits and all that kind of stuff. And as a expert witness on about 300 litigation cases around the country. needless to say. I work with a lot of attorneys, have had to deal with a lot of law. I'm not an attorney. Don't play one on the weekends. But you think when you're an attorney and you hire an expert, a lot of what I get to do is to go to that attorney and help them understand the technical basis of what litigation might be involving and whether it's a fatality case or whatever it is. of what that is. know, I'll one example, I've done a lot of work for the Securities and Exchange Commission on fraud cases, for instance, and not say that, you know, the oil and gas industry and no industry is perfect and you got, you got bad actors everywhere. But being able to take attorneys from the SEC out and help them to understand what oil and gas is and how it works. and so forth so that they can do the job that they are, because they're attorneys without that experience. And I think that's one of the things that I provide is I really like working with people and helping them to learn what they're doing so that they can be effective. Is most of your work consulting now, is it more on the technical as far as application or do you do more kind of this law type consulting? I would say the, the, the expert witness work. Various, you know, it, sometimes might be 50 % of what I do. And sometimes it's 10%. I would say in more recent times, you know, I, I've, I've been involved in the initiation of like unconventionals, like Colbet methane, the initiation of the fracking boom. I help companies with their first wells and places like the Marcellus and Utica. Eagle Ford and the Bakken, the Barnett. If you have folks that were out there doing that, I can't tell you how many times I've sat down at a table or restaurant with an attorney or an oil and gas guy saying, you're that guy. And so I've done a lot of that and continue to do that. But one of the things that I've been working on, would say, more recently is things like You know, one dealing with the water crisis that we're having in areas like the Permian, you know, we've got over 8 billion barrels of water that we're injecting there. We do a lot of water disposal permits, water recycling, water reuse, all that, but also things like at the other end of the spectrum of the energy transition. So we're dealing a lot with, you know, CO2 sequestration and CO2 EOR and natural hydrogen development and geothermal energy development and know developing microgrids and working with data centers to look at best practices there and localized power. So that's one of the things that that that we're seeing is we're seeing a massive need around the world for energy. And last week I was at the AAPG you know, subsurface energy to power conference and presented there. This is just a growing need. And you see with the onslaught of data centers with the need for microgrids, we have, you know, our military bases that want localized energy. But if you think of it, and maybe a larger scale, is when the Drake well was drilled in the 1850s, the population of our world was less than a billion people. And today we're 8.4 billion people. We might need just a little bit more energy. And we've had those people that have humans, as we've developed, have grown over and moved into areas that used to have oil and gas activity that was out in the middle of nowhere. So now we've got environmental issues to address. You we're working on, you know, I live in Tulsa, Oklahoma. We're working on projects now to plug in abandoned oils out in the middle of rivers. You know, you think that's easy? You know, and the whole idea of just really doing the right things and, you know, the carbon market, there's so much going on. really intense. even doing things like, you know, we have companies that are using methane to create hydrogen when we have natural hydrogen available. Or maybe they're doing that and then just emitting the CO2 and they could take that CO2 and use it for enhanced oil recovery, improve oil development in an area. So one of the things that I really try to do and I think is I feel and don't take this the wrong way, but a blessing from God because I can, I'm really good at putting things together, you know, to where you could have stacked abilities to, to, to utilize things and be positive as opposed to going, I'm going to drill this well, I'm going to do this. I'm like, well, if you drill a well and you do these other things, you could have six income streams instead of one. and not have to deal with these other problems. That's a lot of different avenues to go down. How do you prioritize or what's your focus in all those as far as the well integrity, plugging and abandoning, the data centers, all that. mean, it's all out there, but... kind of, guess, I mean, you're gonna focus on probably in a sense what people are paying you to work on, but maybe what's that work or what are you most passionate about or? So I'd say this is that I take a little different approach from what you just said. So yes, I do things that people are paying me to do, but I have several other businesses where I'm part of that we're doing mainstream projects. I'm fortunate I have AOL Consulting, so we have a little under 40 really great, you know, people that are multidisciplinary. So for instance, we're doing work right now in Pennsylvania for, you know, gas migration investigations. And I'm the engineer of record on, I don't know, 300 or so of those cases, but I've got a lot of help and we're doing, you know, we're doing stuff in New Mexico for the state land office, you know, looking at remediation sites and all that. And I can look at that, I got the guys that are on the ground doing those things. So you have quite an extensive team working under you. Okay, gotcha. And I try to focus on the things that I like that are going to make a difference that, you know, I'm going to just say everybody doesn't need Dan. And I don't mean that in a negative way, but if you're just looking to, you know, punch out widgets, You know, there's there's other people that can do that. So I try to be the one that if you really want to do big stuff. You know, you come to me. Yeah. You talked about kind of briefly going back to your time at the EPA. Was that in a specific like region or did they kind of move you around to projects or? you know, where they need your expertise, I guess. So I went to work for EPA Region 5 in Chicago in the underground injection control program. So I have an extensive background in underground injection of all types. So hazardous waste injection, industrial waste, solution mining, gas storage, EOR, disposal, CO2 sequestration, remediation, all that kind of stuff. But while I was there, I got involved in the National Mechanical Integrity Test Workgroup. So worked a lot with the Robert S. Kerr Environmental Research Lab in Ada, Oklahoma in developing tools for well integrity testing. Became a member of the National Integrity Workgroup. and was also supported the CERCLA program, the RIPR program, the Great Lakes Regional Program, and others. And while I was there, I helped EPA on the first criminal indictment under the Safe Drinking Water Act amendments for a case in Michigan. I became, started out as a regional expert, became a national expert, did stuff at like Rocky Mountain National Labs. where they had induced seismicity there, you know, a long time ago. And, you know, so I mean, I believe me, I didn't make the big bucks there. My starting salary was $18,700 a year. Yeah. But the experience I gained, and I think the impact I was able to make was invaluable. I wouldn't, you I'm big on experience and what you learn and what you can gain way over just money. Yeah. When you talk about your work now... I'm just thinking that do you as a maybe a company or a company project field your own studies of geology, groundwater, gas storage, those types of things? I mean you're kind of hired to consult potentially for those but do you sponsor your own studies where you might? gather well data and geological information so that you can better serve your clients from kind of the studies that you've done on your own. So I would say that that's kind of a... I'm going to answer and clarify in a little different perspective. So certainly we do things as a consulting company for our clients. And sometimes, depending on the client or what we're doing, they may hire us to do things on a broad basis. But we also have done a considerable amount of research work for, the Department of Energy and Department of Interior and BLM and others where we're out there trying to break ground to build this. So like, for instance, if you look at, in the start of the fracking industry, the issue of publicly disclosing the chemicals in hydraulic fracturing fluid was a big deal. And now there's this software program out there called FracFocus. I don't know if you've ever heard of it. I haven't. but that's what people utilize and I'm the guy who built that. But on the other spectrum, there's other things that we'll do where we're trying to understand what's happening, where we'll do our own research or other companies that I'm associated with where we may do things to... to do a little bit of what you're talking about. So it really depends. It's a broad spectrum and it can take a lot of variations. There's a lot of data out there, a lot of research that's needed. sometimes it's it's really talking to the individuals. And like even today with the... the development of things like, you know, lithium and other critical minerals, geothermal energy development, natural hydrogen development. Being able to have that social professional network of people that you talk to that you can ask questions to that maybe are working on that specifically. is critical. And I think to really be successful in your career, having relationships and connections and a lot of people knowing you is a big deal. And I'm fortunate on LinkedIn, I've got, I don't know, 25,000 connections, so I can see what other people are doing. I can post something that can get get information out there or if I'm looking for something, you know, I can put something out there and like, hey, I need help. But but even more than that. You know, I've been doing this long enough that I know a lot of the people out there that might be experts in particular areas or fields and not just people, but companies. So we have a lot of partners. So we love to partner with folks that are maybe have a degree of expert in a particular situation. So we're partnering right now with this company called XOIL out of Brisbane, Australia. I have a daughter that lives in Sydney, Australia. I don't have staff in Australia, but I've done a lot of work there for companies like Hess and BHP and others. being able to have boots on the ground there and other places can be helpful. So we're not just trying to do everything on our own. And that's, I think, important. So some people, they don't want to. They don't want to partner, share, whatever, and we're very open to it. Yeah, I think that's something that kind of earlier on in my career was underrated just for problem solving and networking, whether that means to progress your career or however. Yeah, I think there's a huge upside to networking, knowing people, discussing things. One of my own questions in a sense, just given your background and you talked about energy transition and kind of energy in general, where do you think nuclear fits in all that? And kind of why don't you think we've seen it earlier on in energy history? So I think nuclear is huge and we need it. And it's making a... I would say it's making a revival. If you look at companies like, you know, one that we've been working with is called Deep Vision. And this is where you're taking reactors, you know, drilling a five-foot diameter hole, a mile underground, and then having it horizontal, putting reactors in there, and essentially generating geothermal energy from those. from that setup, but that gets you to where, whether you're a military base or a city or a company where you could put localized geothermal energy based on nuclear at your fingertips. And you run like a steam, steam to surface and do a recapture. Essentially, so you're creating geothermal energy, you're processing it as geothermal energy at the surface. there's so much new technology being developed that what today reminds me of is the initial part of the fracking boom. I can remember in the early 90s, I was working with some friends with a large company that were wanting to do a high volume hydraulic frack in the Bakken. Cause at that point in time, the Bakken was if you, you drill the well to your target destination, didn't, didn't, you know, it was a dry hole. You would go back up and complete in the Bakken. could make 10 barrels a day. And they thought, well, if we frack this, you could, you could do more. We, I remember talking to Hal Burton, we wanted to do a high volume hydraulic frack. And at the time they're like, this is technically infeasible. costs a billion dollars. A few years later, they got it figured out with, you know, I mean, it's just, how technology develops. And, and, and then, you know, when, when it started, you know, you, didn't have, I mean, it was just, you drill your perf, you're still dropping balls. was a, you know, you know, the, the, way it started is vastly different than it is today. And even higher volumes today, but you know, no stages. was just one. one stage, you know, so you're, you know, back then they talk about it like, you know, you're, you're doing a, you know, hitting a, hitting a ball out in the left field and hoping it goes somewhere. And, but it, it, made a difference. And ultimately that technology developed so fast. And that's what we're seeing today. As far as technology development with AI, with power generation, with, with so many different things. So I have to tell you, it's my belief that we're on just such a massive improvement in how we can generate and deliver energy. And especially this whole, like what I mentioned, underground powered energy in so many ways. And looking at the other benefits of that to be able to say, you know, hey, I'm in Northwest Oklahoma. can, before I dispose of this water down our disposal well, I can pull out the iodine. Guess what? We need iodine. We need lithium. We need cobalt. We, you know, let's, let's, you know, look at this on a variety of levels to where, you know, we can gain multiple positives from, from what we're doing. So instead of treating it like a waste and disposing of it, actually recycle it in a certain sense. And thinking of that's just another piece of value that you have. Yeah, another revenue stream. And there's a lot of those. like, I remember in, gosh, this was the early 90s in the Bakken, had low BTU gas that we were venting. And we took that gas, captured it, and acquired low BTU engines. And instead of buying energy from the grid, we powered the whole field with this low BTU gas, was otherwise doing nothing. I mean, the amount of what that saved and then thinking of things like high pressure air injection, CO2, EOR, horizontal water flooding instead of like a typical five spot. I mean, just the drilling technology, the completion technology, the power. so many things is that's one of things that it's really neat about humanity is we have so many just brilliant individuals. Yeah. Is your kind of read on the power in the US, the growth of data centers and that type of, mean, I guess I, you know, our population does increase and you put some stress on it, So not having done obviously a ton of research on it and just having a casual conversation here, what's kind of your take on what is putting stress on the grid as they say? So we have a very outdated grid. And if you look at even people in Houston that have had blackouts, but also a number of other places that have had challenges. But if you also look at how much power is lost through the transmission of that electrical power on the grid, it's insane. And moreover, I've got a consulting company. Do know how many flares that we have and continue to permit? Sometimes there's no other option. But if you could take that gas instead of flaring it, repurpose it as a potential income stream, and whether that's to power a microgrid, to do Bitcoin mining, to power a data center, to power a small industrial facility to provide power to a school. And we've even done things just taking old orphan abandoned wells and converting them to geothermal energy for heat. Maybe you're not going to do electricity on some of those wells, but if you can heat a school. And we're doing And it's not just the US. If you look at other countries, and I don't know how much you've traveled internationally, but if you look at someplace like Nepal or a lot of places in Venezuela or Nigeria or countless others, the electrical grid there, if you want electricity, you put a wire up. And so you have this stuff that looks like it's 1900 in New York City. And so we're doing things like in working in countries like Mongolia that is venting gas from coal seams. And we did this in the Powder River Basin. Capture that coal mine methane, but also coal bed methane and pre-mine coal bed methane. Take that. Generate power. You could generate power locally. You could take the water that's produced from that and use it for managed irrigation. And if you look at that just on a bigger scale, countries like Mongolia are having massive desertification. So is China. if you look, Mongolia is the Kashmir capital of the world. everybody, all the ladies out there and a lot of the guys like their Kashmir, right? Well, they've increased the goat population by threefold. And they don't have the water and all that. develop this energy and then use that water beneficially, you're not only giving power to locals so they're not burning goat dung to heat their house, but have this stuff in there that is helping, one, not just vent to the atmosphere doing nothing, but can provide a benefit, and also, reduce the methane in the coal seams so that when they're mining that coal, have less fatalities because it's not blowing up on them and be able to use that water. The variety of benefits is enormous. We see that in country after country after country. If we could do things where I could ask you, why are you buying energy for your house that is created hundreds of miles away. If you could do those things locally, and I'm speaking on saying your house, but it could be a factory, any number of things, that could really take some of the stress off the grid. It could make things more safe during storm events or any of that and provide a lot of benefits. If you look just in North America, over the last 100 years, I think it's actually less than that, I don't remember specifically, but we've lost about 85 % of the biodiversity on the continent. And a lot of that is because of development and increased population. So you can't just develop, develop, develop, and then not do things about the other stuff that's out there. It leads me back to the, know, again, Oklahoma, it leads me back, you think of the dust bowl. So if we could do things out in Western Oklahoma by like processing, you know, nature based waste, like, you know, dairy. dairy farm waste and beef farm waste, take that anaerobic digester as opposed to just letting it go wherever, create renewable natural gas and biochar and take that biochar and use it to improve the soil? Hey, and it's the same thing, know, Northwest Arkansas, Northeast Oklahoma with all the, you know, the chicken population and You know, the state of Oklahoma is in a big lawsuit over that chicken waste impacting things like the Illinois river. And, and so now you're affecting water quality and other things based on what we do when we could do things to change that, improve our environment and generate energy that we need. Like, like, come on guys, let's, let's do the right thing that makes sense. Yeah, people that probably don't live around those type of industries probably don't understand the impact regionally or however. I'm not saying I understand it, but I keep up my... I grew up on a dairy farm, when I moved to Chicago and worked at EPA, I had a lot of people convinced that chocolate milk came from brown cows. I mean, if you don't have that experience, you just don't know. But you got to be curious. You you talk about the volume of waste that can come out of one animal and you have, you know, a thousand of them. That's, you know, gallons per day, so. Well, so do you know this? Like if you look at the, just the beef cattle industry, and we're doing a lot of work with, you know, organizations like permanent farming and others on taking, daring beef cattle waste and processing it and so forth. But if you look at the beef cattle industry, about, I think it's 85 % of the beef that we get in America comes from farms, from beef cattle farms. that have over 500,000 cows. So this is like the idea of the family farm like I grew up on. It's almost extinct. So now it's just these super large things. And if you don't think that 500,000 cows make a lot of stuff, Right? Yeah. sure that regenerative agriculture and reapplying waste you know that solves probably a portion of it but you're still not gonna get the large feedlots you know that the impact like you said half a million head or something yeah how do you get it there how do you treat it how you transport it I mean most of this reapplied manure is local I would imagine to the farms where you're probably only trucking it an hour away maybe but if you got a half a million head how do you get that waste out to the farms where it's needed so I'm sure there's some those farms also need energy and a lot of them are in and near oil and gas development, you know, to where there's there's more opportunities for some of those things to be utilized, you know, locally and regionally. I think just, you know. Do you think those, let's call it a feedlot, they are unaware of the technology or it's too capital intensive or what's your take on the barrier? So the stuff that I see from... like say using anaerobic digestion or pyrolysis or something like that, there's a big upfront cost. it's not like, if I go back in time, my granddad was not gonna, that would have been way out of his league. So there's companies now they're coming to develop that partnering with farmers, partnering with all sorts of things. you can also on some of this like pyrolysis, you can use wood-based waste and all sorts of things. There's just a lot of potential things that we could do, but it's all capital intensive. It doesn't just come along for free. It's not unlike if you want to go develop an oil and gas play or you've got to get investors, you've got to do that. You know, I, and I do a lot of that work as well. And, and, but, but now you've got to go to an investor. Like I have to come to you and say, yeah, this is going to cost Buku dollars, but here's how this is going to work. And when it's new, it's, it's hard. And that's, think, you know, why geothermal energy has been slow to develop and, you know, and, and so many of the things out there and it just. You know, it takes a little time, but what I'll tell you from what I see from my historical eye here, you know, just being one of the old guys out there, things are moving really fast, but you have people saying, we're going to have a billion data centers tomorrow. No, it's going to take time. And now you've got communities opposing them because they don't understand them and they don't want their electrical bills to go up and they don't want, you know, you know, all these different things. It's the same thing that I helped industry with on the fracking boom when we were drilling wells in downtown Fort Worth. had to have, you know, I worked with companies to have directional lighting and sound barriers and all these different things. And we watched traffic. So we had traffic timing so that, you know, that you weren't, you know, you weren't going, we're going to have a Flea of trucks come in hauling water for a frack job right during the middle of rush hour. You know what mean? um Yeah, I think one of the things when you talk about energy is... people think it's kind of you're doing one specific energy type but depending on where you live energy it's just what the cost is you know like you said like you watch a farmer and his price for propane goes up so you see a lot of them going to solar because it ends up penciling out better So it's one thing to consider when you talk about energy as a whole. It's kind of where you live, what's your regional energy cost, and yeah. It's not uncomplicated, for sure. Right. Yeah, so. Yeah, I think that tech too is getting better. You know, when you talk about the manure side and even some of the tech with applying fertilizers and those type of things and talk about water resources, water, you know, monitoring the water. um because you look at even now like in oil and gas and unconventional industry, just how we're completing wells and fracks and refrax and the proximity to wells and all that and being able to understand those reservoirs better is massive. But it's more than that because what we're also seeing is reinvigoration of the conventional industry. So you look at so many of these conventional plays that, yes, they produce, yes, they're seen as tapped out or have been, but the amount of oil actually recovered from many of those reservoirs is 10 or 15 percent. And now if we could do things like shallow horizontal completions, and different completion methodologies, production methodologies, stimulation methodologies, and take a lot of that that we've learned from the unconventional development and employ that to the conventional development side of things, the potential is immense. So there's some really powerful things out there that I anticipate happening. over the next several years. we're in a truly exciting time. Yeah, I agree. So how's everything in Oklahoma? That's a good place to live out here. Well, you I'm in Tulsa, so the former oil capital of the world. It's a lovely place. But I think that we're very fortunate because there's so many neat places throughout the state of Oklahoma and throughout our country. I love places like Alaska. You talked about the slope, but the Kenai Peninsula, know, the Cedar Creek Anticline up in Montana. I mean, there's just, there's so many neat places and I'm blessed to have been to every state in the country, worked oil and gas and other things all over and in, and in 30 different countries. So I'll never forget the, and I got to help Saudi Aramco with the development of their unconventional resources and drilled the first unconventional well in New Zealand. so I, you know, I'm, I have no complaints and it's pretty neat. We live in a neat world. Well, if somebody is, you said you had a pretty good sized team under you, so if we have a young college student engineer, what kind of people are you looking for at all consulting? you know, we're not in any, any giant desire to have to grow. I'd say that, prior next needs, are. Probably for a couple of geologists. you know, but we need one probably more senior guy and, and, another younger guy. Like I, I, I love the opportunity that for instance, our geophysicist had. so we hired him out of school. and I, I was doing work on, induce seismic litigation and he got to come out of school and work on some of the biggest induce seismicity litigation cases in the country. You know, so we give some people, I think very incredible experiences and that, so, you know, I'm a good way to get ahold of me is LinkedIn. Are those the, what's kind of been the hardest specialty to find support for? You know, you talked about you're looking for kind of the geologist. Is it kind of always that way or is it different types of engineering or? It really just depends. mean, because we've got civil engineers, chemical engineers, petroleum engineers, all that, as well as environmental scientists and GIS. So it depends on the kind of things that we're looking at and the things going on over time. It's going to sound weird, but You know, I run my consulting business or I try to kind of like the dairy farm to where, you know, we got people who actually care about one another. It's not a just fight your way to the top or anything like that. So we're trying to do good things. on the consulting side, when we go to work for a client, we're. I would say that we're, we try to become part of their team, you know, and so they've been trustless and we can help them and go from there. So, but. I, you know, a lot of people know me, so I will say that I get a lot of people sending resumes all the time. So it's like we're lucky as we get, can pick the creme de la creme. Yeah, that's good. Well, if people want to reach out to you, you said LinkedIn is probably the best place to do that. And Dan, I appreciate your time today. Hopefully catch up with you in the future. And you're an immense resource. I can tell we're just scratching the surface. So I appreciate your time. All take care.