Know Before You Go

Picture the pumper who drives forty minutes to a well, checks the gauges, sees everything is running normal, drives forty minutes back, and does it again tomorrow. Five wells. Six wells. Every day. Rain or shine. He’s a good hand. He’s reliable. And he’s spending most of his week confirming things are fine instead of fixing things that aren’t.

Now picture the operator who already knows what’s going on at every one of those wells before anybody gets in a truck. He knows which ones are trending normal. He knows which one had a pressure drop at two in the morning. He knows which pump is showing early signs of a problem. And when he sends somebody out, it’s not to check on things. It’s to fix something specific.

That’s not a technology fantasy. That’s what Robert Wichert is building at Cougar Energy, and it changes the math on everything from headcount to safety to how fast you can grow.

What if the goal wasn’t to visit every well every day, but to know which wells actually need you today?

The Fear That Keeps Good Operators Stuck

One thing I’ve noticed over the years is that a lot of smaller operators carry a real fear around automation. And honestly, I get where it comes from. Robert Wichert nailed it on the podcast when he traced it back to the old days of ESDs. The tank’s overflowing. Okay, I need to go fix that. That was the level of technology for a long time.

Something went wrong, an alarm went off, and you reacted. If that’s your only experience with automation, of course you’re skeptical. It felt like the technology was just there to tell you about a mess after it already happened.

But Robert asked the better question: what about catching that way before it happens?

That’s the shift. We’re not talking about alarms that tell you the tank is already overflowing. We’re talking about trending that shows you the tank is filling faster than it should be, three days before it becomes a problem. Kevin Fischer said it simply: the cost of putting something on a well is way cheaper than the cost of reclaiming that area and fixing the mistake. And he’s right. But the real savings aren’t just in avoiding spills. The real savings are in all the trips you don’t have to make and all the problems you catch before they cost you real money.

Go Out to Fix What Matters, Not What Doesn’t

Here’s what I keep coming back to. When you know what’s going on at a well before you ever go out there, the whole nature of the field visit changes. You’re not driving around checking gauges and hoping everything is fine. You already know everything is fine on eight of your ten wells because the trending shows it. What you’re doing is driving to the two wells that actually need attention, and you’re showing up with the right tools and the right plan because you already know what’s wrong.

That’s not lazy. That’s smart. You go out to fix what matters and not what doesn’t.

I’ve spent enough years in this business to know that the best field people are the ones who hate wasted trips. They want to show up, solve a real problem, and move on. They don’t want to spend half their week driving past pump jacks that are running fine just because nobody at the office can tell the difference between a well that needs attention and one that doesn’t. Give those people the data to focus their time, and they will outperform a team twice their size.

The Aviation Lesson Most Operators Ignore

Robert brought up something on the podcast that I thought was one of the best analogies in the whole conversation. He talked about aviation engine oil analysis. In aviation, they routinely test engine oil looking for metal particulates. And once you see an uptick, you know something is wearing. You start checking cylinders, valves, all the rest of it. You don’t wait for the engine to fail. You catch the trend and act before it becomes a crisis.

Now think about how most oil and gas operators handle equipment failures. A well goes down. Somebody notices eventually, maybe on the next site visit, maybe when production numbers come in thirty or sixty days later. Then you scramble. Get a crew out there, figure out what happened, order parts, wait for the workover rig. Meanwhile, that well has been sitting there producing nothing and costing you money.

Robert’s approach at Cougar is to use trending data to build a predictive model. Track mean time between failures. Watch for the early signs, a production drop on one well when the nearby ones are holding steady. Something’s going wrong here. And instead of waiting for the well to go down and then trying to figure out what happened, you’re planning the repair on your schedule, not the well’s.

He even took it a step further. If you’ve got three or four wells that all need work, you can batch those jobs together, minimize mob and demob costs, and be more effective with your field operations. That’s not just avoiding failures. That’s turning your maintenance program into a planned operation instead of an emergency response.

Know Your Vendors Before You Hire Them

This idea of knowing before you go doesn’t stop at the wellsite. Robert talked about another layer that I think a lot of operators overlook: vendor safety screening. Through services connected to their invoicing and vendor management system, Cougar can pull HSE data on service companies before they ever show up on location. What’s their safety record? Have they had incidents? Are they someone you want on your lease?

Robert described it this way: here’s the top three. We know these guys can do the work. But what’s happened over here? And they can build that information straight into the decision process. You’re not finding out about a vendor’s safety problems after the incident. You’re screening for them before the crew ever leaves the yard.

I’ve seen companies learn this lesson the hard way. You bring in the cheapest service company because the bid looked good, and then you find out they cut corners on safety, and now you’re dealing with an incident that costs ten times what you saved on the bid. Knowing who you’re hiring before you hire them is the same principle as knowing what’s happening at the well before you drive out there. Information first. Action second.

When the Data Protects People

There’s one more angle on this that matters, and it’s the one that keeps me up at night less than it used to. Safety. Robert made the point plainly: if you’ve got a high-pressure transmission line and you’ve got a leak somewhere, SCADA will pick it up immediately. You don’t need to wait for the newspaper or a television helicopter.

Think about what that means. You find out about a high-pressure leak from your monitoring system instead of from the evening news. You can respond, shut things down, protect people, and manage the situation before it becomes a public safety issue. That’s not a nice feature. That’s the difference between a controlled response and a crisis.

And yet there are still operators out there who think SCADA is too expensive, who think automation is something only big companies do, who think their pumper driving out every morning is good enough. For most of them it has been good enough. Right up until the day it isn’t.

Final Thought

The old model was simple. Go to the well. See what’s happening. React. And for a long time, that was the best we could do.

The new model is simpler. Know what’s happening before you leave the office. Know which wells need you and which ones don’t. Know which vendors are safe before they set foot on your lease. Know which pump is starting to fail before it takes the well offline.

The operators who figure this out don’t just save money. They run bigger operations with fewer people, they keep their crews focused on real work, and they sleep better at night knowing the data is watching what the human eye can’t.

The best field visit is the one you didn’t have to make because you already knew what was going on.

Robert Wichert is building Cougar Energy to know first and act second, from the wellsite to the vendor yard to the boardroom. Hear how forty-two years of upstream experience shaped that philosophy on Wisdom at the Wellhead.