Evolve: Disrupting well forecasting and cash flow analysis

‘There are so many pieces of the workflow that need to be fixed’

Armand Paradis joins Jake Corley at Evolve (Photo: FreightWaves)

This fireside chat recap is from Evolve: The Next Generation of Oil & Gas, a virtual summit presented by Digital Wildcatters and FreightWaves.

FIRESIDE CHAT TOPIC: Workflow automation in oil production forecasting and reserves estimations.

DETAILS: A look at the ways automation is removing manual workflows and changing forecasting and cash flow analysis in the oil and gas industry.

INTERVIEWER and SPEAKER: Jake Corley, co-founder of Digital Wildcatters, a content platform in the oil and gas industry, and Armand Paradis, CEO and founder of Inside Petroleum.

BIO: Paradis has 12 years of experience in reservoir engineering and programming. He founded Inside Petroleum to revolutionize workflow processes in oil production forecasting and reserves estimations.

KEY QUOTES FROM PARADIS:

On the inbound requests for workflow automation: “Everyone wants to make decisions. They don’t want to come here and just clean up stuff and let me go ahead and copy from here to here. Everybody is just constantly asking for more, more, more capabilities. A lot of those old technologies haven’t been kept up with today’s demand.”

On the need for human involvement when running an exploration and production system: “It’s just impossible because it’s very complicated. This means that this … cannot be replaced by machine — no way, it’s just impossible. At the end of the day, if you make your tools more and more sophisticated, more capabilities, there’s so many different ways to get to different answers or even the same answers. That’s why the judgment, all of this comes into play, experience comes into play.”

On talking with users before developing a technology: “That’s one of the biggest mistakes that a lot of other technology companies have made. They have a vision about what they want to do but that vision is only their vision. You have to talk to your potential users. You need to know what they want. Those are the people who are important, those are the people that are going to adopt your technology. We don’t see anybody as an actual client, we see them as a partner.”

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Todd Maiden

Based in Richmond, VA, Todd is the finance editor at FreightWaves. Prior to joining FreightWaves, he covered the TLs, LTLs, railroads and brokers for RBC Capital Markets and BB&T Capital Markets. Todd began his career in banking and finance before moving over to transportation equity research where he provided stock recommendations for publicly traded transportation companies.