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Robots Are Taking Over Oil Rigs

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Re: Robots Are Taking Over Oil Rigs

#2

Post by digikata »

I wonder if increased automation means poorer responses to emergencies because you have fewer humans there to respond with. On the other hand, maybe it means fewer emergencies because the automation makes fewer mistakes, or makes hard jobs easier and more consistent.

Re: Robots Are Taking Over Oil Rigs

#4

Post by michaelbuckbee »

3 Years and half the workers:

"Rigs have gotten so much more efficient that the shale industry can use about half as many as it did at the height of the boom in 2014 to suck the same amount of oil out of the ground."

I'm more familiar with mining and it's fairly amazing the productivity improvements that went into that, those jobs are never coming back.

Re: Robots Are Taking Over Oil Rigs

#6

Post by kbenson »

digikata wrote: post #2

I wonder if increased automation means poorer responses to emergencies because you have fewer humans there to respond with. On the other hand, maybe it means fewer emergencies because the automation makes fewer mistakes, or makes hard jobs easier and more consistent.

Often overlooked is the type of mistake, which it seems you are touching on with "poorer responses to emergencies". If humans make 10 mistakes over a time period compared to 1 for the automated system, it might look as if the humans are worse, but if the cost of the human mistakes averages to 5 for some theoretical cost scale (so 50 overall), but the automated mistake costs 100 because there isn't a good dynamic response to it, the automated system doesn't actually cost less in the end. That's why we so often see automated systems backed by people, as we don't have automation that can respond as dynamically as a person.

It usually takes far fewer people to oversee automation than to do the original work though.

Re: Robots Are Taking Over Oil Rigs

#7

Post by edblarney »

cloudwizard wrote: post #3

Those are very high paying jobs. It is very unlikely that the displaced workers will make anywhere close to that.

As the price of oil rises, it makes more sense for extraction in 'hard to get' places, which requires more technology, more jobs.

As long as Oil is above $60/barrel, the the Alberta Oil Sands become exploitable, requiring massive, massive jobs. And very high paying. Unskilled labour is $80K. Skilled labour well above $100K - and tons of 'vacation' - usually 2 weeks in, 1 week out type thing. People fly in from all over the world.

The carbon energy sector continues to employ a lot of people and will.

Of course - environmental issues notwithstanding.

Re: Robots Are Taking Over Oil Rigs

#8

Post by ghaff »

I watched Deepwater Horizon on the plane the other day. As someone who designed systems for offshore drilling rigs in the early eighties but haven't stayed up on the tech there much, I was impressed at the amount of electronics and what appeared to be more automated handling of drill pipe.

That said, it was also interesting that the basic mechanics of drilling an offshore well weren't really all that different from what I was used to.

Re: Robots Are Taking Over Oil Rigs

#9

Post by porpoisemonkey »

cloudwizard wrote: post #3

Those are very high paying jobs. It is very unlikely that the displaced workers will make anywhere close to that.

As I understand it the incentive to automate is to 1) reduce costs and to 2) increase quality by standardizing the execution of complicated tasks.

If this is true then as a general rule automation is going to target jobs of highly payed, semi-skilled workers. I think we can expect that these positions will become scarcer and scarcer as automation technologies are adopted.

One area where there's a glut of highly paid and semi-skilled workers is longshoremen (dock workers). I suspect that in the near future we'll be seeing these jobs disappear as well.

https://www.google.com/amp/www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-do...

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