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"Uncapped with Executive Roustabouts" will provide candid, entertaining interviews with retired or former Oil & Gas executives whose "unfiltered" perspectives offer unique value to the industry's ecosystem. The primary audience includes current professionals looking for mentorship, suppliers seeking executive insights, and former peers interested in the guests' current lives. Initially hosted on LinkedIn via Funk Futures, the 45-minute video and audio sessions will balance informative discussions with humorous observations from the host.
GB Jon Krome (00:01.644)
Welcome back everybody. This is Jon Krome with Uncapped with Executive Roustabouts. And today we have a friend and colleague of mine, Gary Birdwell. Gary, welcome to the show. Gary is a graduate of Texas A University with a Bachelor of Arts in Finance. He began his professional life in the Treasury Department of the Texas Gas Exploration Corporation in Houston, Texas. Boy, that is a name from the past.
He spent several years in treasury where he focused on cash management and credit. This is where his interest in computing started to grow. After Texas Gas was acquired by Toc Tau, Gary took a financial analyst role for the North and South America region role of Baker Hughes, XLOG. His time in that role led to a foreign assignment as region finance manager of XLOG's Asia Pacific region in Jurong, Singapore. In this role, his technical knowledge continued to grow.
leading to being transferred back to Houston to lead the information technology department at X-Log and to implement an ERP system for the company. After a few years, Baker absorbed X-Log into InTech, and Gary took a role at Oracle to help develop the market for applications in the oil and gas industry. After about 13 years at Oracle, he was hired to be the CIO of Noble Energy here in Houston. In that role, he led the replacement of every significant system with off-the-shelf applications from the back office, as well as drilling.
field operations, and asset management. Noble was acquired by Chevron in October 2020. After retiring from Chevron, he returned to Oracle in industry leadership roles for the oil and gas strategy and cloud teams. Wow, Gary, that's a whole lot of stuff. Well, thanks for being here.
Good to be here, Jon.
GB Jon Krome (01:46.296)
So let's start with some soft stuff. Everybody in the oil and gas industry has got a favorite movie or series they're watching. What are some of your favorite oil and gas movies or entertainment that you think about?
gosh, that might go way back. would say, one of my favorites is giant.
Okay.
GB Jon Krome (02:07.305)
I love Giant.
Yeah. So, so that's a classic. And, you know, I hear a lot about Landman, but I've not actually seen that yet. But the other one I liked was Hellfighters. Right. And so I thought those were pretty good, you know, movies that really kind of took a good look at the industry from a couple of perspectives. But those are my favorites. I haven't seen anything.
Yes.
Funk Futures Media (02:38.178)
more recently that I like better than those two.
So I actually got to meet Red Adair once. It would have been in the early 90s in Bakersfield. He came to an SBE meeting and spoke at like a monthly dinner or something. It was really neat. By that time he was very old and boy, he looked like he'd been ridden hard and put away wet.
Yeah, they kept him busy.
They kept him busy. And that company, guess that's part of Halliburton now?
GB Jon Krome (03:17.644)
Or slumberjay, I forget.
Yeah, I believe they were acquired by one of the service companies,
Yeah, one of the big three. So you went to A you got into finance, and you probably had a few choices as you were exiting college. Why did you choose oil and gas? What was the attraction?
Well, you know, I had several job offers. You know, I had one in the, insurance industry as a premium auditor. And, you know, after the interview, just the description of the job gave me a headache. So I figured actually taking the job would not have, you know, resulted in a lot of, you know, good evenings. But, you know, I interviewed with the.
with Texas Gas and ended up getting an offer there. And despite the fact that in today's terms, it was a minute salary, it was substantially better than the other offers I had from national banks and from the insurance company. So I took the money route. was in the financial area, right? Treasury and whatnot. that was part of the...
Funk Futures Media (04:35.01)
Part of the decision criteria was it was right in my kind of field of study, but also it paid better. So was a good combination for somebody who's getting their first real job.
Turns out money actually matters, doesn't it?
Well, it did then because I could pay my rent.
Yeah, that's right. know, particularly for IT professionals, and I'm going to call you an IT professional, there's kind of, I see two flavors that have emerged over the last many years. And one is the deep practitioner in IT. They were maybe a computer scientist or a coder or a programmer, and they kind of worked their way up the ladder. And then there's a bit of the generalist that's done a few things and kind of found their way into technology.
and found both joy and success at it. How would you categorize yourself in that kind of choice?
Funk Futures Media (05:32.582)
man. Well, actually I'm probably both. Right. So, you know, I started off, you know, designing actually one of the first things I ever built was a field was a well-level budgeting tool that use the strip pricing and various other things to, really calculate.
know, revenue as well as then impute the the LOE and other costs associated with it. So it was a budgeting tool I built in Texas. Excuse me, at Texas Gas. You know, so I did that on the front end. did a lot of SQL programming on the front end, but I got into the application space at Baker Hughes. And really, my background in Treasury and in the financial areas gave me good
you know, if you will, accounting and finance acumen. so translating that into automation and reporting and other things was just a natural, jumping off point for me. And that really allowed me to do a lot in that space. And so I really would say I'm probably more of a, of a purist than a, you know, than primarily at a technical
resource, I'm sort of a business technology and business applications mindset.
You know, and I think that's important because the most successful technologists that I've worked with have a bit of a bigger background than just technology. And I think it makes them stronger. It gets them more business relevant. And in the end, I think their performance is just higher on behalf of the company. So it's not to impugn the pure technologists, but you know, because there's a time for the narrow and deep as well, no doubt.
Funk Futures Media (07:30.072)
Yeah.
Think about your career a little bit. I mean, what advice would you give to some of the younger folks today about how to manage their own careers? And think about the vast difference in the workplace and the demographics and the technology today that you'd have to kind of manage around.
Yeah, that's a good question, Jon. I believe that there are a lot of, if you will, paths you could take if you're entering the workforce now. I would say the advice I would give to my kids if they were seeking roles would be to really find something that you're passionate about, but always be aware of things that if you will,
create value for the organization, right? So in other words, understand what the business does and how it takes advantage of what your technology is, where you apply that and really grow in both your technical value and your business understanding. And I think if they follow that path, that really does put them in a good position to have a good impact on the company and also open doors down the road.
So similar to that, one of my early bosses, guy named Tim Cut at Mobile years ago said that, in your head, you make three columns. One is business, one is technical, and one is leadership. And to be well-rounded, you got to check boxes in each of those to varying levels of competence. And I think that's a great way to think about, to a degree, what you said as well.
GB Jon Krome (09:19.19)
which is you got to kind of balance the technical with some business stuff to be more relevant. You think about the people that only stay in one of those columns and you can't just stay in the leadership column. You got to jump in there after years and the other two. You're going to be a deep practitioner, which is fantastic, but deep practitioners, you know, I, that just wasn't for me.
So you got to be able to do business and technical and leadership if you really want to move up and be influential, I think.
Yeah, so I would add to that. I think the important thing is communicating well with the people who utilize the technology you provide to understand not only how they use it, but where could it be better? What are other things that might be able to be automated or enhanced or accelerated? And I think that having those touch points with the people who are consuming the technology
is a mindset change from the IT shops of old. When I first got to Noble, I had a very prescriptive IT shop. They would build something and they would impose it on the business as opposed to really going in, doing some discovery, understanding how people did their jobs and then trying to apply technology to it collaboratively.
And I think that that cultural change made a huge difference at Noble in terms of the satisfaction of the technology they were consuming. And I think I would encourage any people starting their careers to really invest the time to get to know the people that will consume what you produce.
GB Jon Krome (11:08.962)
Yeah, that's the proverbial hammer always looking for another nail. So let's talk about technology and its adoption. That's a perfect lead into the next topic, which is really about cycle time, adoption cycle time. We typically think about that for technology, but it applies to other things too, processes, et cetera. What effect do you think are highly technical personal lives?
Apps, apps, apps, apps, apps, Alexa and all the other technologies around our homes have had on the impact of reducing cycle time in the workplace. Do you think there's a relationship there?
I would say the expectation of that kind of technology being readily available has grown enormously. If you look at it, historically, the oil and gas industry was always considered to be somewhat of a laggard in taking on new technology. But I would say that that's actually not entirely true. Because if you look at it, exploration
agreed.
Geosciences was always way on the front end of the consumption of new types of technology. They were using three dimensional geo tools and whatnot long before 3D was really in prolific use anywhere else. But they also were using tremendous computing power and other things that ultimately now
Funk Futures Media (12:50.648)
were small, are small in comparison to the capabilities we have today. But then if you looked at the back office, it did tend to drag, you know, that homegrown AS400 based system that was 25 years old, the green screen hit the F12 button. That was kind of, you know, those were harder to displace. And, you know, it's interesting because that's exactly what I encountered at Noble when I got there was that the back office,
was very manual and all homegrown technology when there were readily available ERP systems that could bring immediate benefit. once that change started though, after the initial shock started to wear off, it picked up momentum. And then it was kind of like, let's go, what else do we have?
But there's always a few people that are a little stubborn and hang back and are kind of wanting to take a slower path. you work with them and then you can finally get them to move ahead. But basically, I'd say the adoption cycle, timelines and the cycles are much shorter now as a result. I think this need for instant ability
and quick answers, know, everything is very, you know, the timeliness is very critical these days. If you will, your shortening cycle times, anything you can do to get to the end point quicker, you know, produces benefit for the company.
I think that's probably, in my observation, one of the bigger factors today is that the people in the C-suite are more tech savvy than those even five, 10, or 20 years ago. And they've got a relentless appetite for a return on investment of the technology today. So they're much more demanding about it. They're much more in tune with the status of the projects. And they want to return. And I think that pressure permeates throughout the organization.
GB Jon Krome (15:03.562)
and is a factor in accelerating that technology adoption cycle time. The other thing, which is interesting that you distinguish back-offs and front-office, I would say that in terms of the front-office, there's no more technical industry, maybe aerospace and defense. You think about the things we've done in the front-office. We're drilling four or five miles away at 30,000 feet. mean, the types of bits that we're using and the completion technology and the logging.
It's incredible stuff. I call that the hard technology in the front office. And boy, the engineers I worked with, we were always looking for innovation and new ways to get something done. You go to the back office.
To your point, it's a little muddier, it's a little murkier. You and I worked at Oracle, that's where we met. Everybody was always talking about how oil and gas is this lagging industry. And they saw it from a very specific lens on just back office apps. But if you broaden the aperture, I couldn't disagree more. The second Cray computer ever made, geophysical processing and mobile oil. Woohoo!
Yeah, but I mean, you know, that's very true. And I think that the other thing is a lot of the, if you will, the operational systems in a lot of oil and gas companies came into the company through the ops group. It was typically separate from the IT departments and the IT kind of fed into that administrative human resources accounting.
I have little bit of a provide about that.
Funk Futures Media (16:45.302)
you know, you know, back office, you know, a little bit of, inventory control from the standpoint of valuation, but not really from the movement like material transfer and other things that take place. And so, you know, in order though, to really meet a lot of the, the regulatory burden and other things, it became more important for IT.
to move toward the core business of oil and gas, it also helped with speed and accuracy of reporting, things like production. If you think about now with the environmental impacts, fugitive emissions tracking and all of the various things you had to do and reporting, the regulatory burden required a lot more data in a lot more timely manner.
to be delivered in order to comply, right? So it led to a natural, if you will, merging of those two groups in terms of providing solutions in order to quite literally keep them focused on the task that made money as opposed to the tasks that were just compliance oriented, which we could more quickly automate and produce those reports and whatnot. you know, but I think that
the definite acceleration of the cycle time is probably at a fevered pitch now with AI, right? If you think of, yeah, it's crazy the amount of application for that technology. And I think there's a hunger for it. I would say that's coupled still with some hesitation because you you're
it's about to go vertical.
Funk Futures Media (18:38.944)
you're suddenly entrusting things that you had a room full of guys taking care of, right? To a machine that's going to do it. And, you know, there's certain considerations that have to be made with that technology in order to put it in play in a responsible way to actually achieve the results without really creating other issues.
Well, it's interesting you bring up AI and also artificial general intelligence, is a different flavor than we're used to with the large language models. But I'm sure you've heard by now of the LLMs providing just false answers, trying to kind of satisfy the user in kind of a synchophantic way.
I mean, that does concern me for an engineer trying to use AI or AGI to solve a complex problem. Perhaps it's not as honest or objective as we want it to be, and it gives the engineer the answer he wants.
Yeah, I would say there are cases that they refer to as hallucination where it doesn't really know an answer, it just makes one up. I think also, I would say that the models, if they're more specific to that function, if you think about seismic interpretation, if you keep your model
Right.
GB Jon Krome (19:57.024)
Yeah, like a good engineer.
Funk Futures Media (20:18.786)
to a relevant set of data, then you also have your geoscientists, they're verifying the things that come out of it. And some of the things that I've seen done were you took geology that had been interpreted successfully in the past and you run it through the model to see if it gives you similar or the same answer. It's never going to be exactly the same, but...
You know, I think that training the models is very, important, but you also have to have people who are going to be able to do the reality checks on the things that come out. And I think that the key there is to give them tools that can accelerate that process as well. you know, but, but yeah, I think the, the, the overly, you know, permissive
AI, if you will, that's just seeking to please somebody is a concern, but I think it's something that, like I said, I think well-trained users as well well-trained models should minimize to a degree. Again, the technologies, I mean, think about it, Jon, it's relatively new, right? I mean, it's in terms of this use.
we're somewhat in the infancy of it and we're moving at breakneck speeds for the uptake of AI and it's being done successfully in a lot of places, but you still can't do this without an eye on what the potential pitfalls could be in the case of a poorly trained model or not sufficiently reviewing the output.
before taking action.
GB Jon Krome (22:17.46)
Yeah, it's another great example of, you know, fire and forget is a terrible method, no matter what you're applying it to. Trust but verify is another way to say that, I guess in a way. Speaking of AI or AGI, what do you think are some of the most powerful or profound use cases for an oil and gas company?
Yes.
Funk Futures Media (22:40.962)
Well, really, you know, I always lean towards the, the operational side of the business because the amount of value creation that can take place there is exponentially higher than just being more efficient at paying invoices. Right. Now I would say that the automation and the, ability for AI to take over back office tasks is significantly higher in terms of the, the availability of things to hit.
real hard and do a great job with. But I think the impacts from the operations side are where the money is. really think that, I think again, production operations, reservoir optimization, seismic interpretation for exploration. I I think those areas in the oil and gas industry are huge.
I also feel like the use of AI and asset monitoring for asset performance management, performance optimization, you know, I think all of those are significant. You know, I've done a lot of work with the maintenance teams in the midstream in particular, and just some of the capabilities in leak detection and other things.
are substantial enhancements to really a culture of almost reactive maintenance that had been the sort of historical norm is something breaks, you fix it. Now, basically picking up pinhole leaks, you know, almost instantaneously is very possible with the type of agents they've got now that can be used in these.
asset management monitoring system. I would say asset uptime, you you optimize that you optimize revenue production, you, you know, you minimize regulatory burden, and if you will, the potential of fines and whatnot. So I think there's just tremendous potential in these areas. And I really do like the asset management space, and the production operation space and oil and gas.
Funk Futures Media (25:03.532)
whether that production is refinery, you know, production, you know, of refined fuels or, you know, plastics or whatever you're doing. I think that those systems optimized to minimize environmental impact, you know, maximize safety, I think are really good uses of the technology. And I think you'll see that become really the norm.
I think that's gonna be a substantial area for oil and gas.
So you've made me think of something while you were describing that. Maybe there's kind of two ways to think about this. One is you use all the AI agents and other tools wherever you've got a lot of data. Doesn't matter what it is, whether it's financial data, invoices, reservoir or well performance, wherever you have a lot of data, you should be able to use AI to help you make better decisions and take action in selected cases.
Now that will lead to the next question about what is core work in a second. The other one is, that's, know, data, data, data, get AI at it, make it cheaper, make it faster, make it better. The other is what are the parts of the business that create the most value? And I'm going to say that core work of any company is what creates value that is competitively advantageous.
And if you can get AI to help you take it to the next level, the implication is you are more competitive. You mentioned a couple of functions a minute ago, generally subsurface and some operations that you think is in that bucket. I want to follow up on that a little bit. How would you define, what functions do you think are core work in an oil and gas company? And I'll come back to AI in a second.
Funk Futures Media (27:05.496)
Okay, well, you know, I mean, if you look at the asset life cycle, know, for upstream, you're gonna start on the front end with, you know, everything from land, from lease acquisition, to prospect development, to, you know, exploration, to exploratory drilling. You know, so I mean, if you think about the oil and gas asset life cycle, it really touches every aspect.
So, you know, the, where I've done work, you know, it's I've done work with the geosciences teams, but we did a lot of work with the drilling teams as well to get real time drilling information and insights. And, you know, I, I feel like the, you know, that, you know, in an upstream company, it's going to be basically, it's going to be, if you will, the exploration phase,
The lease acquisition, again, is a seismic acquisition, again, on the front end, but that interpretation, developing prospects, and then turning those prospects over to exploratory drilling. So then you've got the drilling guys and the drilling department, I shouldn't say guys, but I would say that the ability to locate and then execute exploration wells
to test these prospects. exploration wells in the deep water can be exceedingly expensive. So having as much insight prior to locating and drilling these wells is going to pay big dividends, I think, in the long run. The ability to draw on similar structures from past work.
Right? So if you, if you did a big, you know, had a successful sub salt prospect, and now you're testing a new sub salt, you might want to look at the characteristics of both. think that these, these things are great AI opportunities, but also I think that's core. I think that if you just walk along that asset life cycle, so after you explore, then you, you're going to do development planning.
Funk Futures Media (29:29.314)
you know, facilities development and design and build and deployment. then if you will, production, production operations, you know, secondary and tertiary production at some point, depending on the life of the asset, everything through to, to asset retirement and then complying on the backend with, you know, the, the deprecation of those assets. I, you know, to me.
It tends to be the thing that makes the money, I believe is where you want to invest these technologies and try to drive that benefit. think that you also have people that are pressured to deliver particular volumes or a particular number of prospects and other things. so there's also...
opportunities for all of these things really to be fed through the effective use of some of these newer technologies.
So I'll build on that a little bit in that I think if core work creates competitive advantage, competitive advantage for an oil company comes in one of three flavors, making more oil and gas, reducing expenses as much as possible, and keeping people and communities safe. And if you can map your function directly to those three, then you are doing core work. If you can't, then
That doesn't mean something else. It doesn't mean you're bad. It doesn't mean you're wrong. It doesn't mean you're, you know, it just means something else. And I think there's a role for the technologies, but it's perhaps a different role. So like paying invoices, let's be clear, non-core work, paying invoices. And you got to pay it on time. You got to pay the right amount. You got to send the check to the right location, all that. That's not a value add. That's required stuff. And certainly you could use AI to do all of that.
GB Jon Krome (31:28.46)
and radically reduce the cost of the work and probably make it more accurate, which is different than why you would use it in production engineering or in drilling operations. Certainly you want the benefits of cheaper, faster, safer, but you're there to also make more oil and gas.
yeah. Yeah. No, I agree with you. think that putting this in the hands of the core of the business, has, it will have a leveraging effect if you will, on the, the, company, right? You know, I mean, I think that cycle time reduction, if you will, accelerates revenue, right? And then also if you can reduce cost while at the same time managing compliance,
and safety, you're hitting on all cylinders there. So I think you're exactly right. think these core areas provide not only a tremendous amount of value, but also really hit at some of the fundamental, if you will, precepts lot of these companies have in terms of everybody goes home for dinner every night. We're not going to injure or lose any employees.
by having incidents and whatnot. also, if you're a public company, you're you're putting information out about the performance of the company. And so the ability to plan that, discuss what you've planned, then execute and deliver your plan and do so against a budgetary target.
you know, think is a key fundamental of public companies, right? Is to deliver their business, you know, at or above expectation.
GB Jon Krome (33:24.398)
All right, so one final question about this level of technology. I'm going get very detailed, but it really fascinates me. How would you distinguish when you would use high degrees of automation versus trying to use a humanoid robot? How would you distinguish the use cases between the two? And the example here might be for long haul trucking.
You can automate that into a driverless vehicle or you can slap a sideboard into the driver's seat.
So how would you distinguish when to use one versus the other? One man's opinion.
I, to be honest with you, I think you, just basically have to, you know, like anything else, you create the case for where, you know, one answer is the correct answer, you know, for, for the business, right? It may be that, you know, you, you put a human in a self-driving vehicle, right? Who knows? Some people might prefer to have, you know, somebody there to take
you know, take on the situation in the event of an emergency. I think that you'll see people toe hold some of these things before they go the way of full automation. But I do believe that autonomous operations are going to be, you know, kind of the future of the industry. think you're going to see more and more autonomous operations that that plays into the safety element. So remote operations with a lot of visualization capabilities. I think that, you know,
GB Jon Krome (35:01.294)
you
I think that that's really the direction things are going to go because it's a dangerous industry. always has been. But to eliminate, if you will, the risk on employees or the environment while being able to more efficiently and effectively deliver the production and whatnot, I think is really a compelling value proposition. But in terms of a robot driving
a regular vehicle versus a fully automated vehicle. I think that's, you know, probably going to be, you know, a decision, if you will, a business case that's going to probably require a fair bit of debate.
Yeah, I think people also forget that a humanoid robot is another machine. And like every machine, it has a maintenance schedule. It can break down. It's got limitations on its designs use. So, know, we're not talking about one of these science fiction things that comes out of the box and can do it all. I mean, we're a few years away from that, although we will get there. We're a few years away from that.
Yeah, I would agree with that, Jon. think that, you know, again, that's, I think there's a toehold strategy there where you, you know, I think people will bite this off in small bits until, you know, the technology is caught up and the reliability is caught up, the communications capabilities, you know. Yes, absolutely.
GB Jon Krome (36:36.878)
safety.
Yeah, it reminds me of the early days of SCADA systems and automation in the field. That would be the late eighties and the early nineties. mean, I had colleagues who were fellow foremen that wouldn't use the SCADA data because they didn't trust anything in the computer. had to be, you know, an operator putting crude in a tank and measuring with a dipstick.
for them to take the reading seriously. If it came off a flow meter in the SCADA system, they would dismiss it. So, you know, I get it. There are people that are gonna wanna have to be proven to them before they relinquish. But think about our earlier conversation that adoption cycle time is now, gonna, you know, it could be weeks or months as opposed to years and years.
absolutely.
Speaking of innovation, where do you think the biggest source of innovation comes from? And, you know, we've got a lot of choices today. It can come from the company. It can come from universities. It can come from businesses and IT organizations or oil field services, OFSs. It can come from government research institutions or non nonprofits or NGOs. That's a complicated ecosystem. If you had a magic wand, where would you choose to get more innovation out of?
GB Jon Krome (37:55.98)
or where do you think it best comes from today?
Well, I think private industry does a lot of innovation. think if I were really thinking through what I've seen is that I think the opportunity for private industry to collaborate with university system makes a lot of sense. But I also feel like the
there's going to be a certain amount of, if you will, a bit of a dichotomy on the government side. If you're working with the government around matters of regulation, a certain amount of collaboration is probably useful there. But I would say that, you know, looking at a lot of the things that have been, you know, innovative in the oil and gas space, I would say that a lot of this has been
private industry, as well as academia, I think have been combining to create a lot of this value. I mean, I'm not sure there's a perfect mixture. I think that you have to be opportunistic in terms of how you do that. But I'm a big believer in taking advantage of the research that's being done at universities.
around this space and, you know, have a long standing relationship with Texas A you know, around basically using students there on projects that yielded genuine insights for projects that we had, you know, been considering and how we might attack those projects. And, you know, I would say
Funk Futures Media (39:57.646)
I'd say it's a mix. I don't think there's a magic answer to that question. I think it becomes very situational. So I wish I had a better answer for that.
Well, I I knew it was a bit of a debatable question. You one of the things I've observed over the last 20 years is really the research companies and the bigger oil companies have diminished. You know, when I was at Mobile, we had a research company called Mobile E &P Technology or MEPTEC. It no longer exists. It got folded into the Exxon version. Even Exxon today is a fairly small research organization.
BP's has gotten amazingly small as Chevrons. So it seems that the oil company operators are really telling the marketplace that it's not as much their job anymore as it used to be and foisting it onto private industry, Schlumberger, Halliburton, Baker Hughes, et cetera.
And for the longer term stuff, the universities or the national labs. I always think the national labs are always a bit of a sleeping giant, but they've got a very long term view as well. It's public stuff, you know, which is always hard to get early results from. You've got so many stakeholders to manage, but they've got brilliant work that occurs. Lawrence Livermore and you know, other places like that.
I think you're right. think it comes down to what's the use case and what's the expectation. But boy, operators are starting to really get out of that business.
Funk Futures Media (41:39.788)
Yeah, I would agree with you. think that, you know, from some of the work I've done with a lot of the oil field service companies, I really do believe that they are still, you know, sort of on the forefront of a lot of that technical innovation. You know, I mean, look, I've worked with a couple of different oil companies and the, you know, the debate over, you know,
what constitutes the entirety of your company? If you're a driller, right? If you're, say an E &P, do you wanna have your own rigs, right? Or do you wanna use rigs from a company that innovates for drilling across a variety of environments and situations and puts more into it? So who can more effectively create
Yeah.
Funk Futures Media (42:36.492)
value in that space. And I think you're right. I think they're leaning towards the service companies for the services they provide, as opposed to having, if you will, a fully vertical and horizontally integrated company, because I think the cost of that would be prohibitive. you know, I think that it does something, it's an interesting impact to competitive advantage. There was a time where if you did your own stuff,
you could create some competitive advantage. Now I think that your competitive advantage is lost because a lot of that R &D really is done by a third party and it's consumed by most of your competitors.
by everybody. That's right. That's right. mean, the leaks in the rowboat aren't in the company. They're in the service community. You take that stuff across the lease line. It happens all the time. Okay, we're coming down to the home stretch here, Gary. What do think the industry is getting right and getting wrong in this kind of carbon conscious world?
Funk Futures Media (43:43.022)
Yeah, that's a good question. I think that the focus on carbon emissions or carbon management is a good idea. I think that the mindset has really moved toward not only compliance, but trying to produce
Hmm
Funk Futures Media (44:08.746)
if you will, at a superior level of efficiency and with the lowest possible environmental impact. So I think that people's mindset is in the right place. I think that carbon capture, utilization, sequestration, think that these again are addressing a concern that has been out there for a while. But I think that
You know, know, cap and trade, I don't think was a great idea, you know, when they, when they came up with that. But, but I think the fact that, you know, there's focus on this and there's a real desire to, if you will, you know, manage and minimize any environmental impact. I think that's all good, but I think there's secondary things that are coming out of some of this work. you know, that
prolong the life of the industry. mean, if you think about, you know, blue or turquoise hydrogen, you you drop the carbon black out of that, it makes a phenomenal road surface material, right? So there's sort of a byproduct of utilizing hydrogen as a fuel from existing natural gas supplies, which are substantial. So I think that, I think they're right in the fact that they're looking for innovation in that area.
And I think that, you know, the more you can address this problem, albeit it's still one of the, you know, hottest debates out there is, you know, the manmade global warming debate. But if you just say, you know what though, we're going to do our very best to minimize or eliminate to the greatest extent possible any potential impacts we can have.
by virtue of operating in a cleaner, more efficient way through these technologies and these methodologies, I think that's time well spent.
GB Jon Krome (46:14.986)
Absolutely. mean, I used to drive through South Texas when I was an operations manager down there. And this would have been about 10 years ago. And boy, there are there were neighborhoods that just smell bad because of the venting. So, you know, it's not like you can just take the CO2 out and let the other stuff vent. There's all kinds of collateral benefit to the CO2 question venting, flaring the whole nine yards. All right. Lightning round, lightning round. So I'm going to give you a phrase or a word. Don't think, just answer. OK.
I'll try.
All right, SAP.
Bad.
Wow, Oracle.
Funk Futures Media (46:56.554)
Also, no. Okay.
No, you have to have some context here. SAP, I've competed with through all of my career in the technology space at Oracle. actually, basically, I'm just going to say this is a long answer. It's not a lightning answer. But done right, they all work well.
Yeah, lightning round. on, lightning round.
GB Jon Krome (47:29.666)
Are you running for office all of a sudden?
No, no, my wife wouldn't have it.
Okay, last lightning round question or word outsourcing.
Funk Futures Media (47:42.358)
A mixed blessing.
Wow, didn't expect that. Well, Gary, I've had some fun and I learned a few new things. I hope you did as well. Thank you so much for spending your time with me today. And I'm sure our listeners will love some of the things that you've said. I want to thank everybody out there for listening and we will see you next time on Uncapped with Executive Roustabouts. Take care.