Operating Where You Can’t Drive to the Lease

Most of us in the domestic oil business take something for granted that you don’t even think about until it’s gone: you can drive to your wells. You can send a pumper out in the morning, and barring a flat tire or a washed-out lease road, he’s going to get there. He’s going to check fluid levels, look at pressures, make sure nothing’s leaking, and report back. It’s routine. It’s how we’ve done things for a hundred years.

Now imagine that your pumper can’t get to the well. Not because of weather. Not because of a road. Because the military just rolled through and set up a roadblock. Or the locals in the area are upset about something that has nothing to do with your operation, and they’re blocking access to your own lease. Your rig is sitting there. Your production is running. And you have no idea what’s happening.

That’s not a hypothetical. That’s Tuesday in some parts of the world where Robert Wichert is planning to operate Cougar Energy.

So what do you do when the most basic thing in operations, being able to physically see your own equipment, isn’t available to you?

The Map Robert Is Looking At

When Robert and I talked on Wisdom at the Wellhead, one of the things that jumped out is the sheer geographic spread of what Cougar is building. This isn’t a Permian Basin company that might pick up a few wells in the Eagle Ford. Robert is looking at the US Gulf Coast, Texas and Louisiana, onshore and offshore, and then stretching into Latin America and Africa. Mexico, Guatemala, Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia, Guyana, Brazil. Gabon, Chad. Each one of those places has different rules, different risks, and different realities on the ground.

Robert said it plainly: each area needs a little different touch. That’s the kind of understatement that only comes from someone who’s actually worked internationally. A “little different touch” in this business can mean the difference between operations running smoothly and not being able to reach your own wellsite for a week.

A Fiber Optic Cable That Hears Shovels

Robert told a story on the podcast that stuck with me. In Colombia, where Cougar has large opportunities, there’s a thirty-six-inch crude pipeline. Somebody ran a fiber optic cable along it. Not for data in the way we usually think about it, but for sensing. That fiber optic line can detect when people are digging near the pipeline. Vibrations. Ground disturbance. The kind of activity that means someone is about to tap into a major crude line, which in that part of the world is a real and constant threat.

From that information, they could fly birds out and stop the interference before it became a disaster. No helicopter flyover caught it. No routine inspection found it. A cable in the ground felt it.

I think about that and then I think about the operators back home who won’t put SCADA on a well because they think it’s too expensive. Meanwhile, somebody in South America is using sensing technology to protect a thirty-six-inch pipeline from being physically attacked. The technology isn’t the future. It’s already in the ground. It’s just a question of whether you’re using it.

When SCADA Becomes Your Eyes and Your Hands

In the domestic oilfield, SCADA is a nice-to-have for most small operators. It saves drive time. It gives you better data. It lets you spot problems faster. All good things, but nobody’s operations depend on it. If the SCADA goes down, you send the pumper.

Internationally, SCADA isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s the only set of eyes you might have for days at a time. Robert explained it this way: if you have SCADA systems on the ground, you can understand what’s going on even though you can’t get to it, even if your pumpers can’t get to it. And if you see something really dangerous happening, a high-pressure leak, a safety issue, something that could hurt someone, you can shut things down remotely.

Think about that for a minute. You’re sitting in Houston. Your wells are in a part of the world where the local roads are blocked. Your field crew can’t get through. But you can see pressures, temperatures, fluid levels, flow rates, all in real time, and you can make adjustments within limits that your engineers set. You’re not flying blind. You’re operating.

As Robert put it, the engineers know what’s happening. The field people may not even be aware of the adjustments. In some cases, it was something they should have been doing if they knew what to do. But now the system handles it. That’s not replacing people. That’s protecting the operation when people can’t do their jobs because of circumstances outside their control.

No Cell Tower? No Problem.

There’s one more piece of this that I thought was worth calling out. In a lot of these international locations, there’s no cell coverage. And if you’re building your monitoring around cellular data, which is what a lot of domestic SCADA relies on, you’re stuck before you start.

Robert’s answer was simple. Link the SCADA systems to Starlink. Beam to orbit. You don’t need a cell tower. You don’t need local infrastructure. You just need a clear view of the sky, and you’re connected.

I remember when satellite communication in the oilfield meant a phone the size of a briefcase that cost ten dollars a minute to use. Now you can stream real-time field data to Houston from a wellsite in West Africa for a fraction of what it used to cost to make one phone call from a rig. The barriers that used to make international operations feel like working in the dark, most of them are gone. You just have to be willing to use what’s available.

What This Really Comes Down To

The way I see it, what Robert is doing at Cougar is taking a principle we’ve always believed in at Total Stream, that the right data, in the right hands, at the right time, changes everything, and extending it into places where it matters even more. In the US, good data saves you money and makes you faster. In a geopolitically complex international operation, good data might be the only thing standing between you and a complete loss of visibility over your own assets.

That’s a different level of stakes. And it demands a different level of preparation. Robert planned for this before he ever operated a single well internationally. He knew what the challenges would be because he’s been in the business long enough to have lived them. And instead of hoping it would work out, he built the infrastructure to handle it.

Final Thought

There are places in this world where the oil is good, the geology is proven, and the economics work on paper. The reason more operators don’t go after those opportunities isn’t the subsurface. It’s the surface. It’s the roads you can’t drive down, the leases you can’t access, the infrastructure that doesn’t exist.

Robert Wichert’s bet is that the technology to operate through those challenges already exists. You just have to decide, before you ever start, that you’re going to build visibility into the foundation instead of hoping you can bolt it on later.

Because when the roadblock goes up, it’s too late to start shopping for SCADA.

Cougar Energy is building an oil company designed to operate across borders, time zones, and geopolitical realities most domestic operators never have to face. Hear Robert Wichert lay out how he’s doing it, from SCADA to Starlink to the systems that hold it all together, on Wisdom at the Wellhead.