
Robots Are Taking Over Oil Rigs - nradov
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-01-24/robots-are-taking-over-oil-rigs-as-roughnecks-become-expendable
======
ryanmarsh
Where my Houstonians at?

> "Rigs have gotten so much more efficient that the shale industry can use
> about half as many as it did at the height of the boom in 2014 to suck the
> same amount of oil out of the ground."

Drilling rigs don't suck oil out of the ground, they drill a hole... that's
why they call them drilling rigs not sucking rigs. Also, we don't call it
sucking, rather "production", and that's handled by other equipment...
assuming the well needs to be sucked on.

The "Iron Roughneck" has been around a long time.

I would like to see all the charts in this article to go back to 2000. New
drilling technology is not adopted as fast as some in SV might imagine. Wells
are expensive and dangerous. Innovation is rare and new tech takes a long time
to gain acceptance. I'm not saying headcount will shrink over time but this
industry is cyclical and demand has been increasing and will continue too as
the rest of the world develops a middle class.

> That means an engineer can design an oil well at his desk. With the press of
> a button, an automated system would identify the equipment needed from a
> supplier, create a 3D model and send instructions for building it out into
> the field, Hashmi says. “That is automation.”

LOLOLOL yah, trust me that Fluor, Parsons, Jacobs and all the other oil and
gas engineering firms would love this and have been trying to build or
integrate things like this for a long time. The limit to automation in this
industry and others is, quite frankly, how bad these companies are at making
software. Thankfully for the American worker they suck pretty bad, otherwise
half the white collar jobs in the US wouldn't exist. Also, this shit is
complicated AF and building a petroleum plant isn't just about the chemical
process it will complete. Jesus the naiveté in this article. Oh and who
designs custom well heads anymore?

~~~
fizixer
> The limit to automation in this industry and others is, quite frankly, how
> bad these companies are at making software.

Your statement contradicts the rest of your paragraph (that the article is
naive and far fetched).

Because if this is really true, then it's only a matter of assembling a good
software team, with one or two domain experts (who know the domain and are
good s/w engineers), pair it up with the team of engineers and line workers,
and a successful automated system can be built, i.e., exactly what the
original post is talking about.

~~~
leereeves
Automation as defined by that comment is a really low bar. It probably is
possible.

> That means an engineer can design an oil well at his desk. With the press of
> a button, an automated system would identify the equipment needed from a
> supplier, create a 3D model and send instructions for building it out into
> the field, Hashmi says. “That is automation.”

I'd be very surprised if that doesn't already exist: printing a 3D model,
submitting an order for the parts, and sending the documentation to the field.

That's assuming the engineer has identified the parts and written the
instructions. Automatically doing that might be more of a challenge.

~~~
XorNot
It's not hard to imagine a search engine which matches mechanical descriptions
of parts to a proposed design automatically. Just draw roughly what you need,
punch in the specs, and let the expert-system provide a least-cost bill-of-
materials which comes nearest the ratings + a list of custom parts.

~~~
ryanmarsh
OMFG the hubris. I don't know where to start. Oil and Gas exploration and
production are a Hard Problem. Visit the Offshore Technology Conference
sometime.

------
fcanesin
I work at Schlumberger-Doll Research, a 5 storey building by the side of MIT,
it is the main research center of Schlumberger Oil Services, we are currently
expanding with a new Robotics department. Not only control-automation, there
is applications and research to unstructured environments also.

If you have a PhD on the field from a top university or can demonstrate
equivalent knowledge is a good opportunity. You are encouraged to publish (if
not working on confidential client data), good compensation and work/life
balance - for research.

There is a big push for a lot more technology on the future rigs, driven by
all the factors: environmental safety, regulations and economics. Operating on
a price controlled scenario means you have to be able to quickly mobilize and
demobilize assets, for this automation is also critical.

------
michaelbuckbee
3 Years and half the workers:

"Rigs have gotten so much more efficient that the shale industry can use about
half as many as it did at the height of the boom in 2014 to suck the same
amount of oil out of the ground."

I'm more familiar with mining and it's fairly amazing the productivity
improvements that went into that, those jobs are never coming back.

~~~
ancarda
>those jobs are never coming back

Does it make anyone else sad to hear this? I see posts about robots/AI/etc
automating away jobs and I try to be happy about that (who wouldn't want to
never have to work again?) but I guess I'm saddened by some perceived loss of
interesting opportunities.

If I wanted to get my hands dirty or get away from the world for a bit, before
robots I could work on an oil rig for a bit. Now, that's not really an option.

Does anyone else have this sort of thought pattern? What replaces work you
find enjoyable/exciting if it's not something you can do at home or by
yourself in a post-AI, post-UBI world?

~~~
SEJeff
Please do consider reading the entirety of Ian M Banks's Culture Series. It is
some fantastic Scifi that literally explores humanity in a post resource
scarcity world.

~~~
msandford
Is it true post-scarcity like everyone has their own mostly automated Starship
Enterprise / Battlestar / Star Destroyer?

I always get kind of agitated at the notion of post resource scarcity because
if you took someone from 1000 years ago and dropped them into today they'd be
amazed at how much everyone has. If everyone had 11th century desires but 21st
century technology we'd be there. But we're definitely not. I sincerely doubt
we ever will be.

~~~
philipkglass
The Culture is true post-scarcity in that basically unlimited matter and
energy can be manufactured along with the objects made from matter and energy.
By clever authorial fiat this doesn't lead to mega-terrorism from rare
unhinged individuals, though. The real decision makers and guardians of the
Culture are Minds, super-advanced AIs that can keep watch over millions of
biological passengers and react to any problem a million times faster than
biological entities can act. All manufactured objects in the Culture beyond a
certain level of complexity have their own lesser AIs embedded in them. A
space suit can advise or even argue with its user; a powerful handgun will
refuse to fire if it thinks its user is misbehaving. (This is a minor plot
point in one of the stories where somebody destroys a ship with a very old
Culture gun from before the AI safeguards were built into objects.)

As for the real world you can observe demand satiation right now among
different ranks of the rich. Look at billionaires. They consume much more than
the man who has only a few million in the bank, but _sub-linearly_ more. From
millionaires to billionaires you don't see a thousand-fold increase in
consumption as measured by house size, food, beverages, clothing, medical
care... Billionaires are three orders of magnitude separated from millionaires
on the basis of _control_ , not _consumption_ ; the richest will feel ill long
before they consume all the champagne or caviar they could afford to buy.

~~~
mccoyspace
"As for the real world you can observe demand satiation right now among
different ranks of the rich. Look at billionaires. They consume much more than
the man who has only a few million in the bank, but sub-linearly more."

Which is why the growing wealth inequalities are bad for the overall economy.
The rich can't spend their money with enough scale or velocity.

~~~
robotresearcher
But the money of the rich is in circulation in the form of investments. Why is
retail spending better for the economy?

I'm genuinely interested.

~~~
slv77
Depends on how it was earned and invested.

For example assume that a new billionaire is minted by a lottery with 100
million people buying a $10 dollar ticket. Long term it's neutral but in the
short term it effectively removes $1B in near term consumption from the
economy and spreads it out over 100+ years.

On the other side a million people will likely better invest and sound a
thousand dollars than one person will invest one billion.

~~~
robotresearcher
But the new billionaire doesn't stuff her mattress with ten million hundreds.
She buys investments, which go back into the economy. Or she puts cash in the
bank, which goes back into the economy....

~~~
slv77
The money she collected from the lottery ultimately represent a call option on
someone's future labor. After the lottery that call option has been handed to
a single individual who may never make that call in her lifetime. The effect
is similar to the coal mining town's company store where you can only buy what
they sell at the price they set.

The effect is to concentrate economic activity in specific sectors where banks
are willing to lend which means the economy is less flexible overall.

An economy with $1B of debt and $1B in savings spread over 10,000 people is
going to be more diverse and resilient than 9,999 people who have $1B in debt
and one person with $1B in savings invested in housing and car loans.

The best outcome would be if she invested in new equity in a company that
created a positive ROI in excess of what the lottery ticket buyers would have
produced. Anything else is a net negative.

------
giggidygig
Having worked in the industry for 10+ years now, first on deepwater oil rigs
(drilling), now working IT for a large oil company, some things i've
observed/experienced first hand which could provide some color to the
automation side of things:

1) The smaller the company, the more agile/nimble you are forced to be out of
pure need (no money or resources), this means you have to look at automating
things in order to just get you're job done. Because if you dont, you end up
working 24/7 because you are the only one there to do it. Just like a start-
up.

2) The bigger the company, the less agile/nimble, more bureaucracy/politics
and people, the same driver is just not there anymore, so the focus on
automation isn't as intense.

3) The contractor/service companies (Halliburton, Schlumberger,
BakerHughes/GE, Transocean, Nabors etc..) are probably the only ones in the
industry that could successfully develop and use these types of automation
technologies, because it would make their services cheaper for them, NOT make
it cheaper for the oil companies.

4) The big oil companies have the money, but they simply don't have the
ability to effectively produce/innovate internally as a smaller company
would.Hence the only way they would adopt anysort of automation tech, would be
as a service, even then it wouldn't quiet match up with their own internal
business needs as the company just isn't wired to think that way.

5) Currently, the buzzword/hype vortex within big oil is all
BigData/Cloud/Automation/AI etc.., but is sadly used internally to blind
higher ups to approve internal projects that really aren't much more than a
hobbled together mess of ancient tech.

So from my perspective, automation will eventually get there in oil/gas, but
it will take a glacial pace for it to happen for the oil companies themselves,
but once it eventually get's there, that's when you will see the major
watershed "automation" changes in the industry.

~~~
hackuser
Thanks for sharing your knowledge of the industry. One question:

> The contractor/service companies (Halliburton, Schlumberger, BakerHughes/GE,
> Transocean, Nabors etc..) are probably the only ones in the industry that
> could successfully develop and use these types of automation technologies

> The big oil companies ... simply don't have the ability to effectively
> produce/innovate internally as a smaller company would.

Aren't the contractor/service companies large? Why are they more innovative
than big oil?

~~~
giggidygig
They are large, but not as big as the Super Major Oil Companies (Exxon,
Chevron, Shell, BP etc..).

Oil Companies think large and long term (10-50 yr cycles), meaning their
payback/revenue period is also longer, and as a result their business
strategy/forecasting is longer.

The cycle usually starts with a lot of upfront Capital to build up the
capability to find/drill/produce/refine/sell the oil.

Once they have that capability, then the focus is on producing oil in the
cheapest most efficient way possible over the 10-50 yr life of the oil field.

Compare this to the services/contractor companies, whose work is mainly
fixed/short-term contract based, as a result their business strategy
forecasting is alot shorter. It is also more competitive, so they have to
constantly think up new and better services to provide the oil companies,
while also trying to reduce their own operating expense to extract as much
margin as possible.

So being smaller, with shorter business cycles, and more focus on doing things
better, smarter, cheaper, the result is that the service/contractor companies
really have more opportunity and an inherent need to innovate, simply as a way
to survive and make profit.

~~~
giggidygig
Slightly off "automation" topic - but their are some pretty cool examples of
service/contractor companies using/leveraging technology to do things better (
specifically in the drilling space), which the oil companies benefit from, but
could never have developed themselves in my opinion:

1) Downhole Telemetry Systems (Communication for Downhole tools) - using EM,
Fixed Wire in Drill Pipe and Mud Pulses (Pressure changes in Mud)
[http://www.halliburton.com/en-
US/ps/sperry/drilling/telemetr...](http://www.halliburton.com/en-
US/ps/sperry/drilling/telemetry/mwd-lwd-telemetry-systems.page?node-
id=hfyjrqux)
[http://www.slb.com/services/drilling/mwd_lwd/mwd/powerpulse....](http://www.slb.com/services/drilling/mwd_lwd/mwd/powerpulse.aspx)

2) Point the Bit/Push the bit/Rotary Steerable Systems - ability to remotely
point the drill bit in a desired direction [http://www.halliburton.com/en-
US/ps/sperry/drilling/directio...](http://www.halliburton.com/en-
US/ps/sperry/drilling/directional-drilling/rotary-steerables/rotary-steerable-
solutions.page?node-id=hfvq7ixu)
[http://www.slb.com/services/drilling/drilling_services_syste...](http://www.slb.com/services/drilling/drilling_services_systems/directional_drilling/powerdrive_family.aspx)

3) Loggin While Drilling Technology - having inbuilt sensors of various types
on the drill bit, collecting/sampling while drilling
[http://www.halliburton.com/en-
US/ps/sperry/drilling/lwd.page...](http://www.halliburton.com/en-
US/ps/sperry/drilling/lwd.page?node-id=hfyjrqtw)
[http://www.slb.com/services/drilling/mwd_lwd.aspx](http://www.slb.com/services/drilling/mwd_lwd.aspx)

------
ohstopitu
A family member used to be a Safety Engineer for ONGC and ADNOC. He had
visited oil rigs for quite a bit early during his career and even back (1990s)
then, most modern rigs were automated.

He used to tell me stories about how close shit would hit the fan because
people became used to machines making decisions that they became a lot more
lax - so companies even back then were trying their best to get rid of humans
for such jobs.

That said, the most manpower needed is during the initial phase, after which
you could safely run with almost half the crew.

------
digikata
I wonder if increased automation means poorer responses to emergencies because
you have fewer humans there to respond with. On the other hand, maybe it means
fewer emergencies because the automation makes fewer mistakes, or makes hard
jobs easier and more consistent.

~~~
kbenson
Often overlooked is the type of mistake, which it seems you are touching on
with "poorer responses to emergencies". If humans make 10 mistakes over a time
period compared to 1 for the automated system, it might look as if the humans
are worse, but if the cost of the human mistakes averages to 5 for some
theoretical cost scale (so 50 overall), but the automated mistake costs 100
because there isn't a good dynamic response to it, the automated system
doesn't actually cost less in the end. That's why we so often see automated
systems backed by people, as we don't have automation that can respond as
dynamically as a person.

It usually takes far fewer people to oversee automation than to do the
original work though.

~~~
bluGill
It only takes one human mistake that is 1000 to destroy all that. Many systems
in oil refineries are automated because humans didn't want to shut the plant
down where there was some trouble. Even when the problem is a predictable
humans often refused to admit it they couldn't operate as is. (We know this
pump is failing, the replacement won't arrive for 2 months though so we are
going to continue as long as we can - once it fails we know we have 1 hour to
hit the shutdown switch or the plant will explode)

~~~
kbenson
> It only takes one human mistake that is 1000 to destroy all that.

And it only takes one machine mistake that's 10000 to reverse it again. What
it comes down to is that until _every mistake that can happen is known and
accounted for_ , a human somewhere in the process will _allow for_ better
reasoning about any possible mistakes. Human errors are more likely, but they
are fairly well understood and you can safeguard yourself by putting more
people higher up the stack checking things. This is well understood, we've had
centuries (if not millennia, depending on how you want to qualify it) to work
on the problem of reducing errors in people's work.

> Many systems in oil refineries are automated because humans didn't want to
> shut the plant down where there was some trouble.

That's not a problem with people, that's a problem with the structure the
people are in. When keeping the operation running is prioritized over fixing
problems as they are found, you get a perverse incentive structure. A good
example of this is shown in the NUMMI episode[1] of This American Life. In the
1980's at the NUMMI plant, GM _never_ wanted the assembly line stopped, so
cars would go through not completely finished, and then workers would
volunteer to finish them on the lot manually (for extra money), but theyse
cars often had problems and were very low quality. This is contrasted with
what the GM execs saw at a Toyota plant (and tries to institute), which was
that any problems on the line were encouraged to stop or slow the line and
managers would then go investigate and either fix problems with that station,
or allocate more resources there if it wasn't sufficient. The problem you
outline is not inherent to the people working, the problem is the _structure
they are working within_. The main difference in reality is that when an
automated component isn't working right, people know it (or something
associated with it, such as a feeder) needs to be fixed, so they fix it. Or
more appropriately, they've been trained that this is the correct course of
action. The same could be true of people working, it just often _wasn 't_.

1: [https://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-
archives/episode/403/...](https://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-
archives/episode/403/nummi)

~~~
stickfigure
_Human errors are more likely, but they are fairly well understood and you can
safeguard yourself by putting more people higher up the stack checking
things._

This doesn't sound true to me. The worst man-made catastrophes seem to
frequently involve a human manually disabling some sort of critical safety
mechanism (eg, Chernobyl). You could look at _the checklist_ as a primitive
form of automation that helps precisely because it removes human judgement.

In theory, automation could encompass the knowledge of the finest experts in
the field. Humans get credit for being able to think flexibly and accommodate
information that maybe wasn't included in the original programming. But if
you're experiencing a six-sigma event that the system wasn't programmed for,
what is the chance that Joe Random Operator (completed a two-month training
certificate program) is going to be savvy enough to respond better?

~~~
kbenson
> The worst man-made catastrophes seem to frequently involve a human manually
> disabling some sort of critical safety mechanism (eg, Chernobyl).

But again, we're back to perverse incentives. Keeping the plant running was
more important than diagnosing and fixing any problems. If the people involved
were _first_ assessed by how well they found and fixed problems, and _then_ by
how much uptime the plant had, I'm confident it would have played out quite
differently.

There is a point to what you're saying though, and how it interacts with my
statement. Humans work based on _current_ incentives, while machines work
towards the goals their designers were incentivized towards at the time of
their creation. Keeping the former in good order over time is a harder task
than making sure the latter is correct at design time. That is, it's easy in
the design process to emphasize the cost of errors and try to account for
them, but humans managers, being more dynamic, sometimes allow perverse
incentives to change how a human workforce behaves accidentally. Human workers
are more versatile, but that versatile comes with downsides.

> In theory, automation could encompass the knowledge of the finest experts in
> the field

Which is why I qualified my statement with "until every mistake that can
happen is known and accounted for" and "allow for". The point is, how many
machines are operating in an environment where that's true, and we're actually
utilizing the information from all the experts correctly? Just taking into
consideration that the physical environments where machines run is often not
fully under control, I think it's actually rather small.

~~~
bluGill
In the case I'm thinking of the company wanted maximum profit - which meant
shutdown production when things failed, but continue until then. However there
was a cowboy attitude: the operators knew that "Bubba" was almost able to to
continue operation in a similar situation in the 1950s, and they think they
are better. The reality is that "Bubba failed, but the catastrophic explosion
was after 1 hour 20 minutes or some such thing, beating that record gives you
bragging rights in the lunch room.

~~~
kbenson
> In the case I'm thinking of the company wanted maximum profit - which meant
> shutdown production when things failed

Sure, and I don't dispute that things like this happen. I'm just saying that
the real problem here is "the company wanted maximum profit - which meant
shutdown production when things failed, but continue until then" portion.
Automation often doesn't allow this, not by design, but because it just _can
't_, because it's not versatile enough to work around it's fairly narrow
programming. Humans _can_ , and when they do and then there's a major failure,
that's not a problem of the human workers, or even entirely the problem of
middle management, but of the overall policies and incentives that allow or
promote such behavior.

That is, automation _is_ better at reducing errors, but I also think a lot
(but not all!) of what we attribute to automation reducing errors is also just
their inflexibility not allowing managers to go for short-term goals at the
expense of long-term goals. It's like a car that refuses to drive more than 5
miles without needing to shut down for a couple minutes after it's been 3,200
(for some leeway) miles since the last oil change. It would force people to
get oil changes more regularls, and while it would cost a little more for
those that put it off far longer than they should (me), it _saves money in the
long run_ through the problems it prevents (and gets detected early be people
looking under the hood). That doesn't mean people can't make sure to change it
on time without that extra problem, it's just that we're generally pretty bad
at quantifying risk, especially over longer time scales. That problem is
mitigated somewhat by multiple people and a policy, so it's not a personal
decision, which is why I think companies _can_ do much better with humans as
workers than they generally currently do, even if automation in the end yield
less errors (but at the cost of flexibility in the system).

------
gjkood
Informative article, but a picture is worth a thousand words. While I
appreciate the picture of a drill ship in the ocean, it would have been more
informative to see a single picture of one of these robots.

I guess since the focus of the article was the effect on related labor and not
on the technology itself, a picture was deemed irrelevant. But when the title
leads with 'Robots...' I want to see a picture of a robot.

You may ask why I can't just google them, but alas, I am too lazy to google
for the robot in question.

~~~
MaulingMonkey
You piqued my interest and I'm less lazy.

This seems to be the sales pitch for an unautomated version that seems to give
a good feel for what's going on:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBPiszqZnz4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBPiszqZnz4)

This looks to be one of the more automated versions:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5D4F3Vo4nzM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5D4F3Vo4nzM)

And this one of the more manual processes:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqLALzUft8Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqLALzUft8Y)

~~~
PeterisP
So it's less like robots doing stuff autonomously and more like larger
specialized power tools that can allow 1-2 people to run a process that used
to require 3-4 people.

~~~
MaulingMonkey
Mmm - it's a continuum. This one looks like it's entirely telepresence - the
only part that may be missing is the software to make it fully automatic, and
perhaps some of the sensors depending on where they've hidden the control
station (e.g. is some of it line-of-sight control):

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dvI8XMaRBJY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dvI8XMaRBJY)

------
cloudwizard
Those are very high paying jobs. It is very unlikely that the displaced
workers will make anywhere close to that.

~~~
porpoisemonkey
As I understand it the incentive to automate is to 1) reduce costs and to 2)
increase quality by standardizing the execution of complicated tasks.

If this is true then as a general rule automation is going to target jobs of
highly payed, semi-skilled workers. I think we can expect that these positions
will become scarcer and scarcer as automation technologies are adopted.

One area where there's a glut of highly paid and semi-skilled workers is
longshoremen (dock workers). I suspect that in the near future we'll be seeing
these jobs disappear as well.

[https://www.google.com/amp/www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-
do...](https://www.google.com/amp/www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-dockworker-
pay-20150301-story,amp.html?client=ms-android-google)

~~~
Gargoyle
Another area where there's a glut of highly paid and semi-skilled workers is
web developers. Whee!

~~~
porpoisemonkey
> Another area where there's a glut of highly paid and semi-skilled workers is
> web developers.

I'm not even sure that this stops at _web_ development.

It's my general feeling that in all software there's a small core of very
talented developers that are pushing the boundaries of the technology and an
army of semi-skilled developers that are building off of their labors and
backfilling functionality using the patterns established by the leading
developers. (Most notably in the "quality assurance" teams of some large
software firms.)

Over time I expect that artificial intelligence and more intelligent tooling
will eliminate many of these "backfill" positions. I'm not sure what happens
when this occurs as it would seem that survival of the fittest might leave
many software developers unemployable (myself included).

~~~
Eridrus
To some extent, the idea of frameworks and open source components is pretty
much automation targeting web developers.

WYSIWIG dev tools are pretty much the end point to this, but they never let
you connect to data, so maybe Tableu is essentially the WYSIWIG for now.

------
ghaff
I watched Deepwater Horizon on the plane the other day. As someone who
designed systems for offshore drilling rigs in the early eighties but haven't
stayed up on the tech there much, I was impressed at the amount of electronics
and what appeared to be more automated handling of drill pipe.

That said, it was also interesting that the basic mechanics of drilling an
offshore well weren't really all _that_ different from what I was used to.

------
ProAm
"Sell shovels during a gold rush" has always been a true statement.

~~~
elastic_church
thats why we're all _here_ right? I mean and passion for someone else's idea
of course

------
kin
Kind of a tangent point but I really wonder how our society intends to solve
the problem of automation replacing high paying skilled workers. Is education
and relocation the only answer?

------
noobermin
Random question, automation is inevitable without major changes to the current
political/economic system (like BIG), but is one possible development is as
the price of labor and setting up machines decrease, a larger number of
plants/mines/drills could be opened, is this a possible development?

If such a development were to occur, of course, I personally would be in favor
of environmentally conscious regulations.

~~~
pizzetta
I don't know much about this industry --as in I know nothing, but I think some
of the costly parts are "exploration rights" as well as regulatory hurdles and
costs. If you own some land with mineral rights, then you can do some of this
but if you don't have land then obtaining that land and getting permission to
explore is not a trivial task, I think.

~~~
noobermin
I see, so the regulatory hurdles to even get started are more of an expense
than labor and equipment?

~~~
cyrks
No. For offshore, the major expense for the driller is in the drilling rig or
drillship which can cost upwards of $1B. For the operating company, it is the
dayrate that the driller charges the operator which can be from $75k/day to
$450k/day. Onshore rates are <$20k/day currently for Tier 1 rigs.

The offshore leases are expensive, but in the economic models they are not the
primary driver of costs associated with the project. Same goes for onshore,
but with less cost for the land rights and fewer regulatory hurdles.

[https://www.ihs.com/products/oil-gas-drilling-rigs-
offshore-...](https://www.ihs.com/products/oil-gas-drilling-rigs-offshore-day-
rates.html)

[https://rigdata.com/rigdata-
insights/blogpost?BlogName=plumm...](https://rigdata.com/rigdata-
insights/blogpost?BlogName=plummeting-land-rig-day-rates-eased-their-decline-
rate-in-january)

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chinathrow
With all this tech around, I realize that putting up a few solar pannels is so
much easier and safer.

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jamespitts
So will President Trump regulate or otherwise curtail the automation economy?
His voter base would probably like him to.

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screwston
This isn't great news for those who care about global warming, nothing drives
cleaner fuel technologies better than high hydrocarbon prices.

~~~
vkou
This isn't great news for those who 'don't care' about global warming - people
hungry for fossil fuel jobs, either.

~~~
Eridrus
It's becoming less and less obvious that anyone in a position of power
advocating for fossil fuel energy actually cares about the jobs.

~~~
pm90
It was always rather transparent that the "jobs" angle was a play by big oil
to stoke populism for an objectively unpopular agenda (i.e. more drilling,
extraction pollution). Once automation removes the need for low skilled
laborers I would think this tactic would not be available anymore (but who
knows, in this era of alternative facts).

~~~
cestith
Lots of jobs in gas and oil are very highly skilled jobs. Automating the stuff
that's high paying because it's risky, dirty, and far from the workers' homes
will increase pay imbalances as the software developers, automation folks,
sysadmins, robotics engineers, mechanical engineers, petroleum engineers,
geologists, executives, et al will continue to get their pay and probably more
while anyone automated away who doesn't retrain will make far less in another
role.

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RichardHeart
After watching "Deepwater Horizon" The more robots can replace people dying on
dangerous jobs, the better.

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chrisbrandow
a more compelling graph would have been jobs/rig. The drop in jobs sure looks
like it approximately matches rig demand with a 3-6 month lag.

I am sure robots will replace a lot of these jobs, but I don't see this
article providing much evidence that it is happening substantially.

~~~
cyrks
Because of the direct correlation with # of rigs, the job loss will be linear
with the loss of # rigs. However, the current situation is that each rig that
is still working is getting more efficient and productive on a daily basis. So
much so now, that there are fewer rigs coming online to produce the same
amount of oil that we had before the drop in oil prices. This is where the job
loss will be. Some of it is due to automation, but most of it is due to the
efficiency gains in the drilling and completion process itself.

[http://www.otterwoodcapital.com/static/media/uploads/2016/03...](http://www.otterwoodcapital.com/static/media/uploads/2016/03/oil_production.png)

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pmyjavec
Shouldn't the whole "oil rig" thing be going away?

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ajankelo
This is an epic thread.

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mt3ck
Where are my clever Hackers references at?

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sctb
We've updated the link from [http://gcaptain.com/robots-taking-oil-rigs-
roughnecks-become...](http://gcaptain.com/robots-taking-oil-rigs-roughnecks-
become-expendable), which refers to this.

