Writing from the field

Notes on petroleum engineering, uncertainty, and building agent-native workflows — the thinking behind the tools.

• 1 APRIL 2026 Buy vs Build in the Age of AI In the age of AI, the hardest part of buy versus build is no longer building.
• 8 MARCH 2026 Production Deferral Tracking: The Pinnacle of Production Operations Excellence Every E&P company tracked production losses in some form. Whether it is called deferral tracking, loss accounting, or forecast versus actual variance analysis, the intent is…
• 18 FEBRUARY 2026 The White Knight of PNG Oil and Gas Sector I had no real idea what Papua New Guinea would be like.
• 7 FEBRUARY 2026 Timor Sea: Where Australia Learned to Produce Oil Offshore and a $40 Billion Resource Waited 51 Years In 1983, Broken Hill Propriety company (aka BHP) drilled an exploration well called Jabiru 1 in the Timor Sea, 640 kms northwest of Darwin.
• 2 FEBRUARY 2026 Foam and Emulsion - Two Sides of the Same Coin If you have spent any time in production operations, you have lived this moment.
• 13 JANUARY 2026 The Digital Petroleum Engineer: Why Domain Expertise Changes Everything in Agile The Digital Petroleum Engineer: Why Domain Expertise Changed Everything
• 3 JANUARY 2026 Critical Velocity in Oil and Gas: One Phrase, Many Meanings One Phrase, Different Meanings and Why It Keeps Causing Bad Decisions
• 15 DECEMBER 2025 Your Compressor Is Talking. Are You Listening? Thunderous noise shook the entire control room at 10am. Over the radio, the plant operator announced the terminal failure of the crankshaft on our recip compressor. Having…
• 9 DECEMBER 2025 The Last Victory Lee Sedol stared at the board. For three consecutive games, he had lost to a machine. The match was practically over.
• 7 DECEMBER 2025 Spreadsheets to Spark: Not Just Efficiency Gain Growing up in the 90s, Excel was the gold standard for scientific and academic works. At the turn of the 21st century, petroleum engineers used Excel for everything: pressure…
• 30 NOVEMBER 2025 Scheduling with Context Walk into any oil and gas facility with a state of the art ERP system. Ask to see their well intervention schedule. Chances are, someone will sheepishly open a spreadsheet.
• 23 NOVEMBER 2025 Innovate Like Thomas Edison Someone proposes well control automation. Management asks for the business case. A consultant provides a number. Let's say a flat 10% production increase. It sounds reasonable…
• 17 NOVEMBER 2025 The Internet Revolution - A Déjà Vu There's an eerie sense of déjà vu sweeping through boardrooms across the globe. As executives grapple with artificial intelligence adoption, many of us who remember the early…
• 3 NOVEMBER 2025 “Prevent the Industry from Forgetting Its Lessons”: Reflections on What Went Wrong? by Trevor Kletz I was introduced to What Went Wrong? by Trevor Kletz by one of my former bosses. Every now and then, I like to reread it to remind myself of the author’s timeless message…
• 23 OCTOBER 2025 Measurement by Difference: When Simple Subtraction Isn't So Simple One of the most common techniques engineers use to estimate a quantity is by comparing readings from multiple sensors, or comparing before and after with the same sensor.
• 30 SEPTEMBER 2025 Agentic AI: The Next Operating Paradigm for Intelligent Enterprises For decades, software agents have been a fascinating idea in computer science, entities that could perceive, reason, and act on our behalf. But until recently, they were…
• 3 SEPTEMBER 2025 Understanding Wax Deposition: From Mechanisms to Management Strategy In oil and gas production, few flow assurance challenges are as stubborn as paraffin wax deposition. Left unchecked, it silently reduces pipeline capacity, drives up operating…
• 30 AUGUST 2025 Rethinking Sand Management: From Conventional Reservoirs to CSG Fields Sand and solids production is one of the most persistent challenges in oil and gas. It erodes wells, chokes flowlines, damages facilities, and drives up operating costs. More…
• 23 AUGUST 2025 Multiphase Flow Meter: The Illusive Flow Meter In my last article on flow meters, we saw that each type has its own strengths and sweet spots across oil and gas. One thing is constant though: accurate measurement is…
• 21 AUGUST 2025 Flow Meters: More Than Meets the Eye (and Why You'll Need More Than an ICE Engineer) Here’s a confession: none of our flow meters actually measure volumetric flow rate.
• 19 AUGUST 2025 Flow Meters Every Petroleum Engineer Should Know Every petroleum engineer, especially production engineer, should be familiar with the common flow meters used in the oil and gas industry.
• 10 AUGUST 2025 Know Your Error, Know Your Models: Why Performance Assessment is More Than Just Accuracy When we build machine learning models, whether to forecast oil production, predict equipment failure, or detect operational anomalies, it’s tempting to jump straight to…
• 28 JULY 2025 Fitting a Straight Line: A Detailed Guide to Machine Learning for O&G Engineers I’ve been wondering, why do we engineers love fitting a straight line so much?
• 21 JULY 2025 Can AI Predict When I Die? Hello, LinkedIn community. Allow me to introduce myself. I'm HV, a hardworking pump in the heart of an oilfield operation. I've been churning away for years, pushing fluids…
• 12 JULY 2025 Why Every Analyst Should Understand Data Modelling in Power BI In today’s data-rich environment, analysts are expected to move beyond basic reporting and deliver insights that drive business value. One of the most powerful tools in your…
• 24 JUNE 2025 🌳 Decision Tree: From Simple Rules to Smart Forests 🌲 In my previous article on Discretisation vs. Monte Carlo, I touched on decision trees—but from the lens of decision analysis, where we model choices under uncertainty.
• 19 JUNE 2025 Discretisation vs Monte Carlo: A Modelling Choice? Engineers in oil and gas, especially reservoir engineers, are no strangers to uncertainty. Whether we’re estimating reserves, forecasting production, or evaluating project…
• 17 JUNE 2025 Walking the Lines – Know Your P&ID In the engineering world, reading P&IDs is fundamental. And while knowing how to read a P&ID is a great start, I’ve found it’s not enough to really understand what’s going on…
• 7 JUNE 2025 History Matching vs. Machine Learning: Art, Science, and Predictive Power History matching (HM) is a cornerstone of petroleum engineering, often viewed as more art than science. The process involves meticulously verifying and collecting data…
• 3 JUNE 2025 Beyond the Code: Why the Best Data Scientists in Oil & Gas Think Strategically There’s no shortage of hype around data science in oil and gas. Companies are investing in digital transformation, hiring technical talent, and rolling out new platforms. But…
• 23 MAY 2025 Natural Gas Hydrates: Formation, Prediction and Innovative Risk Management Strategies Production and flow assurance engineers frequently battle natural gas hydrates, crystal structures that can form troublesome blockages in oil and gas pipelines. Unlike ordinary…
• 17 MAY 2025 Petroleum Engineer - A Dinosaur Profession Once considered among the most privileged careers and the highest-paid engineering degrees globally, petroleum engineering today seems more like a dinosaur profession, a…
• 13 MAY 2025 The Paradox of Left-Hand Tail of the VLP Curve Generations of petroleum engineering graduates were taught the mysterious "left-hand tail" of Vertical Lift Performance (VLP) curves, where (quite bafflingly) reducing…
• 11 MAY 2025 Balancing First Principles and Data Insights: A Lesson from Physics In physics, experimentalists explore the unknown through observations and experiments, while theorists aim to explain these findings using fundamental principles and…
• 23 APRIL 2025 A Curious Case of Water Above Oil in the Same Reservoir You're staring at the RFT/MDT plot, thrilled to see the oil gradient lining up beautifully—clear evidence all your wells are connected. Then suddenly, the water gradient spoils…
• 19 APRIL 2025 Part 2: Business Process Mining - Are Your Digital Logs Telling The Truth About Your Process? I hope Part 1 got you thinking—and more importantly, kept you interested enough to come back for Part 2. Admittedly, I’ve taken a slightly unconventional route by starting with…
• 18 APRIL 2025 Part 1: A Data-Driven Operations Process Simulation - Making Workover Olympic-Ready In Part 1 of this two-part series on Data-Driven Operations Process Improvement, we explore how simulation can offer rigorous, science-backed insights—far more reliable than…
• 13 APRIL 2025 The Olympics Is Coming to Town - Unlocking Competitive Advantage with Data-Driven Process Improvement Imagine you own a successful Subway restaurant in Brisbane's bustling CBD. Your daily operations are efficient, with optimal staffing, balanced stock, and minimal waste. But…
• 7 APRIL 2025 What PVT Diagrams Don’t Tell You: The Kinetics of Gas Re-Dissolution Petroleum engineers frequently rely on compositional models, such as equations of state (EoS), to predict hydrocarbon fluid phase behaviour, typically represented by detailed…
• 27 MARCH 2025 How I Survived Tides, Faults and a Multi-Million Dollar Test Lately, I’ve been deep in the world of posting about data and production engineering… but let’s switch it up a bit. Time to talk about something a little more old-school —…
• 21 MARCH 2025 It Started Simple... Until the Engineers Showed Up 😂 In engineering, we love simplicity. A clean, elegant solution that just works, especially in a messy and complex world, feels like magic. But here’s the kicker: getting to that…
• 12 MARCH 2025 Unconventional Gas Lift: Optimising Pipeline Flow without Models Following my recent post on Gas Lift, I want to explore an intriguing follow-up question: "Can we 'gas lift' low GOR wells using high GOR wells within a liquid-dominant…
• 8 MARCH 2025 Gas Lift in CSG Wells: Is It a Game-Changer Worth Your Attention? I came across two fascinating SPE papers (SPE 219536 and SPE 219552) that delved into the economic performance and operational efficiency of gas lift systems versus ESP in…
• 16 FEBRUARY 2025 From Excel to SQL and No Turnback: Breaking Up with Spreadsheets, One Query at a Time! If you’re used to crunching numbers in Excel, transitioning to SQL might seem like a big leap. But once you see how similar tasks are performed in SQL, you'll realize it's not…
• 8 FEBRUARY 2025 How Resilient Is Your AI Model? Recently, I had the chance to catch up with my biggest mentor—an oil and gas veteran from the golden era of the '70s. Looking through his lens again made me rethink my beliefs…
• 4 FEBRUARY 2025 From MTTF to Survival Analysis: Beyond the Basics 🛠️ Let’s start with the old faithful: Mean Time to Failure (MTTF). It’s quick, simple, and gives you a ballpark estimate of how long equipment will last. You calculate it by…
• 8 DECEMBER 2024 Embracing Imperfection: Turning “Trash” into "Treasure" Garbage in, garbage out: We’ve all heard it. And yes, data quality matters. But let’s not be too quick to dismiss imperfect data as useless. After all, one person’s trash can…
• 20 AUGUST 2024 Why Only 10% of Companies Succeed with AI: Because Sometimes We’re Still Faxing in the Digital Age I recently tuned into a podcast from MIT Sloan Management Review, and they dropped a stat that made me sit up: Only 10% of companies really knocked it out of the park with AI…
• 14 JULY 2024 AI: From Mammoths to Machines (Without Losing Our Minds) From stone tools to smartphones, we humans have been on quite the journey. It took us thousands of years to figure out agriculture (apparently, hunting mammoths got old)…
• 9 JUNE 2024 The Power of Collective Intelligence: Ants, AI and Us! Ever noticed how ants seem to have it all figured out? 🐜 They work together seamlessly, achieving great outcomes that would be impossible individually. It's not just because…
• 6 APRIL 2024 Demystifying Cavitation vs. Aeration In early days of my career in oil and gas, I encountered a prevalent misconception: that pump cavitation was caused by pump's starvation or aeration. This blend of confusion…
• 3 MARCH 2024 Heads or Tails: The Science and Serendipity of Coin Flips Ever noticed how a coin flip can defy odds? 🤔 If you ask an engineer about the chance of a coin landing heads after five straight heads, they'd say "50/50," assuming…
• 2 FEBRUARY 2024 P-Value Unpeeled Ever found yourself scratching your head over hypothesis testing, wondering if it's just a fancy way to make decisions based on a bunch of data? Well, you're not alone…
• 13 JANUARY 2024 The Silent Storytellers: Missing Data Ever stumbled upon the concept of survivorship bias? It's a fascinating narrative on the logical error of concentrating on the collected data while overlooking the uncollected…
• 3 JANUARY 2024 The Data Professionals Hello, my fellow Petroleum Engineering professionals! Let's talk about the buzz around data science. You've probably seen those sleek dashboards and machine learning…
• 14 NOVEMBER 2023 When you lack of means, you turn to the mean Truth be told, I have a love hate relationship with mean (not the word mean, I mean the mean the average). Ever since I started my PE journey, the mean is always there, it's…
• 24 OCTOBER 2023 Decoding My Brain's Colourful Tangle on Visualisation 📊 Graphs, Gaffes, and Giggles: The Wild World of Visualisation
• 26 SEPTEMBER 2023 Lightbulb moments start with the simplest inquiries As engineers, we often find ourselves engrossed in the depths of process data. And yes, it's no secret that more often than desired, we encountered data anomalies, often blamed…
• 15 JULY 2023 Can we compare apples to oranges "Comparing apples to oranges" is quite a common phrase being invoked when one attempted to compare two incomparable items, i.e. an invalid comparison.