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Robots Are Taking Over Oil Rigs

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Re: Robots Are Taking Over Oil Rigs

#51

Post by bduerst »

msandford wrote: post #44
SEJeff wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please do consider reading the entirety of Ian M Banks's Culture Series. It is some fantastic Scifi that literally explores humanity in a post resource scarcity world.

Is it true post-scarcity like everyone has their own mostly automated Starship Enterprise / Battlestar / Star Destroyer? I always get kind of agitated at the notion of post resource scarcity because if you took someone from 1000 years ago and dropped them into today they'd be amazed at how much everyone has. If everyone had 11th century desires but 21st century technology we'd be there. But we're definitely not. I si…

Same here. It's a nice notion to think about, but even if we could produce everything at the moment it's demanded, there is still spatial scarcity for goods and services - i.e. there are only so many ocean front homes near where my extended family lives.

Re: Robots Are Taking Over Oil Rigs

#52

Post by ryanmarsh »

Where my Houstonians at?

> "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."

Drilling rigs don't suck oil out of the ground, they drill a hole... that's why they call them drilling rigs not sucking rigs. Also, we don't call it sucking, rather "production", and that's handled by other equipment... assuming the well needs to be sucked on.

The "Iron Roughneck" has been around a long time.

I would like to see all the charts in this article to go back to 2000. New drilling technology is not adopted as fast as some in SV might imagine. Wells are expensive and dangerous. Innovation is rare and new tech takes a long time to gain acceptance. I'm not saying headcount will shrink over time but this industry is cyclical and demand has been increasing and will continue too as the rest of the world develops a middle class.

> That means an engineer can design an oil well at his desk. With the press of a button, an automated system would identify the equipment needed from a supplier, create a 3D model and send instructions for building it out into the field, Hashmi says. “That is automation.”

LOLOLOL yah, trust me that Fluor, Parsons, Jacobs and all the other oil and gas engineering firms would love this and have been trying to build or integrate things like this for a long time. The limit to automation in this industry and others is, quite frankly, how bad these companies are at making software. Thankfully for the American worker they suck pretty bad, otherwise half the white collar jobs in the US wouldn't exist. Also, this shit is complicated AF and building a petroleum plant isn't just about the chemical process it will complete. Jesus the naiveté in this article. Oh and who designs custom well heads anymore?

Re: Robots Are Taking Over Oil Rigs

#53

Post by cestith »

porpoisemonkey wrote: post #9
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…

Watch out for the civil unrest when it reaches the longshoremen and the Teamsters.

Re: Robots Are Taking Over Oil Rigs

#54

Post by sbov »

pizzetta wrote: post #28
porpoisemonkey wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the additional info. I'm not sure how to feel about the increasing use of automation. As a technologist I know that technology tends to increase efficiency and to some extent productivity which could allow us to scale up to projects of a magnitude never seen before in human history. (SpaceX's mission to colonize Mars comes to mind.) As a human being I feel wholeheartedly for the people being displaced by t…

Any such "tech automation moratorium" would have to be a world-wide thing. It would not work if everyone abided by a moratorium but the US didn't or Every did but Australia --that would create an unfair advantage to the one doing all the automation where others had to pay for semi-skilled labor. There is no easy answer to the conundrum.

The other problem is how do you create the moratorium? If it's related to "how you used to do business", new companies would quickly wipe out old companies. If its by industry, new industries could wipe out old ones not because they're more efficient at their core - but because they are allowed to automate whereas other ones aren't.

There just isn't a realistic mechanism to enforce this sort of rule.

Re: Robots Are Taking Over Oil Rigs

#55

Post by pizza234 »

ancarda wrote: post #30
michaelbuckbee wrote: post #4

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.

>those jobs are never coming back Does it make anyone else sad to hear this? I see posts about robots/AI/etc automating away jobs and I try to be happy about that (who wouldn't want to never have to work again?) but I guess I'm saddened by some perceived loss of interesting opportunities. If I wanted to get my hands dirty or get away from the world for a bit, before robots I could work on an oil rig for a bit. Now, t…

>> those jobs are never coming back > Does it make anyone else sad to hear this?

I think that to associate automation with what is ultimately a shrinkage of the GdP is a serious, although easy, misrepresantation. Those jobs are lost, but money is saved for a part of the population, which will spend it, and ultimately create a demand for new jobs. So it's not just "jobs lost".

Now this transition of course happens in the long term, and that's the problem, but it's different from interpreting automation as net loss.

edit: turns out there is a name for this, which is the "Lump of labour fallacy"; of course, as written, the transition does represent a problem.

Re: Robots Are Taking Over Oil Rigs

#56

Post by cestith »

edblarney wrote: post #7
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 ov…

The math isn't the same on the actual rigs, though. The article says half as many rigs with a quarter as many people per rig to get the same amount of oil. So yeah, if we get to $60 or the heady days (I live in Houston) of $110 a barrel it'll add jobs again.

It won't add jobs the way it used to. About 7/8 of the people who would've received calls in the next upswing won't if the numbers in the article hold.

Re: Robots Are Taking Over Oil Rigs

#57

Post by Gargoyle »

porpoisemonkey wrote: post #9
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…

Another area where there's a glut of highly paid and semi-skilled workers is web developers. Whee!

Re: Robots Are Taking Over Oil Rigs

#58

Post by shiftpgdn »

ryanmarsh wrote: post #52

Where my Houstonians at? > "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." Drilling rigs don't suck oil out of the ground, they drill a hole... that's why they call them drilling rigs not sucking rigs. Also, we don't call it sucking, rather "production", and that's handled by othe…

Sadly the media still likes to portray Houston as a town where everyone wears cowboy hats and that oil comes out of the ground Jed Clampett style.

Literally all of my surrounding neighbors are mechanical engineers for oilfield service companies and the common thing we've talked about recently IS automation. However the reality isn't robots but better engineering/process that lets a part run 50x as long with a greater prediction for need of replacement.

You don't have to keep 100 hands on a drilling site for the peak demand if you can effectively schedule.

Re: Robots Are Taking Over Oil Rigs

#59

Post by SEJeff »

msandford wrote: post #44
SEJeff wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please do consider reading the entirety of Ian M Banks's Culture Series. It is some fantastic Scifi that literally explores humanity in a post resource scarcity world.

Is it true post-scarcity like everyone has their own mostly automated Starship Enterprise / Battlestar / Star Destroyer? I always get kind of agitated at the notion of post resource scarcity because if you took someone from 1000 years ago and dropped them into today they'd be amazed at how much everyone has. If everyone had 11th century desires but 21st century technology we'd be there. But we're definitely not. I si…

It is true post scarcity in that Humans invented benevolent artificial intelligence they deemed sentient called "minds".

Minds can build robots to go mine asteroids light years away and come back through (duh) hyperspace. I meant the original comment quite literally.

Also, it is a really freaking good series if you like Sci-fi that tries to answer philosophy questions, which this series does a wonderful job of.

Re: Robots Are Taking Over Oil Rigs

#60

Post by cestith »

chrisbrandow wrote: post #36

a more compelling graph would have been jobs/rig. The drop in jobs sure looks like it approximately matches rig demand with a 3-6 month lag. I am sure robots will replace a lot of these jobs, but I don't see this article providing much evidence that it is happening substantially.

There's no real demand for new rigs right now. In the downturn, though, the rig and rig equipment companies are making more labor-efficient rigs and equipment. So when new rigs come online, they won't raise labor demand the way new rigs used to.
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