Why Oil Companies Leave So Much Money Downhole

Everybody chases the drill bit, but the real money can hide in wells that have produced for years. D.J. Snyder left drilling and completions to chase what nobody wanted to touch: production. His company Vannevar builds downhole tools that squeeze more oil out of wells already in the ground, using a marginal gains mindset borrowed from F1 and the Tour de France. Chuck gets into frac plugs, pumper routes, why nobody shuts in a well to fix it, and how AI could give operators one source of truth.

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Click here to view the episode transcript.

00:00   Meet D.J. Snyder

01:05   From drilling to the overlooked world of production

02:47   Old tech, new problems: gas, sand, and horizontal wells

06:24   Physical widgets and the marginal gains mindset

08:32   Why there's no one size fits all

13:00   Heresy: actually watch and fix your wells