The Insane Engineering of Deepwater Oil Production

Austin Draughon spent nine years at BP keeping Gulf of Mexico wells producing tens of thousands of barrels per day from floating platforms in 6,000+ feet of water. He breaks down why offshore is ten times more expensive, takes ten times longer, and involves ten times more people than onshore drilling, from robots tightening bolts on the seafloor to the ice problem that can kill a well in eight hours. Jacob and Julie learn why you can't just build 6,000-foot concrete pillars, how Christmas trees got their name, and what happens when asphalt buildup shuts down a 10,000 barrel per day well worth the energy consumption of Montana. Plus: helicopter crash training, North Slope darkness, and why AI's best trick is turning 35-page documents into the one sentence you actually needed.

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Click here to view the episode transcript.

00:00 - Gulf of America officially renamed
01:41 - Nine years producing offshore Gulf of Mexico wells
02:59 - North Slope Alaska: darkness and extreme cold survival
05:06 - Production engineer managing 12 high-stakes offshore wells
07:11 - Asphalt buildup can kill a 10,000 barrel per day well
09:13 - Building technology to predict well failures early
11:03 - From Excel spreadsheets to cloud-deployed Python scripts
12:07 - Dry tree versus wet tree subsea completions explained
18:19 - Wildcat exploration: finding elephants to justify $30B platforms
20:09 - Blowout preventers and seafloor robots with little hands
23:11 - Five-mile flowlines connecting subsea wells to platforms
24:23 - Onshore takes weeks, offshore takes 90+ days minimum
26:29 - Automation levels on offshore drill ships
29:00 - 300+ people living on floating production facilities
32:06 - ROV operators controlling robots like video games
34:16 - Why offshore wells produce 1,000x more than stripper wells
36:16 - Pushing spaghetti four miles to hit a four-foot target
37:47 - Hydrate ice problem: eight-hour clock before well dies
39:08 - North Sea waves versus Gulf of America conditions
41:15 - Helicopter crash training at the YMCA pool
44:17 - AI's killer use case: many to one summarization
46:26 - Narrative layers surface buried statistics automatically

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