Tuesday, 22 April, 2025 / Edition 55

We are almost a third of the way through this year! Colorado cycled through all four seasons in one day this past weekend, and we are back to pleasant spring weather while the snow melts 😎 With any luck, it’ll be the last, or nearly the last, snow until fall.

This week, I go over a few of the challenges batteries still face if they hope to replace fuel in more industrial settings, such as aviation and marine shipping. I also go over some more details about AI and where/how it fits best into our industry. Let’s dig in!

Sarah Compton

Editor, Enspired

Battery Challenges Present Opportunities

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With compelling graphs and numerical analysis, this blog by investor and founder of engineer recruiting company EngineerSF Kumar Thangudu presents some hard realities that lithium batteries face if they’re going to move beyond land transport. Here are some of his key points.

Challenges that weigh heavy: Firstly, batteries are heavy and don’t put out as much power per kilogram as conventional liquid fuels. The effects of this fact depend on the vehicle housing the battery.

• In automobiles, more weight results in longer stopping distances, greater wear on tires and the road, and potentially worse accidents because of increased momentum.

• In airplanes, more weight can result in significant performance reductions. Read that as airplanes falling out of the sky as the worst case, with the more likely outcome meaning reduced flight distances.

Why it matters: Reduced distances might be okay if there’s a fast turn-around time, but charging batteries takes significantly longer than filling a gas tank, so overall trip time increases.

• In automobiles, these shortcomings are usually tolerated: Customers use electric vehicles for short, daily commutes rather than long family road trips.

• But marine and air travel are sort of the epitome of long family trips, so decreased travel time and increased wait times are huge barriers.

And that’s without factoring in weather conditions.

• Cold weather can reduce range by nearly 35 percent, and high altitudes can drop the range around 20 percent—both are factors that planes encounter regularly.

• High humidity can also drop performance by about 15 percent.

What’s next: These realities aren’t calls to stop development, but they provide pain points which could spark innovation.

Steps forward include many opportunities for geoscientists:

• Finding breakthroughs in material science to improve battery density

• Improving grid carbon intensity so we’re not simply exchanging carbon output location (e.g. charging an electric car in an area that gets most of its electricity from coal can actually result in greater CO2 emission than a diesel vehicle)

• Improving charging times to be competitive with fueling times, and improving the economics around battery disposal, both in terms of financial handling costs and environmental impact

A message from AAPG Academy and The University of Oklahoma

Join AAPG Academy and experts David Curtiss and Shangyou Nie for a free webinar on 24 April that will explore the current state of the upstream energy market, including recent trends and their effects on the workforce. 

Nie will analyze the following five trends, then Curtiss will provide his perspective on the impacts each trend could have on the oil and gas workforce:

1. A global refocus on the core businesses of oil and gas
2. The growing importance of gas for future energy and LNG opportunities domestically and internationally
3. A resurgence of exploration, powered by AI
4. Increased attention on geothermal
5. The resurgence of the Middle East in the near and mid-term

The presentation will close with an extended Q&A, offering a chance for personalized advice and insights from Curtiss and Nie.

Leveraging AI to Cover Our Weaknesses

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Despite the ongoing media fanfare on the subject, many people feel they’re lacking in the nitty gritty details of exactly how and when to use AI. One of the biggest questions that faces anyone deploying the new tech is: Should I use AI to replace an entire human role? Or should I use it as a supplement or complement to tasks done by workers?

I would argue that the sweet spot lies in learning to use AI to augment, not supplant, a workflow. Perhaps the clearest guidance I’ve seen is from this article in the WSJ, entitled “Why AI Might Not Take All Our Jobs, if we Act Quickly.”

Capitalizing on strengths: The article drove home the idea of using AI and ML to help us with skills at which we don’t excel, to leave room for the tasks we enjoy and specialize in. To do this, we have to understand what we need to prioritize and optimize.

Potential shortcomings: AI is much better than us at working with data, but it doesn’t see anything outside of the data.

Examples include:

• Auto-picked tops that run amok because all they’re doing is looking for patterns. It’s up to us to understand where we expect a top to be and why.

• ML-driven seismic interpretations can speed up the process considerably, but without an understood geologic structural framework to operate in, anything goes and results can be misleading.

So, given a set of business constraints, market information, and operational constraints, an AI that has production, geologic, and operational histories of basins in the United States could help direct a company’s exploration efforts.

That makes intuitive sense, and we have to cut through the hyperbole around AI to see that’s been the punchline from the beginning.

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✉️ To get in touch with Sarah or suggest a topic for Enspired, send an email to editorial@aapg.org.