Revolutionizing Oil & Gas: The Digital Well Program by Halliburton

In this insightful interview, Aman Srivastava shares his journey from mechanical engineering to leading digital innovation in the oil and gas industry. Discover how his team is developing cloud-based solutions to standardize and optimize well planning globally, and the importance of field experience and AI in shaping the future of energy.

 key  topics:

Digital Well Program: a cloud-based solution for well planning
Standardization in oil and gas operations
The role of AI and data in optimizing drilling
Field experience's importance in digital transformation
Global collaboration in digital oilfield innovation

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Good afternoon. This is David Apshire with the Under Pressure Podcast. Today we have Arman Shavistava. He's here today to visit with us about his experience in the oil and gas business. Amon, thank you so much for being here today.

SPEAKER_01 0:16

Thank you for having me, David.

SPEAKER_00 0:18

Absolutely. Amon, can you walk us through how you originally got into oil and gas and what your journey has looked like so far?

SPEAKER_01 0:26

Yes. So I was doing my bachelor's in mechanical engineering back in India and I was all into automobiles and engines. I got hired by one of the operators for oil and gas in India. Until then I had no clue that there was this parallel petroleum world that existed. I got in there and they have a very rigorous training program which I went through. I was fortunate enough to go through that in the beginning as soon as I joined the firm. It was very interesting to me. I I I I am a hands-on person, so I love that a lot of things that I'm learning as a drilling engineer. It goes out in the field, and I was also fortunate enough to work on the field as well to learn uh how how drilling looks like, how the actual drilling takes place. So that kind of nudged me thinking that alright, uh, apart from automobiles, I think I can also pursue a career in the petroleum industry. So for working for four years uh with that firm, I applied for a master's in petroleum engineering because I wanted to learn more about this field and not just uh because I my bachelor's was in mechanical engineering, not petroleum. So I got selected uh in the master's program at University of Oklahoma. I came to OU in 2012, and in 2014 I finished my master's with thesis. I joined another firm here in Dallas, Texas, uh and since then I have been living in Dallas, Texas. I worked in my previous firm, I worked as a drilling engineer. I uh we had some projects in China and we had oil fields in Oman, so it was a lot of traveling, it was a lot of fun. Uh I then transitioned into Halliburton Landmark, and slowly now I am I transitioned into a global RD role with uh landmark where I'm building cloud-based digital solutions to help drilling engineers plan and monitor the wealth better.

SPEAKER_00 2:26

Wow, wow, it sounds like you've had an impressive career so far, uh, which is exciting to hear, and of course, uh I'm always excited to hear uh some of the you know, of course, attended the uh University of Oklahoma because I'm a big OU fan. Yeah, that's right, that's right, baby. Boomer Senior. Uh always glad to hear that. We actually, I just got back from Oklahoma City this morning. Uh we were there last night for the Thunder game. Um we had a little uh team building exercise in Yukon, and then we drove over to the Thunder game last night and got to watch uh Oklahoma City Thunder beat the Denver Nuggets, so it was a it was a good day for sure. And always and always love Oklahoma, so that's that's so cool. So you've worked both in field operations and now in digital RD role. What does your current day-to-day actually look like?

SPEAKER_01 3:17

So I I guess I have kind of like a 9 to 5 job, but I would call it like a 7 to 4, 7 to 5 job now. So my day starts at 7 a.m. Uh since I'm in a global RD role, I have my entire team spread across the entire globe, and we are working on building a cloud-based solution. Uh, the name of the solution is Digital Well Program. So I have to constantly be in touch with folks throughout the globe, and I have to make sure that I'm honoring their time zone, I'm not holding them up too late in the night. That may sometimes happen, but I try to do that as less as possible. Uh so my everyday work starts at 7 a.m. being in touch with uh all the developers throughout uh the countries, like I said. Since you're trying to build a solution, my task would be to make sure that I understand the requirement and the features that are that are needed from a drilling engineer's perspective. We are constantly in touch with several operators all over the world. We hear their problem statements, we hear their pain points, and we try to solve those from a digital point of view so that they don't have to hustle from one application to another application. They should be able to do everything staying in one place, and that one place acts as their single source of truth for all their needs for planning. And that's where I come in bringing my knowledge and experience from drilling engineer to petroleum engineering world, and then we have the developers on the other side who help us bring that into reality by having that solution built out.

SPEAKER_00 4:50

Wow, that that sounds amazing. That sounds like an awesome program that you're getting to work on and kind of bring together all over the world, right? Not just the United States, but all over the world, which is that is so cool. So when you say digital well program, what problems are you trying to solve for the operators that you see as a common problem?

SPEAKER_01 5:09

Yeah, so the digital well program is uh Halliburton's cloud-based design to uh transform how the wells are planned, engineered, and delivered. So uh traditionally, planning a well requires uh multiple disconnected solutions or tools or manuals or Excel files, and they have very long planning cycles. Uh the data many times would be scattered, so the engineers are scavenging here and there, or maybe some old files, hard copy files to look at some data. So, this is where the digital program brings all of these processes together into a single collaborative environment where uh the engineers, operators, service providers they can all work and plan the well at the same time. Uh at its core, the basic engineering models still exist as microservices. Uh along and along with that, we have an open architecture. So if there is a need for a new calculation, or if there is a need for the engineers to uh tweak the way that they are working on, uh we can definitely bring that into effect because that's where the open architecture comes in. It uh it it helps connect multiple applications and the uh the the the value chain is to enable better collaboration and faster decision making. Uh it it if if I can shorten this, it helps into a data-driven, collaborative, automated, standardized way of planning the wells. That's what a dishabell program can help a drilling engineer achieve.

SPEAKER_00 6:43

Yeah, absolutely. Well, I love the word standardized, especially you don't hear that very much in the oil and gas business, and I'm sure you're aware of that. It's it's so inconsistent. Uh, and one of the things I've learned over my career is you know, people everybody operate differently in each basin and they act as their own entity. And so each country, of course, everybody has their style on how they like to drill a well and how they like to operate that well. So I think that's great that you guys are working through that globally, so that way, of course, you can come up with a total solution for your customers. So that's that's really impressive.

SPEAKER_01 7:19

Right. So, David, that you you have said that that reminds me at the beginning of the project, we actually did an interview with several drilling engineers on-site service providers and spoke to them. How do you plan your wells? And we just said, All right, just this blurred out, and we started writing things down. And it took several months to do this exercise. But by the end, we noticed yes, everybody has their own way of working, even inside the same organization. There might be two drilling engineers who work in different ways or their style. But there was a format that we saw could be standardized, and that's what we took that as an opportunity. Alright, what if I can standardize this entire process? So maybe uh, yes, you can have your own caveats in there, but in the end, you would have one standard way of working, and once you have got that standardized way of working, it's much easier to automate that. And this interview included folks from North America who are working in around Oklahoma or in the Permian Basin or in North Dakota, to folks working uh in Central Asia, Middle East, towards the eastern uh hemisphere, and and we saw again like it globally, yes, we all think that we work in in our own very different ways, but there is a scope that can be standardized, and that's what we are trying to bank upon.

SPEAKER_00 8:40

That's awesome. I love that. That's so great because anytime we could standardize in our oil and gas business in any application, in any form, it just sets us up for success in the future because it has everybody operate in the same way, and it and of course, too, just like we know, uh, throughout every area in the world, everybody operates differently. So anything we can do to standardize, it's just gonna make each company, each operator more money in the long run. So what do you want to say for that? Yeah, yeah, no, I love that. So, from your perspective, what's something people outside uh the industry completely misunderstand about oil and gas?

SPEAKER_01 9:17

That's that's that's a very interesting question. I think there are two things I I believe people don't realize. One is they don't realize how deeply oil and gas well is embedded in their everyday life. It's i it's just something that is inseparable from everyone, and people have a hard time realizing that. It's some sometimes when I speak to several folks and I tell them uh what I tell them in a way that okay, indirectly, yes, oil and gas did does affect even if you're riding your electric car. It does impact even your electric car. And then I can see that suddenly there's a shine in their eyes, they're like, Oh yeah, I never thought in that way. Because it's it's just so much embedded in our daily lives, people don't realize that. The second one, the second thing I I think people don't realize is how much effort goes behind getting that gasoline in your car from 20,000 feet below the earth. There is so much of science, so much of technology, so much of dedication required behind that work, and every day engineers and scientists are working day and night to make sure how to get that cheaper, safer, in a much environment-friendly way that we can. Uh and it's uh I mean I I I I don't like saying it, but it's very e easy to evilise the oil and gas industry for being the pollutants on the earth, but we don't realize how much of uh effort goes into it in making sure that we are running a sustainable uh workflow, a sustainable pipeline, and along with that we are making sure that this provides a very sustainable energy to everyone.

SPEAKER_00 11:01

Absolutely, I completely agree. And you know, everybody uh I think forgets um and you know, don't look back, you know, a hundred years ago or 150 years ago, um, you know, the technologies that evolved in our industry to be able to produce the product and the energy sources that we're able to produce today. And I think one of the things that you know I've seen personally, and you've probably seen it as well over your career, where you have friends that are not in the industry and you go to talk with them and you say, Oh, this is how we do this today, and they think you know, we're the the evil uh or the bad guys, and uh always like to remind them that you know everything we do, uh like you mentioned, sustainable, of course, and also you know, we the the regulations today, not just in the US, but across the world, and the requirements that we have to do to make sure we're you know getting the product safely out of the ground, not hurting the environment, and being able to, you know, produce energy sources, whether it be you know natural gas or oil or whatever it looks like uh in that aspect to be able to everybody to be able to turn on the light switch or to go to the gas station to fill up their car. Uh I think I think it's just it's mind-blowing. Um, but I think two people's forgotten you know what it was like before. So hopefully over the years, uh, you know, as oil and gas is starting to evolve, and I think uh on some aspects, especially with the AI data centers coming in, people are starting to have a little bit different perspective when it comes to you know the oil and gas industry and you know the the capabilities that we offer for the future, right? So I I think they forget uh what we do lots of times. So thank you for bringing that up. So you've mentioned uh you know field experience. Uh what is the why is it so important, especially for engineers moving into the digital or AI roles?

SPEAKER_01 12:57

Yes, so uh field experience in my opinion, that's my this has been my personal journey as well. I think field experien drilling, especially on the drilling side, and I guess on the production side as well, field experience gives you an edge over any kind of bookish knowledge that you can gain. I'm not saying bookish knowledge is not good, it's very important to know your basics of engineering, basics of mathematics. But when you go out in the field and when you're looking actually what a drill pipe looks like, how it's lifted, how it's connected to another drill pipe, how it's lowered, how do you connect your pipes, how do you connect your pipes to cementing or compressor lines, you get a totally different perspective. You start looking at this industry from a totally different lens. And yes, I understand the engineers that are coming now today, they are more on the digital side, they are more on the AI side, they are very tech savvy. But uh my my my my humble request to everyone is grasp every opportunity you you get to go out in the field, especially if you're in a drilling or production. Reservoir, maybe not so much because you can't really get into the reservoir, but do go out in the rig side and look at what a Christmas tree looks like. Look at how the the fuel gets the the crude oil gets uh up to the surface, how it's transferred through the pipeline. What does it mean that when you're reaching reading a pressure gauge, what does it actually mean? Where does the pressure gauge lie rely on and what is it that you're using it to measure with against with? So this uh field itself is a very hands-on field. When you have a book knowledge, that's great, that will get you to places, but when you start having uh field experience, when you add that field experience in your resume, that just changes the whole game completely. And it's very maybe I may not be able to explain clearly, but for those who have been in the field, they would agree with me that it's just a different ball game and you know what you're working on.

SPEAKER_00 14:58

Absolutely. I I agree a hundred percent. Any kind of field experience in the oil and gas business is gonna set you so far in advance, uh, you know, than you know, people who come out and just go straight to corporate America and become an engineer and never get out and see the field side. I that's where my heart is, of course, when it comes to learning. Uh, you know, it's hands-on and walking through the processes and seeing what works, what doesn't work, why it doesn't work, and talking to everybody there that's got the generational knowledge, of course, that you know they can share with you and and give you experience that you would never get uh in a classroom setting, right? So it's gonna definitely, definitely help. So you mentioned uh AI is a huge buzzword right now. So how do you think AI in the oil and gas is gonna be, you know, over the next 10 years?

SPEAKER_01 15:52

AI is a very powerful tool. It's being caught on really quick, really fast. Uh I want to make sure I say this and if it's possible in in capital bold letters. AI is a tool, it's not a magic solution, it's not a magic wand. People often think that, oh, we have used AI, this will give us, let's use AI to solve the problem. No, it will not, it's just a tool. If you need to screw in uh uh you have a screw and you want to put to put it in the wood as a wood screw, you need a screwdriver, maybe a hammer, but if I give you a plier, a nose plier, uh yeah, it's a great tool, uh, but not of use at this place. So when we are thinking of AI, it can be very powerful. Oil and gas industry today is all about data, and that's what AI and machine learning is, it's it's data science. But you should need to first of all understand what the data is, and that's where petroleum engineers come in. And second, make sure that you understand it's just a tool. So if you know how to use the right tool at the right place, you will get the right answer. But if you are using the tool just for the fun of it or just trying to thinking that this is the solution, no, it won't. It it may it may give you an answer. I'm not saying it won't, but it may give you an answer and you will end up spending millions of dollars on it. And trust me, it can be millions of dollars very quickly. AI is expensive, it's not a cheap solution. Not a cheap tool, sorry. So uh make sure you understand the problem statement, make sure you understand the tool. So whoever data scientist you're working with, explain them properly what is the problem you're looking for and what is the solution you're looking for. So understand the data, understand the science, and then make sure you go ahead and apply it. Otherwise, you may end up with the wrong answer or kind of like a duh answer. It may spit out that yeah, you should wear hard hats on the field. Well, yeah, we knew that already.

SPEAKER_00 17:50

So I love it, I love it. No, that's that's a great answer. I I think you're spot on. I I think you know it can definitely be beneficial in some aspects of it, and then some of it, you know, AI is only as smart as what you know, the information that it has, the data that it has. So if it has limited data, especially on how we drill and operate different wells and stuff, I mean it's only going to give us a certain amount of solution. So I I think you're exactly right. So, what are some of the biggest operational challenge operators are facing right now from a data standpoint that you see internationally?

SPEAKER_01 18:28

Yeah, this is uh some this is a question which is actually uh I deal on a daily basis. So I I think it's from a digital standpoint, operators have a lot of data. And I'm talking about multimodal data. It could be text, that's that's the daily reports that you're getting from the Riggside, it could be simple text solutions, it could be uh audios, it could be visuals, it could be pictures. Uh it could there are many formats in which you're getting the data. And it's very hard for the operators to consume all that format and make a meaningful conclusion from it, or at least use it in a lessons learned basis, or to apply it on what the next step should be. Interestingly, our brain can do that very fast. We can be on a rig side, and I can be looking at a shale shaker, just looking at the standpipe pressure, the weight indicator results, and talking to the driller and the mud engineer at the same time, and then come to a common conclusion. Okay, let's drill another 50 feet. But for uh to to get to get all that information into one platform, digital platform, understanding and getting to a conclusion, that's where the problem is. And uh it's not just getting the data in, it has to be secure, it has to be safe, there should be no leaks anywhere in the data. So in our opinion, that's where the operators are struggling a lot. Many operators have found a solution, many operators think that they have found a solution. Uh me, I mean, I'm I'm personally working in that field, so I know that still there are a lot of gaps in that area, how to consume that much amount of data and then you know, make an intelligent this decision out of it. That's where I mean part of where my solution goes in towards planning. And yes, we are still evolving, it's a journey, it's not a one-time software that I can make and it just solves all the problem magically. It's a journey that we have to take with the operators to go on and make a continuous evolving solution.

SPEAKER_00 20:34

Yeah, absolutely. I I love the word continuous uh because it's always gonna be evolving, uh, just just like we all know. Anything that you do using the data, it's just gonna be constantly evolving and changing how we operate day to day. So I I think you're you're spot on. That's an exciting, I mean, I'm super excited for you guys to be able and your team uh to be able to you know work on a project like this because you know, with that information that you guys are able to get today and utilize 10 years from now when you're drilling a well, you know, on the other side of the world, and say, hey, we we've seen this exact same thing, here's the conditions, and it you know gives out results and it can at least point in the right direction on way to make improvements to hopefully save on the drilling cost, right? So just become more efficient overall and uh everybody makes more money overall, which is which is great. So you manage a global team. Uh, what does that structure look like today for you?

SPEAKER_01 21:34

So I have around 10 to 15 developers, depending on the team size. So right now the team I am working with has 10 to 15 developers, and we have uh about right now I have three QAs. So if I speak from a normal uh linguistic tone, I would say like uh m myself as a product manager and the QAs, we are the only ones with the petroleum engineering background. The rest everyone is a computer science developer. So uh as a product manager, I have to first first finalize okay what is the feature we are going to work on in the next couple of weeks or months. I jot down all the calculations that are needed, what is the workflow, what is the data that is needed to perform these calculations or the workflow. I sit with a UIUX user interface and user experience uh designer, where we make sure that the information that is displayed on the screen, that also is should be meaningful for the uh for the drilling engineer. So once that part is done, I hand it over to the developers, uh to my team lead, and explain them. So uh in a nutshell, like I tell them what I need and then they make it happen. So then they go behind the curtains, they develop APIs, they develop microservices, uh, they develop the front end, and with time they have their own questions, they come back to me. The QA asks the QA, the quality assurance folks are there, they again have petroleum engineering background, so they test the application in every way possible. We have a normal workflow, then we have corner cases. What happens if somebody enters wrong information? What how do we show errors? So uh we try to make this whole experience as much guided as possible. So the drilling engineer has more time to think about the actual problems rather than not worrying about oh, did I mistype a comma or a dot? Not around that aspect. We try to take care of that before then. So that's what the structure is. We have developers depending on the team size, depending on the feature size, how big the feature is, how small the feature is, how or how many features we're developing. So we work in uh uh we we work in an agile mode. So we have sprints, and every week, every day we are meeting, and every at the end of every week, uh we have a target, the developers show what they have done, and slowly by the end of three, four month cycle, we combine all of them and then we have a release. So you can say like every year we are delivering like three to four releases for that solution.

SPEAKER_00 24:11

Wow. Wow, that's very, very impressive. And in large organizations like yours, where do you feel the friction or the bottlenecks in or internally that you kind of see and on a weekly or monthly basis?

SPEAKER_01 24:25

So I would say uh working in big organization like landmark Halliburton, it's like uh steering a really large ship. So if somebody says, okay, uh we need to make a turn immediately right now, that's really hard to do. Uh it's not a small speedboat, it's a big ship. So it has its own systems, it has its own processes, it's hard is its own structured workflow. So I guess the the the friction that I feel sometimes is that since it's hard to steer quickly in that organization, there may be some small aspects that we wish we could have done if we were working on a smaller level. But then at the same time, with this big organization, the biggest benefit I see is the amount of knowledge bank that they have is just tremendous. I can shout out for help, and there are folks with several years of experience available, write just one team's chat away, and they are ready to help. Okay, man, what do you need help for? And they dive in and help me out. So, yes, I guess that would be I guess the biggest bottleneck I see in my opinion.

SPEAKER_00 25:39

Nice, nice. Now, if you could wave a magic wand and improve one thing about your day-to-day work, what would it be?

SPEAKER_01 25:48

Interesting. Um I would say the uh I I I would probably have the wand work both the sides, so if I can, so it works on both the ends. So first thing, like I said, so when I said uh if I want to make small changes quickly, that's really hard to do with steering a big ship. So in my everyday routine, like I'm like I said, we are re meeting every day, and then every week we have we are seeing the progress what the developers have done. Uh many times it happens that I want a very small tiny change to be done in the application. Just giving an example, like, hey, this is red in color, I want this in green in color, or this should be in blue in color, or this should be white, or whatever. I have some changes. For that, again, I have to go back to the developer and they have to do this work again. So it becomes a little iterative back and forth. I wish that there was a way that I can do this without breaking their own code. So I'm not saying that I don't know how to code, I know how to code, but if I could do that using any system, maybe an AI agent that can help solve these problems much faster, that'll be great. And the second thing would be many times me and my manager who sits in Houston, uh, we we often come up with some ideas along with the team members, uh the other product managers that we have, we come up with these small ideas that hey, what if we do this calculation or we have a small workflow and we want to do a small POC, a proof of concept on that particular flow. Again, that would require us to get developers and then have an environment and it's a whole setup. Uh but if I can have a magic wand that gives me a sandbox environment where I can go and then whip up something really quickly uh with a minimal amount of coding. I like I said, I mean I can code, but I'm not as good of a coder as the developers are in my team. But I still can work up something as a POC, a proof of concept, which I can show to my manager, to to to to all the senior stakeholders, and maybe get approval for it on a on a budgeted way. That hey, I think this feature would be really helpful if we release it out and we can show it to clients and other folks as well. So I guess uh those would be two things I wish that magic wand can help me with.

SPEAKER_00 28:02

Yeah, absolutely. Well, I completely understand that from your perspective, and it sounds like you guys have a lot of cool things going on uh that you guys are working with technology, of course, and just advancing the way you know people are gonna go in and drill in the future, right? And have these tools at their hand that you know our kids or our kids' kids one day will be able to have access to this information to say this is how we're gonna do it, and this is how we're gonna continue to do it because this makes the most sense. So I I definitely appreciate your team's work and excited to hear about all the cool things you're doing on your side of the business because one of the things I think that we've learned over the past 150 years in the oil and gas business is that there's no standardization and there's there's not a lot of sharing of information, so it's great to hear uh a company like yours that's able to work together internationally to make sure that you're covering all the bases and making sure that you guys are going to develop a software that can be used uh you know for another hundred years, right? To let us know what we need to do in the future and just and just operate better and be more efficient and make more money, and of course, to uh be able to take care of our customer at the end of the day so that way they're able to continue to drill more wells and uh continue to create more uh energy for everyone in the United States and the world for that matter. So that's that's really exciting. And I definitely want to thank you so much for coming on today. I definitely appreciate your time. Uh, I'm definitely excited to be able to meet engineers like yourself that are on that side of the business and working with the data and the technology just to be able to evolve our future and to be sustainable, right? You said that word earlier, and I think that's one thing that you know lots of people forget that every well that's drilled in the world, uh, the one thing's guaranteed it's going to decline. And of course, after that decline rate, uh, you know, we've got to have folks that can come in there and make everything operate normally so we can continue to live the way we live, if not better, uh, in 50 or 100 years from now. So I'm definitely excited about the your guys' project and all the stuff you guys are working on and definitely appreciate your time today. Thank you so much for coming on. It's very kind. Uh, one of the things I'll do is I'll send you an email after this uh and I'll get you the transcript and everything over, and then if you can just reply back with your mailing address, uh, we'll get some stuff shipped out to you this week. So definitely thank you again so much, Amon. I appreciate you so much and appreciate your team and uh look forward to talking to you guys soon again. So thank you, David.

SPEAKER_01 30:43

Thanks for having me. Thank you for having me, David. Thank you so much.

SPEAKER_00 30:46

Thank you. Bye bye.