From Calculators to Cloud: Building the Automated Oil Company

Robert Wichert and I met around 1997 or 1998. That’s roughly twenty-five years ago. And when I think about where this industry was at that point, and where it is now, the distance we’ve covered is staggering. But the thing that hit me on the podcast is how long we spent standing still in the middle of it.

Robert walked through his career timeline on Wisdom at the Wellhead, and it’s a timeline a lot of people in this business will recognize. When he started, forty-two years ago, they were just getting into handheld calculators. Then came the early spreadsheets. Lotus 1-2-3. Engineers trying to figure out how to capture data and optimize things with tools that were barely a step beyond paper.

Then fast forward to when Robert and I met, twenty-five years ago. And we still hadn’t really progressed much. We were working Excel at that point. Getting field data in by fax. If you needed something done, you had a tech, and that person would sort out some data, and you’d sort that out.

I remember that era well. I was a petroleum engineer in those years, and I can tell you exactly what it felt like. You’d wait for a fax. You’d hope somebody wrote the numbers down right. You’d enter them into a spreadsheet that was probably different from the spreadsheet your colleague was using for the same wells. And at the end of the month, you’d try to make it all tie together and wonder why it never quite did.

So what actually changed? And why did it take this long?

The Tools Caught Up. The Industry Hasn’t.

Robert laid it out plainly. The internet took off. Cloud computing went through the roof. SCADA advanced to the point where you can pull live-stream data from the field right into the office and dashboard it in a format you can make decisions with. Without having to manipulate the data.

That last phrase matters: without having to manipulate the data. For most of our careers, manipulation was the job. You got raw numbers from the field, and then somebody had to clean them, organize them, re-enter them, format them, and deliver them to the person who needed to make a decision. By the time that person saw the data, it had been through so many hands that nobody was completely sure it was right. And the decision it was supposed to support was already a week or a month old.

Now you can pull it live. Straight from the sensor to the dashboard. No hands in the middle. No re-keying. No waiting. The data that your engineer sees at eight in the morning is the same data the field generated overnight. That is a fundamentally different operating reality than the one Robert and I started in.

The Technology Exists. The Adoption Doesn’t.

Here’s the part that keeps me up at night. Everything I just described is available today. Live field data. Connected systems. Dashboards that show you what’s happening right now instead of what happened last month. None of this is experimental. None of it is bleeding edge. It’s proven, it’s affordable, and it’s sitting there waiting to be used.

And most of the industry is still running on the model Robert and I were using twenty-five years ago. Maybe they’ve upgraded from Excel to a slightly better spreadsheet. Maybe the fax machine is gone and the data comes in by email now. But the fundamental problem is the same: disconnected systems, manual data handling, and decisions based on information that’s weeks or months old.

Robert said something on the podcast that captures this perfectly. He said the automation is simply pulling together all the pieces that already exist. Every company has them. But in Cougar’s case, they’re going to be connected completely. That’s the whole play. Not inventing new tools. Connecting the ones that are already there.

Twenty-Five Years of Conversations Led to This

I mentioned on the podcast that Robert and I have had a lot of conversations over the years. We’ve worked together in the past with previous companies around the idea of streamlining data and making systems efficient. Those weren’t sales pitches. Those were real conversations between two people who cared about the same problem and kept trying to figure out how to solve it.

When I built Total Stream with Bob Baldwin, we were trying to solve the exact problem Robert kept running into: engineers who couldn’t get clean data fast enough to do their jobs well. We’d sit across from operators who were drowning in spreadsheets and manual processes, and we’d show them what it would look like if everything was connected. Some of them made the move. A lot of them didn’t. Not because they didn’t see the value, but because changing an established operation is genuinely hard.

What makes Cougar different is that Robert didn’t have to change an established operation. He got to start one. And twenty-five years of conversations about what an automated oil company should look like went into the blueprint.

From the Sensor to the Decision

When Robert talks about building the automated oil company, he’s not talking about robots in the field. He’s talking about a company where the data moves from the sensor to the dashboard to the decision without human hands slowing it down or introducing errors along the way. Engineering data flows into accounting. Accounting connects to vendors. Field data feeds dashboards that are customized for what Cougar needs to see.

Robert is relying on Total Stream to help get those dashboards set up, customized for what Cougar is going to be doing. And I have to say, after twenty-five years of talking about this with him, actually building it feels different than talking about it. This is the version of the automated oil company that we’ve been describing in conference rooms and over coffee for two decades. Except now it’s real. Now there’s a company behind it. And now we get to find out what happens when you actually do what we’ve always said operators should do.

I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t excited about that.

Final Thought

We went from handheld calculators to live-stream SCADA data in the span of one career. Robert has been here for all forty-two years of it. I’ve been here for most of them. And the thing that strikes me when I look back is not how far the technology came. It’s how long we kept doing things the old way after the new way was already available.

The gap between what’s possible and what’s actually being used in this industry is enormous. And the operators who close that gap first are the ones who will define what the next twenty-five years look like.

Robert Wichert isn’t waiting for the industry to catch up. He’s already building what comes next.

From handheld calculators to a fully connected digital oil company, Robert Wichert’s forty-two-year journey through upstream technology is a story every operator should hear. Catch the full conversation on Wisdom at the Wellhead.