Tuesday, 26 August, 2025 / Edition 73

Like any health-conscious American, I work to make sure I get enough protein in my life. Often, that included mixing some vanilla protein together to go in my coffee, but sometimes I just want coffee, unadulterated (ish…decaf, cream, and creatine). Those mornings, I reach for an unusual solution: cocktail shrimp. Guys. Give it a try. No cooking. High protein. Goes surprisingly well with sourdough toast. I’ll allow you to sing my praises after you try it.

My willingness to look beyond “breakfast” food for this daily meal helped me find something I’ve now mixed in as routine. As we’ve seen with oil and gas tech, integrating algorithms into our daily workflows is no longer novel (though I suppose we could argue it never was) but routine. This week, I go over the ways frac is continuing its march towards full automation, as well as one company who is flipping pressurized hydro storage on its head. Let’s dig in!

Sarah Compton

Editor, Enspired

What Goes Down Must Come…Up?

Funkjoker23/Wikimedia

Charging up: The need for long-term energy storage cannot be understated, even without considering the shift to intermittent energy sources like wind and solar.

Blackouts stink: Nearly everyone reading this newsletter has experienced power outages at some time or another, potentially within the last year, due to storms, flooding, or some other natural event.

Get used to it: As climate shifts continue, such events are expected to only increase in frequency, meaning backup — or stored — energy could become a key player in the future energy mix.

The most popular form of stored energy in the US is pumped hydro storage, where a reservoir placed at a higher elevation drains into a lower reservoir through a turbine, generating electricity in times of need.

The upper reservoir is then refilled during times of power abundance from the lower reservoir through pumps.

We need a hero: A company called Quidnet is turning that traditional model of hydro storage on its head by using the ground as the storage location in what it calls geomechanical energy storage.

• Water is kept at the surface in a retention pond.

• When there is a surplus of energy, some of it is used to pump water down a well where it’s held under pressure.

• The well is shut-in, and when electricity is needed, the well is opened up, and that pressurized water runs through a turbine to generate electricity and return to the retention pond.

Overcoming hurdles: In June this year, the company passed a milestone by completing a 35 MWh discharge test after storing their water in the subsurface for six months with no loss.

Oil and gas experience at work: Quidnet’s leadership team includes oil and gas engineers, and as an oil and gas geoscientist, I see a lot of potential, but also have some questions.

This article from 2022 highlights Quidnet and talks about the lenses they form underground to store their water in.

Oh so tactful: One of the company’s former leaders, Scott Wright, put it in terms with typical oilfield pizazz: “I say whoopee cushion and people don’t like it,” but based on the concept, whoopee cushion sounds spot on.

So many questions: I see some downfalls here like protecting aquifers, especially if this tech requires fracking into the shallow sections. I also have a lot of questions around maintaining the pressure required over the potential lengths of time (i.e., potentially years).

The pressure is on: Granted, the test in June proved it’s possible to keep a shut-in well pressured up over time. But if keeping shut-in wells pressured up and ready to flow were such an easy task, half the production crew in the oilfield would be out of work.

How to scale: There’s also the question of how this tech performs once other wells are drilled to accomplish the same task, and what happens to neighboring wells if/when they all get turned on at once, as they would if the power went out across a region.

Still, I think this tech shows some amount of promise and could use some geoscience input on many things, including protecting aquifers and determining which reservoirs are best.

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Frac Bots, Coming to a Field Near You

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All aboard! Automating operations has been little more than an oncoming train for some, but for others, it has been a light at the end of the tunnel.

Automation de-risks so much of operations by increasing consistency, removing humans from hazardous environments, and never getting decision fatigue.

Slow and steady: Fracking operations have been slowly working their way towards automation for years, adding conditional automatic valve openings here, setting various sequences and their bounds there.

Love some combos: ProFrac and Seismos, though, are stepping up that game by combining their powers to deliver a real-time quality control system that can enable fully automated Closed Loop Fracturing.

Bring in the subsurface: ProFrac had already started to automate its surface operations with its ProPilot product, but adding in Seismos’s subsurface tools and skillset will let their customers take automation to a new level.

Matt Wilks, Executive Chairman of ProFrac, had this to say, "...we're delivering more control to operators through dynamic completion design that optimizes hydrocarbon recovery…Seismos [will be] acting as an independent auditor of downhole performance."

The system has modes that are both supervised and unsupervised.

• Supervised mode delivers engineers and completions teams real-time, validated subsurface data which allows them to make any changes they need to on the fly in a timely manner.

• Unsupervised mode involves handing the reins over to the system, sort of, by allowing it to execute a set of pre-defined actions based on real-time conditions, so some operations can be executed without human intervention.

Fresh look: Supervised mode sounds like, to me, how frac has been done before. Jobs are executed with real-time pressure and other downhole information streamed into the frac van or maybe offsite where completions engineers might make decisions based on the data.

I suppose adding in seismos gives some more downhole geologic information about the formation response to the job, but this sounds like things most frac jobs have onsite anyway.

The unsupervised part is something a lot of operators are stepping into, and being able to support the journey is only good for ProFrac and Seismos.

Simon says: Many operators don’t like the idea of handing their operations over to a machine, but they’re a lot more comfortable walking through various scenarios, giving guardrails, and lining up a set of common-sense instructions for a machine to execute given various conditions.

I suppose I would consider “supervised” mode a bit more of “business as usual with extra data” mode (not great for marketing, I suppose) and “unsupervised” mode as “supervised,” at least as I’ve understood learning models for AI.

Becoming more available: Marketing and names aside, it’s no longer just the big guys like HAL or LOS that are looking to offer semi-autonomous frac operations.

As geoscientists, we’re unlikely to be programming frac bots anytime soon. But our data and information should inform some of the conditions and instructions they receive, which means you might have to have some conversations with your frac engineers before they go off and program these things without input from us.

To learn more about ProFrac and Seismos’s partnership, go here.

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