Robots Are Taking Over Oil Rigs
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?