Épisodes

  • EP 85: Aarya Borele from Evardi Energy

    EP 85: Aarya Borele from Evardi Energy
    Sep 4 2026

    Utilities are drowning in paperwork long before a repair crew ever leaves the yard. Aarya Borele, co-founder and CTO of Evardi Energy, walks John and Bobby through outage requests getting rejected a day out, FERC 881 pushing line ratings from seasonal to hourly, and why 95 percent accuracy is a failing grade when the lights are on the line. Also in here: the grid as cloud infrastructure, Griddy's flameout, and a 49ers conspiracy theory involving a substation.

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    0:00 Agents, VMs and running everything at once
    3:26 Back in the studio
    4:34 What Evardi does
    5:45 Uri and the incentive problem
    10:28 When the ISO rejects your outage
    12:35 How the grid actually works
    15:02 FERC 881 and hourly line ratings
    17:46 Where Evardi fits in
    21:37 Blackouts in India and Kenya
    25:28 The grid as cloud infrastructure
    30:17 Griddy and the wholesale gamble
    33:45 The stack, compliance and weather models
    37:40 Accuracy in critical infrastructure
    40:22 Jargon, bad data and context
    45:56 Models, local hosting and token costs
    55:29 The 49ers substation theory
    57:13 Speed round
    1:05:38 Physical AI and robot ducks
    1:11:25 Paying attention in a granola world
    1:14:09 The ask

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    1 h et 17 min
  • EP 84: Ben Dickinson & Bryan Frantz from NexTier Completion Solutions

    EP 84: Ben Dickinson & Bryan Frantz from NexTier Completion Solutions
    Aug 13 2026

    Everybody in oil and gas has been sitting on mountains of completions data and barely using it. Ben Dickinson and Bryan Frantz of NexTier Completion Solutions built the fix from the inside out, an end to end frac data platform made by the people running the pumps. John and Bobby get into why the closer you are to the equipment the closer you are to the truth, where frac data standards are headed, and whether efficiency has hit its ceiling. Plus AI coding and the hunt for a good Pittsburgh wing.

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    0:00:00 - Back from summer break
    0:00:41 - Trying to keep pace with AI
    0:10:16 - Who NexTier is and where it came from
    0:12:22 - Building an end to end frac data platform
    0:15:17 - The industry's siloed data problem
    0:20:39 - Agnostic architecture and one tool for everyone
    0:26:44 - Borrowing solved problems from other industries
    0:31:41 - The tech stack and starting greenfield
    0:35:17 - Control systems and the job data schema
    0:44:11 - Why frac data has no standard
    0:47:08 - Fleet Stream and getting data to customers
    0:53:23 - Has operational efficiency hit its ceiling
    0:59:58 - How opinionated should the software be
    1:03:08 - Physics vs data driven modeling
    1:08:41 - The AI coding tools they use
    1:10:35 - Western PA wings and pierogi

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    1 h et 14 min
  • EP 83: Paul Brown from BDE Data

    EP 83: Paul Brown from BDE Data
    Apr 10 2026

    Paul Brown, Founder and Principal Engineer at BDE Data, joins John and Bobby all the way from Scotland for a conversation that covers a lot of ground. From his days as an international drilling engineer dodging pirates off the coast of West Africa to building WellSchematic.com and tackling the nightmare of digitizing 50-year-old multilingual well files, Paul is the rare person who speaks both languages fluently.

    Click here to watch a video of this episode.


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    00:00 - Oil prices, energy costs, and life in Scotland vs Texas
    01:50 - Paul's background and path from drilling to data
    08:19 - WellSchematic.com and legacy well data as a service
    10:52 - Drilling war stories: West Africa and the Falklands
    15:00 - UK oil industry and energy policy
    34:41 - Legacy well file digitization
    38:06 - The PDF table extraction problem
    42:22 - Open source models vs foundational models
    44:31 - AI stack, data privacy, and cloud infrastructure
    51:54 - AI's role in the upstream industry
    56:04 - Getting tech adopted in the drilling world
    59:06 - Coding journey: from PHP and Laravel to Python
    1:02:22 - Advice for engineers getting into coding
    1:09:38 - Programming languages and AI-assisted development
    1:11:56 - Cursor and Claude Code
    1:13:55 - Speed round: Scotland, whiskey, and cloud platforms

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    1 h et 21 min
  • EP 82: John Ely, The Godfather of Frac

    EP 82: John Ely, The Godfather of Frac
    Mar 6 2026

    When you have 80 patents and a lifetime achievement award in hydraulic fracturing, you have seen some things. John William Ely, Founder of Ely and Associates Corp, and Jon Harper, Vice President of Sales and Marketing, talk frac history, pre-job diagnostics, the slick water revolution, geothermal, and why the industry keeps pumping the same thing and expecting different results.

    Click here to watch a video of this episode.

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    0:00 - Intro and guest backgrounds
    3:25 - John William Ely's origin story
    7:45 - Offshore blowout and well control in the Middle East
    11:25 - How fracturing has evolved over 50 years
    19:30 - The slick water revolution and where we went wrong
    27:40 - Pre-job diagnostics and what operators overlook
    36:55 - Geothermal applications and completions challenges
    43:50 - Parent-child well interaction and offset communication
    47:00 - Refracing and diversion
    54:15 - Increasing recovery factor
    1:06:35 - Longer laterals, U-turn wells, and land-driven decisions
    1:12:35 - Knowledge gaps in the next generation of engineers
    1:25:20 - The untapped tight conventional opportunity
    1:30:02 - Advice for young engineers entering the industry

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    1 h et 35 min
  • EP 81: Deren, Dagen and Josh from Firm App

    EP 81: Deren, Dagen and Josh from Firm App
    Feb 27 2026

    Owner relations in oil and gas has been shoved in a corner forever, basically a "here's your check, don't call me" situation, and Deren Boyd, Dagen Boyd, and Josh Wright, co-founders of Firm App, are building the platform to fix that. These three started in oilfield safety software with iScout, got acquired by KPA, and now they're tackling the massive gap between operators and their surface and mineral owners with AI-powered multichannel communication. We're talking voice agents with adjustable accents, auto-responding emails, chat widgets that actually work, and an owner-facing app that puts payment info and well data in people's pockets. Plus the OKC crew gives their take on Devon and Expand relocating and what that means for the city.

    Click here to watch a video of this episode.

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    Click here to view the episode transcript.

    0:00 Devon and Expand leaving OKC, what it means on the ground
    4:42 What is owner relations and why has it been ignored
    7:18 Timing and the generational shift driving tech adoption
    10:10 How operators have been duct-taping owner relations together
    12:05 The owner-facing app and multichannel approach
    14:38 AI voice agents, email auto-response, and chatbot workflows
    18:15 Building and rebuilding AI architecture every six months
    21:29 Under the hood on voice AI, latency, and conversation nuance
    26:37 School districts, 10,000 page websites, and unexpected use cases
    34:58 The iScout origin story and oilfield safety software
    42:17 Getting thrown in the penalty box and winning work back with data
    46:13 Revenue statements, vendor portals, and what owners actually ask about
    52:24 NAPE plans and the land community
    54:48 Business model and implementation timeline
    55:58 NIL, college athletics, and the dumpster fire
    1:04:36 Dev tools, Claude Code, and the future of SaaS

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    1 h et 10 min
  • EP 80: Kayla Ball from SensorUp

    EP 80: Kayla Ball from SensorUp
    Feb 20 2026

    Bobby Neelon and John Kalfayan sit down with Kayla Ball to break down why the methane compliance space is stuck in the trough of disillusionment, how she ended up cleaning up Petra's flat file nightmare at IHS, and why vibe coding with Claude feels like training your own replacement. They dig into sensor data chaos across ops teams, why public data companies should be worried, the wild difference between building lovable prototypes versus commercial deployments with SOC2 governance, and how AI is forcing everyone to confront the fact that humans shouldn't be entering data into anything anymore.

    Click here to watch a video of this episode.

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    Click here to view the episode transcript.

    0:00 - Devon and Chesapeake leaving Oklahoma City
    4:50 - What SensorUp actually does beyond sensors
    11:40 - Methane space challenges and compliance markets
    18:30 - Why standardizing sensor data is so hard
    26:40 - Getting into product management from geology
    32:45 - AI automating regulatory workflows and field inspections
    38:50 - Vibe coding prototypes versus productizing for enterprises
    45:15 - Public data moat questions for IHS and Enverus
    52:30 - Duck Lake and licensing components over custom dev
    58:15 - Product management changing with Claude Code
    1:04:40 - Data problems holding back AI adoption
    1:11:20 - Speed round on youth sports complexes and baseball
    1:22:40 - Hot takes and wrapping up

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    1 h et 24 min
  • EP 79: Hussein Shel from AWS

    EP 79: Hussein Shel from AWS
    Feb 13 2026

    Hussein Shel, CTO and head of business development for energy and utilities at Amazon Web Services, joins Bobby and John to talk about his journey from Chevron engineer to cloud technology leader. They explore how AI coding tools are changing the game for energy companies, why the barrier to entry for building apps has never been lower, and what it means when your reservoir engineer can now spin up their own solutions in minutes instead of months. Hussein shares why he thinks we're only scratching the surface of what's possible when you combine domain expertise with modern AI tools, discusses the cultural shifts needed for energy companies to move fast, and explains why he's both excited about AI's potential and concerned about its massive energy demands.

    If you’re into energy tech, you’re in the right place. John and Bobby have built a deep catalog of conversations with the minds modernizing energy inside companies like AWS, Snowflake, Devon Energy, and more. Listen to the full library on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, or watch at https://collide.io/community.

    Click here to watch a video of this episode.


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    Click here to view the episode transcript.

    00:00 - Welcome and introductions
    03:14 - Early AI experiments and low-code tools
    08:11 - Core principles that haven't changed
    12:04 - Managing costs and governance
    15:15 - Data access and shadow IT
    17:16 - Building apps in weeks vs months
    19:25 - Domain-specific foundation models
    21:10 - AWS infrastructure and energy footprint
    26:21 - Custom silicon and partnerships
    29:11 - Current AI model landscape
    33:36 - Enterprise adoption challenges
    38:58 - Cultural change from the top
    42:06 - Scoping problems and quick wins
    46:16 - Legacy systems and technical debt
    52:18 - Building AI-first energy companies
    56:57 - Tech debt acceleration
    1:00:04 - Speed round and favorite spots

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    1 h et 7 min
  • Collide AI 2025 Wrapped Part 1: Why Forward Deployed Engineers Ship When AI Pilots Fail

    Collide AI 2025 Wrapped Part 1: Why Forward Deployed Engineers Ship When AI Pilots Fail
    Dec 23 2025

    Collide AI 2025 Wrapped Part 1 turns into a real talk on why forward deployed engineers win where AI pilots stall, with Michael Cortez, John, and Nick Smart swapping war stories from completions, geophysics, and the startup trenches while they map out how Collide Enterprise moves past basic chat tools into search plus workflows that actually hold up in the real world.

    Click here to watch a video of this episode.


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    Click here to view the episode transcript.

    00:00 Setup and intros
    00:45 Michael’s path and joining Collide
    01:59 Nick’s background and role shift
    03:08 Collide Enterprise vs community
    04:16 Search, RAG, and workflow evolution
    06:31 Why out of the box AI falls short
    08:41 Time savings and real work focus
    11:39 Single source of truth vision
    13:16 Small teams scaling bigger assets
    17:18 AI adoption vs past tech hype
    19:26 Digital transformation missing link
    20:20 Why FDEs make pilots work
    23:36 Biggest learnings this year
    31:52 What’s next in 2026
    38:57 Bold predictions for 3 to 5 years
    47:37 Fine tuned models teaser and wrap

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    48 min