eserorg's comments

I started my own oil company. I'm 27. See: http://www.eser.org

Stats:

* There are thousands of independent oil and gas producers in the United States.

* Independent producers develop 90 percent of domestic oil and gas wells, produce 68 percent of domestic oil and produce 82 percent of domestic natural gas.

* Most independents have fewer than 20 employees.

See the "Independent Petroleum Association of America": http://www.ipaa.org

* Eric Schmidt gave a presentation at the Computer History Museum in 2001 on lessons learned through his experiences in the technology industry.

* The Computer History Museum talk is called "Unwinnable Wars: Personal Persepctives on Technology Leadership" and can be accessed through Google Video

Notes from the talk:

"Lessons Learned":

1. Against A Fast Competitor, A Cloning Strategy Doesn't Work

* For instance, Sun's attempt to develop a Win32 API Clone called WABI failed

2. There will always be an open source choice

3. Consortia don't work

4. There will always be a Microsoft or IBM, etc...

5. Multi-software unification doesn't work (license conflicts, etc...)

6. Your strategy should be complete market domination. Because if you don't, someone else will. There will always be unitary choice at every control point.

Strategies That Work:

1. Low-cost proprietary (Dell, Ebay, Microsoft)

ok. I removed that feature.

This is actually the second version of the same idea -- "an oil and gas search engine".

The first version was called "Hydrocarbon Search": http://hydrocarbon.search.eser.org/

By including delicious-like hierarchical tags, the second version became much more useful.

Problem was, there was no business model.

So, I'm working on the third version now -- its designed to run on the yet-to-be-released GPS-enabled iPad.

So, you can take it out into the field and have it tell you about nearby oil wells, seismic surveys, leaseholds, remote sensing data, surface linears, offshore oil and gas blocks (if you are on a boat, for example), etc...

It's going to be pretty sweet. The business model is to charge for each region seperately: north texas, west texas, east texas, colorado, offshore shallow gulf of mexico, offshore deep-water gulf of mexico, north sea, australia, etc...

And since the data changes daily, it will be a subscription service.

Hopefully, third time is a charm

We implemented hierarchical tags for our oil and gas search engine, having been inspired by delicious: http://www.resourceplay.com

Hierarchical tagging has tremendous practical utility for sifting through large volumes of data.

Pre-Market U.S. Stock Futures: http://money.cnn.com/data/premarket/

This is essentially a solid-state microturbine.

You can order a 65-kW microturbine from Capstone Turbine Corp for about $40,000 USD.

Natgas-powered microturbines have commonly been used for distributed power generation in industrial settings (hotels, hospitals, etc...)

See Ingersoll Rand: http://www.ingersollrandproducts.com/IS/Category.aspx-am_en-...

See Captsone Turbine Corp: http://www.microturbine.com/prodsol/solutions/chp.asp

Try Googling for "microturbine".

[edit] Also, "Microturbines: Applications for Distributed Energy Systems" is a good book on the subject. Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Microturbines-Applications-Distributed...

"Raw materials only drive economies when they are relatively small economies that can hitch themselves on larger consumer spending economies that are booming"

The United States' consumer-led economy isn't "booming".

"The problem with global recessions is that demand for everything tanks and that includes raw materials."

Have you checked the price of gold and oil recently? Those definitely _are_ booming :-)

"The so called "voracious appetite" of China is only voracious because they use it to feed the voracious appetite of America for consumer goods. If Americans keep getting poorer that appetite of China will no longer be voracious and raw materials prices will keep falling."

China's economy is expected to grow 8.3% this year, and raw materials prices are soaring. Believe me, I know :)

The only thing that's falling is the consumer-sector of the economy. The US economy is bifrucating between core industries and the consumer sector.

I think it's reasonable to expect that the consumer side of the US economy will contract dramatically from the 70% of economic activity that it currently represents -- it has to come more in-line with the rest of the world.

It's a fallacy to think that the consumer has to drive economic growth -- that's been a phenomenon unique to the US since WWII.

"Coal is too expensive to transport for export". Seriously?

The United States exports over 60 million tons of coal each year.

"Good luck basing our economy on coal."

China is building one new coal fired power plant each week. The OECD projects China's economy to grow 8.3% this year -- while the rest of the world is mired in a recession. China's entire economy is based on coal.

Warren buffet just bet the entire future of Berkshire Hathaway, his life's work, on coal -- BNSF is the prime mover of US coal exports to China.

You really have no clue about hydrocarbons.

Re: "Nobody disputes that including coal the US has the most carbohydrates."

Carbohydrates are what you eat for breakfast.

Column #3 on Table 6, page 23 is the sum of: proved hydrocarbon reserves (from table #5) + undiscovered hydrocarbon reserves in BOE.

Table 6, page 23:

"Reserves of Fossil Fuels Plus Technically Recoverable Undiscovered Oil and Natural Gas:" ---

Russia: 293.7 ---

Saudi Arabia Estimated Undiscovered Oil and Gas: 231.3 ---

United States Undiscovered Oil and Gas: 351.5 ---

351.5 > 293.7 > 231.3

Regardless, I'm putting my life where my mouth is. I started my own oil and natural gas exploration and production company in Denver.

I've also spun off a second company, a mineral royalties company, that is focused on the acquisition and divestiture of North American mineral rights in producing open-pit mines.

And finally, I've started a third US natural resources company, SonicFrac, to develop a solid-state fracturing device for optimizing the production of US Shale gas wells.

I also invest every last penny that I take home back into US mineral rights, US oil and gas prospects, and US minining royalties.

I own stock in dozens of publicly traded oil, gas, mining, and resource development companies.

Natural resources are the first thing I think about when I wakeup in the morning, and the last thing I think about when I go to bed at night.

I'm 26.

Perhaps I'm irrationally optimistic about US resource wealth...

I don't believe that I am.

But, you _need_ to be irrationally passionate about what you do. Whatever it is.

If you're running a consumer internet company, and are not irrationally passionate about its future, I doubt you could persevere through the trials and tribulations of being an entrepreneur.

I am a US natural resources entrepreneur. And I am zealous about what I do. You should be, too.

The United States has tens of trillions of dollars of mineral wealth (oil, natural gas, tungsten, gold, silver, copper, molly, palladium, rhodium, scandium, yttrium, bastnaesite, etc...) trapped in the ground by a gordion knot of government regulations and bureaucracy.

By fully exploiting this mineral wealth, the US could not only pay off its entire national debt, but also generate trillions of dollars of surplus tax revenue, pay for universal health care, cut taxes, eliminate the federal income tax, and create tens of millions of American jobs.

Interesting Fact: The United States has more oil and natural gas than any other country in the entire world, including Saudi Arabia. These are the official findings of the United States Senate, page 23: http://j.mp/3HIfQi

We could more than offset our trade deficit with China by feeding their voracious appetite for natural resources.

Another interesting fact: if Nevada were a country, it would be the world's 4th largest producer of Gold.

On a per-capita basis, the United States is sitting on a mind numbingly huge resource of untapped mineral wealth.

We could literally dig out way out of debt.

Sweet!

I'm hacking together a perl script right now using the Mechanical Turk API.

It's automatically spliting up the mp3 files, generating the html forms, and loading them into MTurk.

I'm going to use a 2x coverage for each chunk and see what happens.

This is a brilliant idea. Thank you for the suggestion! I can't believe it didn't occur to me before -- and we are _very_ heavy users of AWS.

Why on earth would anyone pre-announce end-of-life for a product before you've released its successor?

You would have to be a complete idiot now to sign up for Quicken online. Intuit has just completely destroyed an entire revenue stream.

Freight rail efficiency is measured in "labor-cost-per-revenue-ton-mile".

The cost of trucking is dominated by the fuel-cost-per-ton-mile.

Whereas the cost of moving 1 ton of goods over rail is dominated by the cost of labor, the cost of moving 1 ton of goods via truck is dominated by the cost of fuel.

In point of fact, rail freight gets ~436 ton miles per gallon.

The only mode of transport that gets more ton-miles-per-gallon is water transport (DSO, dry bulk shipping, oil and gas tankers, panamax, river barges, etc...)

The edge case is liquid and gaseous hydrocarbons, which can be transported via pipeline. It's no surprise that Buffet has been buying up oil and gas pipelines over the past several years.

The only catch here is that waterway transport inside the United States has sub-optimal efficiency due to the Jones Act.

I can speak to the value of multivariate optimization in the oil and gas business.

Specifically, the U.S. onshore natural gas business is currently focused on what are called shale gas "resource plays". These are large contiguous blocks of acreage -- hundreds of thousands of acres -- over which thousands of wells are drilled one-after-another, in a manufacturing process. What makes this possible is a large, contiguous, underlying resource of natural gas reserves, trapped in tight rocks.

The key to profitably exploiting these resource plays is finding the right "formula" that can be repetitively applied to drilling and completing each well. There is no time to individually sit down and engineer each well. All you can do is analyze the data after the fact.

The profitability of each gas well is influenced by hundreds of variables. For instance, you have to "fracture stimulate" a gas well using a variable combination of hundreds of chemicals, each in a varying volume, with a variable pressure, to a variable depth. The well itself may have a variable number of frac stages, with a variable number of horizontal lateral wells connecting it to the reservoir, with a variable length for each lateral.

The question you have to answer is: given thousands of data points over thousands of individual wells, what is the most profitable "formula" for drilling a well in a particular resource play? Profitability is defined as the present value of the discounted future cash flow of the well using a discount rate of 10% -- you'll hear people talk about "the PV10". You know how each well has performed after it was drilled, you know what its profitability was, and you know what formula was applied to drill and to complete it. And you have this data for hundreds of wells -- each using a different combination of variables. And there's new data added every day.

There is a _lot_ of money riding on the right answer to this question.

There is a _massive_ amount of data in the oil and gas business. And every year there are entirely new classes of data being generated. 2D seismic, then 3D seismic, then microseismic, completion data, well logs, magnetic, gravity, surface linears, etc...

It's not surprising that one of the largest customers to the supercomputing industry -- after defense -- is the oil and gas business.

One trick here is that this data is usually locked up inside proprietary databases shared amongst companies in different industry consortia. So, you really have to be a player in the business to have access to the data -- that doesn't mean that you have any clue how to analyze it, however.

And there are big QA problems with this data, too. So, you have to deal with that as well.

If you are young, energetic, and college-educated with a solid background in an engineering discipline, there are jobs for the taking in the oil business.

The average age of an employee at an oil and gas E&P (exploration and production) company in 2009 is 55 years old. These are highly prized employees with experience and knowledge that is in short supply in the industry.

Over the next 25 years (through 2035), the global hydrocarbons industry is estimated to invest 22 TRILLION dollars of capital (2009 USD) to meet what is expected to be a doubling of world energy demand.

Do the math.

Computer scientists, chemical engineers, geophysicists, mechanical engineers, biologists, petroleum engineers, etc... It doesn't matter. You would be surprised at the voracious appetite of the global hydrocarbons industry for new technology and talent.

I'm obviously biased, being in the business myself. But, the next time you're at a college engineering job fair, spend a few minutes at the booths of the E&P companies. You may be intrigued.

There's no business like the oil business.

You're absolutely right.

I hacked up a prototype last night that creates a reverse index of:

tags => item GUID's => a precomputed bloom filter for all tags in that GUID

Each tag has its own reverse-index, which is stored in a separate file assembled using O_APPEND. The entries in each file are pre-sorted based on a predefined ranking algorithm.

Queries are mapped to cluster nodes using a CRC32 hash modulo across the number of cluster nodes.

Tag conjunction queries are run by computing a bloom filter for the tags in the query. The tag with the fewest GUID's is determined (approximately) through a LUT stored in main-memory. The query bloom filter is then sequentially compared using a bitwise-and with each of the bloom filters in the appropriate reverse-index file.

After 10 matches are found, the results are rendered.

No check is done for false positives.

The problem I'm having now is in prepending new entries to the start of a reverse-index file. This operation is not performant. Since it's out-of-band with the query stream, it's tolerable for the time being.

That would be very interesting to read.

We're looking at implementing a tagging system for navigating through a large proprietary datastore of oil and gas well data.

The problem we're running into is scaling conjunction queries without blowing-out our hardware budget -- 100's of tags per item with tens of millions of items, updated daily.

Ask me in 20 years.