Analytics and radios

Jan. 15, 2018
Full disclosure: This writer treasures his transistor radio. His fondness for the low-fidelity innovation of yesteryear colors what follows.

Full disclosure: This writer treasures his transistor radio. His fondness for the low-fidelity innovation of yesteryear colors what follows.

Younger colleagues chuckle when the writer speaks of enjoying a Rockets or Astros game while walking the dog, leash in one hand, Sony with analog tuning in the other, heroics by the likes of James Harden or Jose Altuve reported excitedly into the tangible air of a Houston night for anyone to hear.

The phone?

“Don’t you know you can listen on your smart phone?” they ask.

“Yes, I do,” the writer responds knowingly. “But the Sony comes to life when I switch it on, with no wait while a circle swirls on a screen labeled ‘buffering,’ whatever that is, and no jarring pauses in the audio when Altuve’s batting with bases loaded.”

“Don’t you use ear buds?” they ask.

“And not be able to hear cicadas in the trees or airliners in the sky or wide-body pickups careening through the neighborhood as though nobody ever walks his dog there?”

They roll their eyes then, these youngsters to whom ear buds represent pinnacles of civilization.

So much for context. The subject is analytics.

It’s changing everything. This writer will repeat what he has written nearby before: that future supplies of oil and gas nowadays depend dominantly on knowledge and know-how and that modern analytical methods leverage knowledge.

The implication for future oil supply is profound, when you think about it. For that reason, Oil & Gas Journal ran a special report on analytics last year and plans two more this year.

Yet the question occasionally arises: How, exactly, do analytical methods help oil and gas professionals?

Well, let’s see: They improve decision-making by helping decision-makers spot patterns and identify relationships.

Huh?

Thank Chesapeake Energy for providing more-useful specificity on this subject. In a corporate presentation, the company says big-data analytics helps it improve frac-fluid analysis, proppant loading, perf-cluster spacing, reservoir characterization, choke management, lateral-length efficiency, and formation targeting.

Those, of course, are operational enhancements producers cite when explaining how they lower drilling and completion costs, raise ultimate recoveries, and otherwise optimize development of hydrocarbon resources in shales and other difficult but lavishly charged reservoirs.

In the oil and gas business, analytics is a big deal—downstream as much as upstream.

Yet even big deals have limits.

Analytics at the personal level can be creepy.

This writer now receives an unsolicited, weekly, data-rich report generated, obviously, by yet another clever program created by twenty-something code-writers at one of those control-everything software manufacturers.

Covered are e-mail hours, meeting hours, focus hours (whatever that means), e-mail read within 30 min of receipt, and “top collaborators.”

How did humanity survive before people received such enthralling feedback? All that’s missing from this formula for life-by-the-numbers is hours spent wishing for an accounting of hours spent on activities categorized anonymously by someone else.

The answer, however, is at hand: zero.

This writer knows full well that he spends too bloody much time writing e-mails instead of news and analysis and doesn’t need numbers excreted by an algorithm to press the point.

Yet answering e-mails is part of the job. Does the algorithm know anything about the job?

“This data is for you, and only you can see it,” purrs an assuring message in the weekly report.

Baloney. Everyone knows anything online can be accessed by anyone who really wants it and knows how to write code. Ask Hillary Clinton.

Can data from a mechanism asserting such a whopper be trusted? Can there be fake analytics?

Analytics will happen

This all feels like somebody borrowing your socks without asking and returning them unwashed.

Inevitably, analytics will happen because it can happen. It will happen where it helps more than even it can measure. And it will happen where it helps little and is wanted even less.

Now the dog needs his walk. Where’s the radio?