[athollywood]

The oil and gas industry is ripe with potential start ups. Here are a few that come to mind:

1. A better system for automation and measurement. Current solutions aren't ideal when it comes to setting up new systems as well as updating and maintaining existing systems. We build several million dollar facilities a month and each one has automation and measurement equipment that has to be individually set up and programmed. Each technician does things a slightly different way, and the end result is a different set of automation and measurement logic at each facility.

2) Fiber optic DATS (distributed acoustic and temperature sensing) data handling and interpretation. This is a fairly new type of technology in which a fiber optic line is installed in the wellbore. The fiber optic line basically acts as a 15,000' strand of thermometers and microphones placed every 3'. The data from one installation is on the order of terabytes per hour. Oil and gas service companies that offer this service don't know how to handle this amount of data. The problem could probably be solved with S3 or something.

3) Drilling optimization. Create a software suite that utilizes ML/AI to help drilling engineers figure out the best way to drill a well is. It's a perfect ML/AI application. Lots and lots of training data available, easily defined input and output parameters, etc. Drilling engineering is full of hard, non-linear problems and humans are just really bad at it. The only way to be good at it is to drill lots and lots of wells and then listen to your gut.

[kozikow]

Any more insights about applying drones to 1? I work on deep learning for aierial imagery startup (tensorflight.com). It seems like we could structure some information from drone images.

If you are interested in helping us understand the problem and potentially solve it together contact me at [e-mail]

[ommunist]

Are you looking to develop applications in forest inventory?

[kozikow]

Yes, our current application is focused on Orchards, but we are planning to enter forestry as well.

[j15t]

Hi, would you happen to have any additional information on #3? (links to companies that require these services and/or industry reports)?

I am work with technology that might be useful for this type of application. Thanks!

[athollywood]

I guess I'll explain how the business side of drilling a well works. An operator (think Chevron) will decide where and when the well is drilled. They will then hire a drilling company (say H&P) that owns and operates rigs to drill the well. Even though the drilling company operates the rig, they basically drill it however the operator ask them too.

So to answer your question, any operator requires these services, though most dont know it. A company called Pason is the leading company in the drilling data industry. Their bread and butter is just data measurement and streaming, though they recently have entered the analytics space. Their technology seems pretty promising.

[pbnjay]

Are you in this industry? Where could I learn more about #2? Sounds like something up my alley...

[athollywood]

I am. Google "fiber optic DAS" and you will find quite a lot.

http://www.aogr.com/magazine/cover-story/fiber-optic-sensors...

[pbnjay]

Yeah I found a few articles but not a whole lot of specifics. You're suggesting something like this box? http://www.optasense.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/FiberOpt...

I feel like it'd be really hard to break into this field without some data to play with. Catch-22...

If you have access/desire to share some data like this I'd love to chat more (email in bio). Sounds like an interesting problem.

[athollywood]

All of our data is proprietary unfortunately. This leads to another start up idea: a data consortium company for this type of work. I don't think we would mind giving the data up if there was a legitimate way to do so and if there was some benefit for us (I.e. advancing the rate of progress in this field).

[pbnjay]

Interesting. I'm actually part of a agricultural genomics data consortium with similar concept (companies contribute $$ and data in exchange for licensing rights to research results).

[tacon]

@athollywood Are you available for offline discussions? Maybe you could put some contact info in the public section of your profile. Feel free to email me: [e-mail]

[DHaldane]

I might have a pretty killer solution to #1. Could you answer some followup questions? My email is in my profile if you want to reach out.

[tea_merchant]

@athollywood, I work in Energy research, is there an email I could reach you on?