The Inquisitive Engineer: When Fixing One Well Breaks the One Next to It

Eric Fidler was telling us a story on Wisdom at the Wellhead about a conversation he'd had with a Sensia partner just the week before. The partner brought up a scenario that stopped me cold. He said, what happens if optimizing this well causes a problem with that well over there, and the net result is you're producing less than when you started?

Then he gave a specific example. An operator had a check valve that was failing. He increased pressure on the overall grid by optimizing a new well, and the increased pressure caused a backflow through that bad valve on the neighboring well. He did everything right on the well in front of him. And the system punished him for it. Net production went down.

Eric said he'd lived that exact scenario himself, years ago, working offshore. Pneumatic era. To figure out what was happening, he had to get on a boat, drive around to the different jackets, and read the gauges by hand. Took him the entire day just to work into the problem. One rusty check valve, hiding in a system that nobody was looking at as a whole.

That story landed hard for me, because it captures something I've been wrestling with for most of my career. We're getting better and better at optimizing individual pieces of the operation. But the problems that actually cost you money almost never live inside a single piece of equipment. They live in the connections between them. And right now, this industry is losing the people who understand those connections faster than it's replacing them.

The Problem I Keep Running Into

I spent fifteen years as a petroleum engineer, and I can tell you the moments that taught me the most were never about mastering one system. They were about the times I watched a decision on one well ripple through everything connected to it in ways nobody anticipated. Pressure changes that affected the gathering system. Production adjustments that threw off the gas management plan. Financial assumptions that fell apart because the technical reality on the ground shifted.

That's a big part of why we built Total Stream the way we did. Bob Baldwin and I kept seeing the same blind spot. Engineers who were brilliant at their piece of the operation but had no visibility into what their decisions did to the pieces around them. Financial people who could model the numbers beautifully but didn't understand the technical chain of events that made those numbers move. The systems didn't talk to each other. And because the systems didn't talk, the people couldn't see the full picture either.

We've spent years trying to tie the technical to the financial so that a company can see the whole operation in one place. Not because it's a nice feature. Because when you can't see how the pieces interact, you make decisions that look smart in isolation and cost you money at the system level. I've watched it happen more times than I want to count.

Automating at the Wrong Level

Here's what concerns me about where the industry is headed. We're building smarter tools for individual assets. Better controllers. Better sensors. Better analytics on each well. And all of that is good. But if the person running those tools only understands the component and doesn't understand the system, we're automating the very thing that got Eric's partner in trouble. We're making it faster and easier to optimize a single well without seeing what that optimization does to everything connected to it.

Eric made this point directly. He talked about engineers coming into automation and digital deployment who aren't exposed to how the asset actually behaves. They know the software. They know the data flow. But they've never stood on a platform and traced a pressure problem from one well through the gathering system to the next jacket with their own hands and their own eyes. They've never had to spend a day on a boat figuring out why production dropped, the way Eric did.

And that matters. Because the experience Eric had on that boat, miserable as it was, is exactly what taught him how production systems interact with one another. That knowledge didn't come from a screen. It came from physically following the problem through the system until he found the one rusty valve that nobody would have thought to check. You can't get that understanding from a dashboard. You can only get it from years of asking why.

AI Without Understanding Is Just Faster Guessing

My approach is, I've always told people, AI is going to be good at augmenting what you do. But without the knowledge of what you're doing, it's worthless. And the knowledge I'm talking about isn't knowing which button to push. It's knowing what happens three systems over when you push it.

Eric confirmed what I've been saying. The pool of people with that systems-level understanding is shrinking. It's not going to expand. The experienced hands who know how every piece of a production operation talks to every other piece are retiring. And the knowledge in their heads doesn't automatically transfer to the next generation, no matter how many training programs you run.

That's the part that should worry every operator in this business. We can put the most advanced edge controller on every wellhead in the basin. We can run AI models that optimize production in real time. But if nobody on the team understands why production dropped when you optimized that new well, if nobody can trace the problem from the wellhead through the check valve to the neighboring jacket, all that technology is just making the wrong decisions faster.

Eric and I talked about this in the context of the Sensia and Total Stream partnership. Part of what we're trying to do is exactly this: put the right expertise within reach of the companies that need it most. Smaller operators who don't have a deep bench of systems thinkers on staff. Through Sensia, through New Tech Global, through the alliances we've built, the idea is that you don't have to have every expert in-house. But you have to have access to that thinking. You have to be able to phone a friend who actually understands how the pieces connect.

What This Means for the Next Five Years

Capture the connections, not just the procedures. When your experienced people document what they know, make sure they're recording how the systems interact. Not just how to operate a pump or read a controller. The procedure tells you what to do. The connections tell you what happens when you do it. That relational knowledge is the hardest to replace and the most critical to preserve. Every month we wait, more of it walks out the door.

Build cross-system visibility before you automate. If your team can see how a decision on one well affects the wells around it, the gathering system, the overall grid, you're in a position to automate safely. If they can't see those connections yet, you're not ready. Automate the parts before you understand the whole, and you'll end up producing less while spending more. Just like that check valve.

Stop treating expertise like overhead. In a downturn, the first thing a lot of companies cut is the experienced person who costs the most. I understand the math. But the person who can look at a production problem and see the connections nobody else sees is not overhead. That person is the reason your automation works. Lose them, and you'll spend three times their salary figuring out why your optimized wells are producing less than they did before you touched them.

Final Thought

One rusty check valve. That's all it was. An operator did everything right on his well, optimized it perfectly, and production dropped because one valve nobody was watching failed under the increased pressure. The problem wasn't the well. The problem was in the space between the wells, in the connection that nobody was thinking about as a system.

Eric Fidler spent a full day on a boat to find that valve. And in the process, he learned something that no amount of software can teach you by itself. He learned that the oilfield doesn't work in pieces. It works in connections. Every well, every valve, every gathering line, every pressure change is part of a conversation that's happening across the entire system all the time.

The question for this industry isn't whether the tools are smart enough. They are. The question is whether we still have people who understand the conversation well enough to know when the smart tools are getting it wrong. That's the expertise we can't afford to lose. And right now, we're losing it.

Eric Fidler spent four decades learning how production systems talk to each other, from pneumatic gauges on offshore jackets to edge-to-enterprise automation at Sensia. On Wisdom at the Wellhead, he explains why that systems-level understanding is the most valuable and most endangered thing in the oilfield right now.