Energy 101: We Ask The Dumb Questions So You Don't Have To

Maps quietly run the entire oil and gas world, you just never noticed. This one breaks down GIS without the jargon, from Google Earth doodles to the software that decides exactly where to drill. Richard Webb and Zach Harlan of Exprodat explain how mapping tech places wells, dodges the neighbor's boundary, and powers everything from Zillow to the military. Plus drilling on Mars, conspiracy toll roa...

Those giant pyramids of sand at every frac site exist for one reason, and it turns out the industry might be quietly running short on the good stuff. Curtis Wilie and Josh Johnson of Superior Energy Services break down how a coal byproduct called fly ash is shaking up the proppant game, why something three times finer than sand outperforms it, and how pulling forgotten barrels from legacy wells co...

Methane is invisible, odorless, and far more potent than CO2 in the short term, so how do you actually catch it leaking? Brendan Smith, CEO of SeekOps Inc., explains how technology built for the Mars Curiosity rover ended up flying on drones over oil and gas sites here on Earth. We get into spectrometers versus satellites, why offshore detection is so tricky, what EU methane rules mean for US oper...

Getting laid off twice taught Yogashri Pradhan, founder of IronLady Energy Advisors, that staying visible matters as much as staying technical. She traces a career running from UT petroleum engineering to Devon, Endeavor, Coterra and Chevron, the downturns that reshaped it, and why she got married in front of a pump jack. There is also honest talk on the Diamondback merger, the wildcatters she loo...

Micro turbines hitting 83% efficiency could replace flares and turn stranded wells into tiny neighborhood power plants. Mark Ronkin of Grid Energy Solutions came down from Edmonton to talk with Jacob and guest host Britt Breaux about jumping from five years in the Canadian Army to wireline to running his own MWD shop, then stumbling into the tech at a gas show in Milan. Plus getting sick next to a...

Building software inside a frac and wireline giant is a different beast than doing it at a startup. Ben Dickinson and Raleigh Bumpers from NexTier Completion Solutions get into life under the Patterson UTI umbrella, the EOS platform, the Vertex automated pump control system, the shift from diesel to natural gas powered fleets, agentic AI in the field, and why the world genuinely stops if oil and g...

Dan Grech, Founder and CEO of Global OTEC, swung by from London to break down ocean thermal energy conversion, a technology that turns the ocean's heat into 24/7 baseload power. Jacob asks the dumb questions about warm surface water meeting cold deep water, why Jimmy Carter is the unsung hero of ocean energy, how OTEC stacks up against offshore wind and Peter Thiel's new wave bet, and why Hawaii a...

Three decades of front-row energy seats and takes you genuinely can't argue with. Mark Meyer gets into the Strait of Hormuz mess, Heathrow's jet fuel shortage, countries sitting on hydrocarbons while importing them, the IEA's net zero detour, BP's expensive U-turn, and why 2 billion people still cooking over dung deserves more airtime than another COP summit. Astros predictions and a Joe Rogan tan...

Andrew Richard, CEO and Co-Founder of Automated Rig Technologies, flies in from Calgary to break down why the oilfield spent 70 years optimizing brute force instead of rethinking the process. He gets into the jointed pipe injector that strips 97% of operator input out, what rig hands call the "barbecue basket," why everyone in oil and gas wants to be first to be second, and the IKEA chatbot that a...

Chlorine is in your pipes, your microchips, your drinking water and somehow nobody talks about it. Roxanna Delima, Co-founder and CBO at Rushnu, breaks down why this overlooked chemical is critical to US manufacturing and how her team is flipping the script on a 100 year old industry by using heat instead of electricity and turning waste carbon into actual product. No government subsidy dependence...

David Holt, President of Consumer Energy Alliance, sits down to unpack 20 years of fighting for affordable, reliable energy for regular Americans. From NIMBYism and lazy politics to the data center power surge, nuclear's comeback, carbon capture, and why the price of eggs is actually an energy story, this one covers a lot of ground and makes it all make sense. Click here to watch a video of this e...

Shawn Cutter, Founder & CEO of EnergiAcres, went from sixth-generation Ohio farmer to Discovery Channel reality TV star to selling his oil and gas software startup to Quorum before Series A. Now he's building circular energy infrastructure that pairs power plants with data centers and greenhouses to make energy count twice. We get into the grid crisis, the cloud vs on-prem debate, and whether...

The Beetaloo Basin in Australia's Northern Territory is one of the most exciting shale plays nobody is talking about yet. Jason Finlay and Aiden Anderson-Barr from Vantage North Group, both former NT government officials, break down why Australia had a fracking moratorium, how a left-leaning government lifted it, what the East Coast energy crisis actually looks like, and why US technology is the k...

Offshore driller Justin Forrest of Valaris Limited joins Jacob and Mark Meyer to break down what it actually means to sit in the driller's chair on a seventh-gen drillship, why managed pressure drilling is the offshore equivalent of horizontal drilling, what 28 days on a rig really looks like, and how Justin has been quietly documenting the hidden world of offshore drilling one black and white pho...

Pressure testing, cold calls from Wendy's parking lots, and a family logo that goes back generations. Clint Wagner, Owner of Wagner Energy Services, Juan Macias Jr, Operations and Business Development Manager at Wagner Energy Services, and Peter Brecht, Commercial Insurance Broker at Falcon West Energy Insurance Solutions pull up to the NAPE edition of Energy 101 to talk about what hydrostatic tes...

Sean Hanrahan, Founder and Managing Partner of Platypus Brewing in Houston, spent 25 years in global minerals and oil and gas before trading the corporate world for a brewmaster apron. From offshore exploration in Australia and the Gulf of Mexico to opening a craft brewery in the First Ward, Sean breaks down what those two worlds actually have in common. Click here to watch a video of this episode...

Prabhdeep Sekhon, CEO of Eclipse Energy, breaks down the hydrogen rainbow and why it doesn't tell the whole story about cost, carbon intensity, and water use. From farm boy in Canada to petroleum engineer in the Bakken to clean tech founder, Prab explains how his team is using microbes to eat leftover oil in abandoned fields and produce hydrogen without water, turning billion-dollar liabilities in...

Austin Draughon spent nine years at BP keeping Gulf of Mexico wells producing tens of thousands of barrels per day from floating platforms in 6,000+ feet of water. He breaks down why offshore is ten times more expensive, takes ten times longer, and involves ten times more people than onshore drilling, from robots tightening bolts on the seafloor to the ice problem that can kill a well in eight hou...

Texas electricity is way more complicated than flipping a switch. Brittany Devlin from DOB Ai breaks down the deregulated energy market where customers can actually choose providers and save serious money, but most people just overpay out of laziness. From how the grid physically works to why your AC destroys your summer budget, she explains the whole pipeline. The real hack? Like energy aggregati...

Brandon Wamsley from Flatirons Chemicals joins the show to explain how the $100 billion oil and gas chemical industry actually works - from killing bacteria that sours wells to keeping pipelines from corroding in minus 58 degree North Dakota winters. He shares his journey from laying tile in construction to becoming a field technician in Williston during the Bakken boom, where people literally cam...

Joe Natale from Knight-Chemstar joins the show fresh off pulling off something pretty remarkable in Massachusetts - successfully running the first 100% renewable diesel pilot program for commuter rail locomotives in the country. He breaks down the wild logistics of moving renewable diesel from Midwest producers to New England, why heating oil is basically diesel's cousin, the bacon grease problem...

Building startups turns into a rapid fire philosophy session on founders, culture, money, and why velocity beats speed when Jacob asks the dumb questions we all think about. Collin McLelland of Collide breaks down how real companies get built, why talent density matters more than headcount, how power, AI, and energy collide, and what actually keeps teams motivated when the grind gets real. Click h...

Trying to make geophysics cool again, and honestly Peter Duncan from MicroSeismic, Inc. makes it easy. We bounce from a bear encounter in Newfoundland to why geophysicists are basically treasure hunters with pricey toys, then land on the simple difference between seismic and microseismic, why sound travels so freakishly well through rock, and how listening to tiny underground pops helps fracking a...

Growing up in New Zealand somehow turned into mud logging the Aussie desert, rigging up deepwater tech in the Gulf of Mexico, geosteering off Scotland, helping figure out nuclear waste storage in Swiss clay, and finally landing in subsurface risk and insurance where “nothing moves without coverage” starts to make way more sense. Jacob asks the dumb questions, Rodney Garrard from Arch Insurance Int...

Tyler Wilson at Altor Solution breaks down why corrosion quietly eats wells alive and how his team fights back by lining production tubing with stainless steel, plus a wild path from ski instructor dreams to Australia farming to freezing roughneck days in Alberta and eventually running North America ops at Tesco. We get a clean, plain English walkthrough of tubing vs casing, annular flow, why join...