Energy Bytes

Paul Brown, Founder and Principal Engineer at BDE Data, joins John and Bobby all the way from Scotland for a conversation that covers a lot of ground. From his days as an international drilling engineer dodging pirates off the coast of West Africa to building WellSchematic.com and tackling the nightmare of digitizing 50-year-old multilingual well files, Paul is the rare person who speaks both lang...

When you have 80 patents and a lifetime achievement award in hydraulic fracturing, you have seen some things. John William Ely, Founder of Ely and Associates Corp, and Jon Harper, Vice President of Sales and Marketing, talk frac history, pre-job diagnostics, the slick water revolution, geothermal, and why the industry keeps pumping the same thing and expecting different results. Click here to watc...

Owner relations in oil and gas has been shoved in a corner forever, basically a "here's your check, don't call me" situation, and Deren Boyd, Dagen Boyd, and Josh Wright, co-founders of Firm App, are building the platform to fix that. These three started in oilfield safety software with iScout, got acquired by KPA, and now they're tackling the massive gap between operators and their surface and mi...

Bobby Neelon and John Kalfayan sit down with Kayla Ball to break down why the methane compliance space is stuck in the trough of disillusionment, how she ended up cleaning up Petra's flat file nightmare at IHS, and why vibe coding with Claude feels like training your own replacement. They dig into sensor data chaos across ops teams, why public data companies should be worried, the wild difference...

Hussein Shel, CTO and head of business development for energy and utilities at Amazon Web Services, joins Bobby and John to talk about his journey from Chevron engineer to cloud technology leader. They explore how AI coding tools are changing the game for energy companies, why the barrier to entry for building apps has never been lower, and what it means when your reservoir engineer can now spin u...

Collide AI 2025 Wrapped Part 1 turns into a real talk on why forward deployed engineers win where AI pilots stall, with Michael Cortez, John, and Nick Smart swapping war stories from completions, geophysics, and the startup trenches while they map out how Collide Enterprise moves past basic chat tools into search plus workflows that actually hold up in the real world. Click here to watch a video o...

Bruce Holman and Corey Scott showed up ready to blow up the idea that accounts payable has to be slow, messy, and stuck in the past. They walked us through how Energy Payables is flipping the script with a platform that actually makes sense for operators and vendors, think cleaner workflows, real transparency, and smart tech like AI doing the heavy lifting instead of some poor soul buried in sprea...

Justin has a way of making the oilfield and the data world feel like they’ve always belonged together. He walked us through how he’s helped teams untangle messy workflows, clean up data quality issues, and actually make analytics useful instead of overwhelming. From his time at Marathon Oil to experimenting with tools like Snowflake and Alteryx, he’s all about boosting efficiency and giving people...

PandoScape is on a mission to make data actually make sense. We sat down with Christy Hopkins and Philip Heggelund, the CEO and CTO duo behind the company, to talk about how they’re untangling the mess of data integration in energy. From subsurface insights to cloud headaches, they’re rethinking how information flows across the industry. We got into the good stuff: cleaning up bad data, breaking d...

Rudy Lacovara is on a mission to untangle the messy data spaghetti that runs through oil and gas. He built PetroBricks to be the “Zapier for energy”, a way to connect clunky systems, automate the repetitive stuff, and make workflows actually make sense. We got into the pain points everyone in the industry knows too well: outdated data standards, SCADA headaches, and the constant struggle to automa...

AI is shaking things up in oil and gas, and Hussam Rahman is right in the middle of it. He’s the founder of AAI Agency and the brains behind tools like Petri, a copilot built for engineers, and the Business Toolkit that helps companies cut through messy workflows. We got into how AI is solving everyday headaches, think bad data management, clunky reporting, and inefficient processes, while opening...

AI is no longer just a buzzword in oil and gas, it’s reshaping how the entire industry works. Steven Barrow grew up as a fourth-generation oilfield guy, but instead of sticking with tradition, he’s pushing things forward with Patronus Energy. We got into everything from using computer vision to spot safety issues, to drones inspecting sites, to automating the headache of P&IDs. Steven’s story...

AI isn’t just creeping into oil and gas, it’s blowing the doors open. Scott Casso from Casso Land & Imaging Services walked us through how his team is dragging decades of dusty, “dark” data into the digital age. Think land title work, document digitization, and the kind of workflow cleanup that makes mergers and acquisitions a whole lot smoother. Instead of drowning in paper, companies can now...

Mathias has a knack for shaking up an industry that doesn’t exactly love change, and he’s doing it from the inside. As CEO of Whitson, he’s bringing petroleum engineering software into the cloud era, building tools that work in real time instead of waiting on clunky desktop updates. We talked about what it takes to get a traditional industry to embrace modern platforms, why seamless data integrati...

AI and GIS might not sound like the flashiest combo, until you hear what Bunting Labs is cooking up. Michael Egan breaks it down with John and Bobby: how they’re turning old-school geologic maps into clean, digital datasets, baking large language models into QGIS, and giving non-technical folks the power to ask spatial questions like pros. From landmen to transportation planners, this episode expl...

AI isn’t just showing up in oil and gas, it’s kicking the door down. We hung out with Bella Kelada-Khalil from Midnight Marketing, who’s diving headfirst into petroleum engineering and AI after starting in sales and events. She’s asking the smart, unfiltered questions you wish you could, and we’re here for it. We swap stories on how AI is automating the boring stuff, making data wrangling less pai...

Tired of clunky geoscience software that feels like it was built in the '90s? Same. That’s why we brought on Cameron Snow from Danomics to talk about how his team is shaking things up. He’s built a platform that actually makes life easier for geologists and engineers, no more wrestling with legacy tools just to run a few thousand wells. We got into how Danomics uses AI (without going full robot ov...

If you've ever wrestled with messy datasets, legacy code, or trying to get executives to actually *use* data, you’ll get a kick out of this one. We sat down with Jeff Krimmel from Krimmel Strategy Group to talk shop about how he’s helping energy companies turn their mountain of data into real-world strategy. We hit everything from making peace with Fortran (yep, still kicking) to getting smart abo...

SmartChain is on a mission to kill off the chaos of clunky contracts in oil and gas and they might actually be pulling it off. We caught up with their co-founder Cameron Sinclair, who’s turning heads with a platform that automates the mess out of invoicing, closes those dreaded “leakage” gaps, and makes cash flow way less of a guessing game. From aligning incentives between operators and vendors t...

We're lifting the curtain on the mysterious world of energy data transparency with the guy who's shaking things up at AFE Leaks. He's on a mission to break open the hidden details around oil and gas costs and operations, think: cracking open dusty old filings and turning them into something everyone can actually use. He chats about the wild ride of starting a data-driven company in an industry rul...

AI isn't just a buzzword in oil and gas, it’s changing the game, and we’re breaking it down with someone who’s been in the trenches making it happen. From smarter fracking and streamlined drilling to navigating the chaos of legacy systems, this convo peels back the curtain on what it *really* takes to build tech that actually works in the field. We’re talking massive data, modular design, edge com...

What happens when a control room engineer gets fed up with clunky old systems and decides to rebuild them from the ground up? You get CruxOCM, a company shaking up pipeline automation with tools like PipeBot and GatherBot that sound like sci-fi but are very real (and very efficient). Vicki Knott shares how she went from pulp and paper mills to leading a tech company that blends first-principles en...

AI in oil and gas isn't just a buzzword, it's actually solving real problems out in the field. On this episode, we chat with someone who's knee-deep in the data trenches and building tools that make workflows faster, smarter, and way less painful. From using vibration data to predict when gear’s about to break, to training AI to read and summarize boring old PDFs, it’s all about turning raw info i...

Oil and gas engineers drowning in data, meet your new best friend—Wise Rock. We’re talking lightning-fast analytics, effortless communication, and a platform built to make your life easier. Brock Meyer, the brains behind it, joins us to share how his tech is slashing downtime, streamlining workflows, and bringing exception-based surveillance to the oilfield. Think real-time SCADA data, production...

From Kazakhstan to Louisiana and now shaking up the oil and gas industry, Onega Ulanova’s story is as bold as her startup, QMS2GO. This AI-powered tool is turning the grind of quality management into a smooth operation, automating audits, crafting training materials, and capturing wisdom from seasoned machinists. Inspired by her own experience as a quality auditor, Onega created QMS2GO to save qua...