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Oil and Gas Upstream
Conversation with Karen Olson, President, Olson Turner Enterprises, Houston, TX in person at the 2026 HFTC | Ep 334
00:41:38
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A
Oil and gas production is the union of natural systems with advanced science and complex engineering. Smart people across the globe create this remarkable place we call Upstream. And each day brings a new challenge. This is the Oil and Gas Upstream podcast, where we look at how these systems come together and learn from the people who make it happen.
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B
Welcome to Oil and Gas Upstream. I'm Elena Melkert, your host. Some of you know me as the former Director for Oil and Gas Upstream Research at the US Department of Energy. I retired from the doe, founded Energia Consulting, and joined the Oil and Gas Global Network as a podcast host. We're recording in person here at the 2026 Hydraulic fracturing technology Conference in Houston. And it's a very exciting, exciting venue. It's a conference that has grown over the years. And I recorded earlier on the exhibit hall, which is completely filled with vendors, and it's a very exciting. It's really good energy. People are really, really excited about what's happening in oil and gas right now. So today's guest for this at the conference here is Karen Olson. Karen is president of Olson Turner Enterprises. And Karen has been with the Hydraulic Fracturing Technology Conference for many years, including its first its start. So we're going to talk to Karen a little bit about the Hydraulic Fracturing Technology Conference and see what's going on here this past couple of days. Karen, welcome to the podcast.
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C
Oh, thank you, Alaina. It's great, great being here with you.
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B
Excellent, excellent. So I'm bragging about you as being part of the organizers for the program for this year's conference, but you've been attending or participating or even. Did you help organize the first one?
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C
Yeah, actually, I was part of the committee for the very first hydraulic fracturing conference, and that was back in 2007. So this is like the 19th year for HFTC and the time has gone by. I can't believe that.
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B
I know.
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C
Can you believe that? It was back in 2007, and I just remember it was actually Steve Holdage.
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B
Steven. Linda, that's right. That's right.
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C
Who I miss dearly. He gave me. He called me up and said, hey, I'm thinking about starting a conference on just hydraulic fracturing. He goes, I want you to be on the committee and help us get it going. And I said, I'd love to. And the first one we held was in College station back in January 2007
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B
at Texas a and M. At Texas
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C
A and M. And at the time, you know, Spe thought, oh, maybe 400 people would show up for the conference, first year, you know, first year, you know, get it going. We actually had 800 people show up that very first year.
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B
Oh my gosh.
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C
800, 800. And so we outgrew College Station just with that first year. I mean, we had people outside, you know, sitting on the ground outside, you know, eating their po boy sandwiches. I don't know if people remember that, but it was a great success. And we started off with keynote speakers kicking off the event and then people giving presentations.
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B
Was it a multi day event or was it a one day or what was it?
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C
I don't quite remember. I think it was two days, but I could be wrong.
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B
Okay, but it wasn't like a half day thing.
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C
No, it wasn't a half day thing.
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B
It was definitely a conference.
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C
It was going to be a conference with technical papers. And the unique thing about it was we were going to just focus on hydraulic fracturing and that we were going to have these keynote speakers that could come and talk and they wouldn't have to necessarily write a paper.
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B
Very good, very good.
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C
And we still sort of follow that format to this day that if there's something that's really cool happening and we want a keynote speaker to come and talk about it, they don't have to have a paper to be a keynote speaker here, even at today's conference. So.
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D
Right.
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B
So it's been continuously every year up until here 2026. So who is our keynote speaker?
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C
Well, this year we had a special keynote speaker at our opening session. We were blessed to have Chris Wright come and speak. So we had our Secretary of Energy who reports, you know, to Donald Trump as our keynote speaker.
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B
And we see him on the news every time the President is talking about energy. He's always turning the tris and says saying something.
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C
We see him on the news all the time. He's been involved with everything going on in the world.
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B
And of course he's a friend of the conference. Right. I mean, before he was Secretary of Energy, he was a producer, right?
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C
Yeah, well, before he was Secretary of Energy, he was the CEO of Liberty Energy Services and he would. We actually, he would be our moderator. Sort of like you played the role this year for the panel. Chris would always be our moderator. It was Steve Holdich until Steve passed away. And then we asked Chris to step in. And so I think he just really loves this conference.
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B
I think he does.
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C
And I think he realizes that he has a lot of friends here that care deeply for him. And so I think he really enjoyed being here. He gave a great Upbeat. Talk to the audience. You know, we had over 2,000 people probably listening to him talk yesterday morning, right?
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B
Yeah, yeah.
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C
And he just, you know, what I heard him say was it was because of the shale revolution and all the work that everybody had done in the room yesterday that, you know, gave us our energy independence and has made a difference, you know, just worldwide.
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B
That's right. He talked about the role of oil and gas, the need for making energy available to all people in the world. Most people don't live the way we do. Energy poverty is very real and you don't have to be limited to any particular. If you got some kind of energy, you should use it, use it all. You know, don't have any restrictions. Some energy forms are more effective, more energy dense than others, have more power in them. So it's important to be able to use what you have and be open to that portfolio because the bottom line is you want to lift people up. Right. And you can't. If you have worries about energy, it's not going to be available to you. So Chris is very articulate on all forms of energy, welcoming them all, but really being honest about what we need to move forward. Because there are so many people who don't have what they need to have, even a good lifestyle, much less a lifestyle that we. That we enjoy.
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C
And Chris is just so smart and fully understands all these different types of energies. You know, whether it be, you know, hydrocarbons, you know, nuclear. Yeah, right. Even fusion.
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B
That's right.
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C
We were talking about fusion and geothermal and what's happening in the geothermal world right now, which is exciting. Coal, I mean, just so knowledgeable, which I think that's a rarity that we have somebody at that position that really understands.
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B
Absolutely. And then you mentioned the opening panel that immediately followed Chris's keynote. And I moderated that panel and it was a very rich experience. We had Dr. Jennifer Miskimmins. Right.
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C
Petrol.
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B
She's the Petrol. The head of the Petroleum Department at Colorado School of Mines.
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C
She's also the department head.
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B
Yeah, the department head. And she's also the 2026 President of Society of Petroleum Engineers. And then we had James Ritchie with Chevron. With Exxon.
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C
Exxon, that's right.
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B
And we had Burley Bourgeois. Chevron.
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C
Chevron.
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B
And then we had Assistant Secretary Kyle House. Feet. Did I say it correctly?
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C
Housevet.
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House. Fett.
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C
House. Fet.
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B
He is the assistant secretary for the newly renamed office. The new name is Hydrocarbons and Geothermal Energy Office. And he's the assistant secretary for that office, that's the office that I was formerly part of when it was called the Office of Fossil Energy. And then during the last administration for that short time it was named Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management, something like that. But I love the new name Hydrocarbon and Geoscience Energy Office because it really speaks to the transferability of skills of petroleum engineers, petroleum and geologists and really brings open, breaks open, if you will, the subsurface, no pun intended, the subsurface to be able to harvest the natural resources that we are blessed to be endowed with for the betterment of mankind. I mean, this is really, really fundamental. So Kyle had a lot of interesting messages there talking about the new office. What are some of the messages that stood out for you?
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C
Yeah, from Kyle. That's another amazing person that we're so blessed to have working reporting directly to Chris as Assistant Energy. Some of the messages that I hear Kyle talked about is now we're going to have centers of Excellence. Centers of excellence, Right. So all the national labs report through Kyle's organization. Right. That's part of family.
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B
So there is an organization. There is an organization at the Department of Energy to which all the national labs report. Let me just give that quick tutorial. Some of them report to the Office of Science. Some of them are legacy laboratories from the time of the Manhattan Project and into the present. But the lab that does report to Chris directly is the National Energy Technology Laboratory and it is navtil. It is the only laboratory that is government owned and government operated. Which means when we have questions of national import that you want to have federal employees that are fully vetted and secure can secure the information. That is the role that the National Energy Technology Laboratory plays. We saw that in the Deepwater Horizon there were things that could not be in the public domain or while investigations were going on. And the whole notion that we had the capabilities of a national laboratory to provide some insights on how to control this wild. Well, so that was. I was the person who the Department of Energy stood up the President's Commission and sunset it and all of that. And I was embedded with the commission and the role of the national laboratories was really fabulous. But none like the one that was government owned and government operated federal employees being really on point there.
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C
So now he's restructuring them so that they have specific center of excellence for different hydrocarbons, right?
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B
That's right.
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C
So like the one in Morgantown, Right. West Virginia. It's being inaugurated, I think tomorrow Thursday. What is tomorrow? February 6th? I think maybe February 5th. Today's the 4th, anyway, and that's going to be for coal, the center of Excellence for coal.
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B
Right.
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C
And then the lab in Pittsburgh is going to be the center of excellence for hydrocarbons.
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B
Right, right. And that's the one that basically I want to say, reports to Kyle.
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C
Okay.
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B
Yeah. All the other labs, as you said. I think. All right. I think I got confused that you were thinking. Talk, thinking or saying that the labs reported to Kyle, but the reports report to the national laboratory. We're recording, sir. That's quite all right. I think we were talking about the national laboratories reporting to Chris or Kyle. I wanted to make it clear that the report to Chris, Secretary of Energy, Chris Wright, under the jurisdiction of different assistant secretaries, but the one that reports to Kyle, Assistant Secretary for hydrocarbons and geoscience, Geothermal energy, is the National Energy Technology Laboratory, which has more than one physical site.
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C
Right.
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B
One is Morgantown and one is Pittsburgh. So, yeah, that's what you were.
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C
So that's where they're going to be. Do the center of Excellences.
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B
Yeah.
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C
And the other thing that they're looking at DOE is they're having workshops right now. So they have a workshop this week and their focus is going to be looking at, you know, how do we increase recovery out of these unconventional reservoirs?
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B
Absolutely, absolutely. Periodically, the department will seek advice from. Not advice, seek opinion. Opinion and comments from particular subject matter experts on particular areas. And so that's what these meetings are about. But anybody is welcome to reach out to the Department of Energy and use their authority as a taxpayer to share what their thoughts are, their interests are, and what they think the government should be spending time on. But that can be on any topic. And of course, these focused conversations are about energy, and this one's going to be oil.
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C
And I think that's great because, you know, 65%. Right. Or more of our energy comes from oil and gas. And I always believe personally that we should always continuously be doing some form of research to advance it and not just assume that we know everything because we don't know everything. So I think the workshops for gathering ideas and opinions on how can we increase recovery, current recoveries are low in these unconventionals right there in the 10%.
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B
That's right.
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C
Range.
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B
10% is, you know, in that right range. 20% would be like fabulous.
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C
Yeah.
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B
The goal would be to get to what we can get from conventional, which is, you know, 60% at the most. And even then you're not 100%, you're not 80%.
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C
Right.
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B
So if our goal is to get to conventional levels. You know, that's a low, that's a low goal.
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C
And it's, and it's, it's not easy. I mean, if it was easy, we'd already be doing it. Right. So to get another 10% or to double what we're currently making out of these unconventional shale type reservoirs is going to take a lot of ingenuity technologies, probably technologies that we don't have, better understanding of the subsurface even further.
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B
So. Right.
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C
And then there's another workshop the following week, I think, on produce water.
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B
Produce water, that was the topic.
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C
And you know, because there's a lot, you know, a lot of water gets produced with these unconventional. Especially out in West Texas, you know, they produce about 20 million barrels of produced water.
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B
You talk about Permian in the Permian.
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C
Yes. And so right now a good portion of it just gets disposed of.
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B
Yeah, yeah. Right, yeah. And the challenge is that that is not sustainable because the volumes are really, really much higher than we would have expected. Right, right.
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C
And it's, it's in the part of our country where it's arid and dry and water is a sacred resource.
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B
So.
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C
Absolutely. Even though this water is produced water, maybe there's things that we, ways that we can treat it and put it back in the environment to good use versus it just being sent down a disposal well and gone forever.
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B
Right. Well, in the first Trump administration, one of his initiatives was that exact thing that water is so important. It's actually a national resource that should be protected and also should be part of a strategy to ensure it's just too important to everything for it to be left to chance in just the market that there should be some. So they had an initiative to look at non traditional sources of water, including produced water, and try to identify some technologies that could transfer or change that produced water from a waste to more of a resource. And then there are some states that are actually in drought that are, you know, long term drought that are looking at these kinds of things. So using produced water in non oil field uses is kind of something that people have been working on for some time. And the notion that water can has to be moved from where it's produced to where it possibly could be used is there's some initiatives in different states, New Mexico, Texas, for changing produced water, treating it in ways that are cost effective and make them available for other uses. And it gave rise to a new industry called midstream water. It's just that transport industry and the trading industry and taking it from what it is, where it is, and making it to what you want and what
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C
you need it is. And then some. And also in some of these produce waters, there's rare minerals in them, too.
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B
That's right. Lithium is one that comes from. Yeah.
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C
Lithium, yeah. You look at, you know, say up in the Marcellus or even in the Haynesville, the produce water there, there's enough lithium and, you know, enough in the parts per billion that it could be commercial. And then that just sort of reduces our reliability on countries like China for those rare earth minerals. If we can get those technologies off the ground and get them into more of a commercial. Yeah, I mean, there's little lab test field trials taking place, but we need to scale them up.
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B
That's right. That's right. Yeah.
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C
Which is always hard to do.
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B
Which is. That's the trick, right? That is the trick. But we're good at. We're good at hard challenges. Right. The energy sector, the oil and gas sector is good at trying to.
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C
The oil and gas sector, to me, is one of the most creative sectors I've ever worked in. You just tell them what the issue, what the problem is and say, here's what we got to try to figure out and somebody's going to figure it out.
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B
That's right. That's right.
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C
And that's what's so great about this.
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B
Sometimes incrementally and sometimes with a big leap.
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C
Yeah.
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B
And you just never know where the good answers are going to come from. One of the things that Kyle said that I was really excited about is that while it's not the government's dollar that's going to be subsidizing the industry, the government is interested in spending money on cracking those difficult nuts, using the power of the national laboratories to kind of figure stuff out, working with industry to move it up the TRL and into commercial space, and then get out and let you make the money. Money. Right. That's. That's the way that's the proper partnership.
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C
Yep. That's what he talked about, about forming partnerships to unlock, you know, these next big issues that we're trying to figure out.
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B
Yeah, yeah. And.
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C
And we. They did it in the past. We had the hydraulic fracturing test sites 1 and 2, I guess, back in 2012, 24.
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B
So that was one of the. The elements of my research portfolio when I was the director of oil and gas upstream. And that was. We had 17 field laboratories at 19 sites. And the objective there was to partner with industry. And of course, I think this is a wonderful example of what's possible. While the government initiated these projects, paying 80%. Right. 80 cents on the dollar for the investment, the industry partner for the 20% formed partnerships with all the other companies in the area so that they contributed way more than their 20% to the cracking of these tough challenges in the sense of taking real technologies, putting them in the field, and really monitoring in a scientific way before hydraulic fracturing during and after and gathering all that information. And as each laboratory came into play, different kinds of reservoirs were explored. And it's just a huge contribution. That was just the very best partnership. So the law says that the government can spend up to 80, 80% on these projects. But it was the market that led the companies to come together and bring students so much more money. They did so much more knowledge science.
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C
Yeah, I was, I was part of that first test site.
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B
Were you HFTs1?
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C
Yeah. In terms of identifying, you know, what, what are the things we were trying to understand, you know, what were, what were the unknowns we still struggling with?
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B
Some of our listeners aren't really familiar with the intricacies of hydraulic fracturing. So what were some of those research questions that you.
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C
Yeah, some of the fundamental research questions we were trying to understand was, you know, well, how high are the fracture really growing? You know, so let's get a good handle on the fracture height. And I call it the billion dollar question is, you know, we always pump water with sand in it, and we don't quite understand where exactly the sand is going. You know, we can track the hydraulic for fracture, the fracture that we're generating.
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B
Right.
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C
At least especially the length of it. But where does the proppant end up? Does it just sort of fall out near wellbore? Does it make tortuous paths and go all over the place or where's it going and proppant?
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B
Explain to some of the newbies what proppant is. Why do we care about proppant?
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C
Yeah, so we call it proppant, but basically proppant is just sand. Sort of like, you know, when you go to the beach, it's just sand. And we typically use regional sands these days is big in the Permian Basin. It's typically what we call a hundred mesh, which is just a very fine sand. It's sort of like the sand you see in Destin, Florida at the beaches there.
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B
Yeah, at the beach. Yeah, it's like beach sand.
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C
It's like beach sand. And that's what we pump with water.
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B
And why do we do that? Why do we put proppant in there.
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C
Yeah. So when we crack the formation rock open with pressure, so we're pumping into it with water, and the rock will just crack open a little bit. And I'm talking very little, like maybe 0.2 inches wide. We then follow in with water with sand added to it, such that when we shut down and they take the pressure off the rock, that fracture is going to close. Just because of the thick of the weight of the earth just pushing down on it, it's going to close. Well, it closes on that sand, and it helps leave that fracture open.
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B
So it props it open. It prop.
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C
Props it open. That's why we call it proppant.
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B
That's right. That's right. So I had asked you about some of the good questions, research questions, and you talked about trying to track where the proppant went where, which meant where do we actually have a productive fracture? What are some of the other questions that we explored in the early days?
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C
Yeah, the other thing is, you know, we're drilling horizontal wells and so. And we tried to be efficient and will complete part of that horizontal well in sections that may be 200 foot long. 300, 400, 500. So trying to find out.
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B
Gotcha.
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C
How long a piece of that horizontal lateral can we complete at one time, and how many holes in the casing and what size they should be. But we can effectively treat all of them. Get a fracture to grow out. Because we'll drill a horizontal well and we're creating fractures that are roughly perpendicular to that wellbore.
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B
Yeah, so like this. So we're doing this way.
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C
Yeah. So they're like transverse.
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B
That's right.
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C
Or perpendicular to it. And, you know, we want uniform fractures along the whole length of that lateral. So it drains these. This rock is so tight. I mean, this is sort of like. I don't want to say it's like granite, like your countertops, but it's basically.
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B
It's moving in that direction. It's not there. It's not that tight, but it's not. Beat sand.
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C
Yes. And if you don't have a fracture right there, we're not going to produce the hydrocarbons out of it because it does have oil and gas in it, or maybe sometimes just gas. But you have to create a fracture for that fluid to flow into and then produce up your wellbore.
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B
It's kind of like if you had a sheet of glass and then you, like, take like a hammer to it and then all these little fractures come out. And so all of a sudden you can actually get very small molecules or, you know, you can get water molecules, oil molecules, gas molecules through those little. And create little networks, if you will, in that reservoir that was very tight. It's not glass, but it's in that direction of being as we mean when we say tight.
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C
And that's a good point. And the thing that's interesting is that every reservoir rock that we have fractures differently.
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B
That's right.
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C
So what you just described with the glass, that's how I used to describe the Fayetteville Shale, which is, oh, my gosh, across Arkansas.
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B
And it's huge.
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C
It's huge. It's a 6 TCF reservoir.
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B
Wow. 6 cubic feet of gas.
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C
6 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. And when I was the completion expert for that field, and we did these large block experiments where we would take outcrop of this shale and we would put it under stress and then fracture it just to see what the fractures look like. And it literally looked like I took a hammer and I hit tempered glass and it was just shattered.
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B
Wow. Yes, yes.
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C
So, and that was, I guess, the second unconventional reservoir discovered in the U.S. right. Right. The first was the Barnett.
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B
Right.
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C
Fort Worth area, sort of the Landman stuff.
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B
That's right.
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C
And then the second was the Fayetteville, which. The Fayetteville. I don't think many people realize it. It is the Barnett.
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B
I did not know that. No, I.
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C
It is just. It's the same horizon. It's just in Arkansas.
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B
Yeah.
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C
Versus Texas on there. So.
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B
Yeah, no, I. And I did not know that. I worked when we started getting into hydraulic fracturing in a big way. It wasn't until the Marcellus that I gin engaged. So, so, so, so the Fayetteville. What are. And so what are the. When did the Permian come in?
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C
Now, Permian came in, got hot later. So the, the Fayetteville, it was discovered in 2001.
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B
Okay. Okay.
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C
And, you know, in its heyday, they were drilling and completing 500 wells a year just in that field alone on there. And then the Marcellus started picking up somewhat in the Haynesville. And at the time, I think a lot of the unconventionals were focused on gas. Natural gas.
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B
Right, right. Because you need very little permanent. You need very small fractures and you can get a good volume.
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C
Yes.
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B
Oil is thicker.
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C
Right.
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B
It's not syrup, but it's not, you know, water either, and it's not gas.
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C
So it's more viscous.
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B
Viscous.
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C
So I think people in the beginning were more focused on natural gas. It's easier to flow through these tight Rocks and, you know, and with these fractures that we would place in them. So it was actually a little bit later, before the Permian, that people realized, hey, we could be doing these in oil reservoirs as well. And then things started kicking off by companies like Pioneer and. And such, Diamondback and those companies out in the Permian. And now the Permian just dominates. It does, at least on the oil side. Well, even on the natural gas that they produce there, too. And then we have the Marcellus, which is just a phenomenal reservoir up in the Appalachia Basin, which, interesting enough, it was the DOE GRI Gas Research Institute back in the 70s, that realized that there was so much gas in the Devonian. They called it in the Devonian.
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B
Devonian. That's right.
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C
The Devonian shale.
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B
That's right.
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C
Which was really the Marcellus.
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B
I did not know that. Yes, I stopped thinking about the Devonian, so. Absolutely.
- [29:19]
C
Yeah. So I did my master's thesis on the Devonian shale in West Virginia in 1986, and it was how to optimize those wells, those completions, how to frack them back in 1986. And that research, this is with Holditch and Associates. Steve Holdich. So that's how I met Steve that long ago. He took that research and got a grant from GRI for $5 million to go out and optimize and do the fracs in the Marcellus back in the day. And the only thing we were missing back at that point that we hadn't connected was the combination of fracs with horizontal wells.
- [30:02]
B
That's right.
- [30:03]
C
It was taking those two technologies and pulling them together.
- [30:06]
B
Right. And the Department of Energy very early spent time and effort at the National Laboratories to both understand the nature of fracturing. Natural fractures. Natural fractures, in order to kind of get some parameters related to inducing fractures.
- [30:26]
C
Yep.
- [30:27]
B
Then also horizontal wells in tighter formations, I mean, they were still conventional reservoirs, but they were a little bit tighter. And could you just contact more reservoir through a horizontal well as opposed to drilling a bunch of vertical well. And so there was a lot of early stage work that was done by the Department of Energy, but it was industry who put them together.
- [30:50]
C
Yes.
- [30:51]
B
And that is just the magic.
- [30:53]
C
Yeah.
- [30:53]
B
And actually it was just technology, but when you put it together, that's when you've got a real contribution.
- [30:59]
C
And that's what's so great. There are so many independent oil and gas companies here, and they work well with the labs, they work well at the universities. And then we have the majors that come in behind and take over everything. I say that it was actually 1994. I worked for Mobil in Midland and we drilled, I would say some of the first commercial horizontal wells in West Texas. And it was in the parks Devonian, it was carbonate dolomitic, only 30 foot thick. And we drilled 4,000 foot laterals. And this was before we didn't have the plugs like the composite plugs that
- [31:42]
B
we have today to direct the flow
- [31:46]
C
to be able to break the horizontal well up into, you know, different sections. So we did a limited entry down the whole lateral open hole pre drilled liner at 150 barrels a minute, 28% acid, my goodness. But we made 8 million a day gas wells.
- [32:02]
B
Wow.
- [32:03]
C
Back in the day, there you are.
- [32:05]
B
So that's right.
- [32:06]
C
That was 1994.
- [32:07]
B
Very good.
- [32:09]
C
We just couldn't get mobile to do more. You know, we evaluated all the fields and said, oh, we got all this horizontal application and all the money at that point for a lot of companies was going overseas.
- [32:21]
B
Right, right.
- [32:22]
C
And oil production in the US was dropping.
- [32:25]
B
Right, right.
- [32:26]
C
So.
- [32:26]
B
And I always have to say that some of that work gave insights that led to being able to work with shale because dolomite is not like beach sand. I mean it is not. It's precipitated in place. And so it's hard.
- [32:43]
C
Yeah.
- [32:43]
B
And so maybe it's not granite, but it is hard. And so it does. And it traps, it's got pores. So even, I mean it's not granite, so it has pores, it's sedimentary. So being able to make successful horizontal wells and then where else can I try? This great technology led to that experimentation with the, with the shales.
- [33:06]
C
Yeah, well, you know, in West Texas everybody talks to each other. And so when those wells became, you know, commercial, next thing you know, Texaco had five rigs right next door to it.
- [33:18]
B
That's right, that's right.
- [33:20]
C
And a lot of people will say, oh, it was the Bryant G field, which was Texaco's field that came up with doing the commercial horizontal wells. But it was actually the Park Stevonian first. But we just had one rig.
- [33:31]
B
Okay.
- [33:31]
C
Over to Texaco's five rigs.
- [33:33]
B
That's right, that's right. So the sound of the guns. Where are we going to get? We're going to be successful. That's great.
- [33:39]
C
I think that's the big question now. What do we do next? Yeah, yeah, right. And that's where I think the DOE is pushing for now. We have all these horizontal Wells across the U.S. what do we do? How do we increase the recovery?
- [33:53]
B
What Are some of the research questions that come to your mind now, you know, you have such a history, right. And now, like what kinds of things should, you know, all of us be thinking about in terms of the new research questions? Some hard, some harder, some hardest. And, you know, different, I want to say, different points of view, different entities have different capabilities in certain kinds of research questions, whatever. And, and when you think about perhaps the role of AI into bringing in all the new knowledge, maybe there, is there a query that we could give to the AI about what some of these research questions might be? I don't know, I'm just making this up. Just occurred to me.
- [34:40]
C
Well, I think AI will play a part because it can query so much data and maybe, you know, pull stuff out that, you know, a human we can't see or get to. But my big question that I still haven't answered, and I've been thinking about it for 15, 16 years now, is I still don't know where the proppant is really going.
- [35:04]
B
That's true.
- [35:05]
C
So I still, and I like simple questions.
- [35:08]
B
Yes.
- [35:08]
C
Because it's those fundamental questions that if you can answer those, then it unlocks so much more to go with it. So I think if we can understand how the proppant is moving or the sand is moving through these fractures, then maybe we can do it better.
- [35:25]
B
Right? Absolutely.
- [35:26]
C
On there. So that's, that's my, in the back of my mind, I still want to figure that out.
- [35:32]
B
We have some approximation type technologies. Right. And give us a general direction. Explain that a little bit so that people don't think. We really don't know at all where it's going.
- [35:41]
C
Right. Yeah. So, yeah, we have proppant transport. We can calculate equations based on fluid dynamics and fluid movements. We do have technologies where we could put a little tracer with the sand and run a log in an offset well and maybe see it show up or something like that. So we do have some general technologies out there that we can do these days. It's just not real. It may give you a point in space, but it won't give you a three dimensional picture. I sort of had this vision of sending little microchips down there that have a little, little antenna on them and they say, oh, it gives like GPS coordinates.
- [36:26]
B
Yeah.
- [36:27]
C
And it says, oh, I'm right here. Yeah, I'm right here. And by the way, I got this much pressure on me and it's this temperature down here and.
- [36:33]
B
Yeah.
- [36:33]
C
And so we can map it.
- [36:34]
B
Yeah. Specifically, the closest I got to that in the Research portfolio was. There was a. The embedded in the proppant were these little hollow spheres. They had a little. I don't even know what kind of technology it was. Like a little thing would send out a signal.
- [36:54]
C
Yeah, yeah. They were like pop rocks.
- [36:56]
B
That's right. Like pop rocks.
- [36:57]
C
Yeah. Sort of like bikini pop rocks.
- [36:59]
B
And then you can. And then you could. At the surface you could hear that signal. So you could approximate where it was going.
- [37:05]
C
Yeah.
- [37:06]
B
But very expensive.
- [37:09]
C
Yeah.
- [37:10]
B
And what's the other part of it?
- [37:11]
C
I don't know if it's the same one. But I, I did look at that technology and you'd have to have like a fiber optic geophones in a well to listen.
- [37:20]
B
You had to listen.
- [37:20]
C
That's right, listen for. But the, the thing that I saw was I'm practical. I want to make sure that it's going to work when I go out and pump it if possible. So we did a yard test. Cuz I said, well have you ever run this pop rocks through a blender and a pump?
- [37:38]
B
Oh my gosh. I didn't think about that.
- [37:40]
C
See real life.
- [37:42]
B
That's right.
- [37:43]
C
Because you have to place it down whole and you're gonna place it by pumping it through a blender tub. It's gonna get swirled around with water and then it's gonna go through a pump and then down the wellbore out into the fracture. And so we did a yard test. Well, they all popped. Oh, they just going through the blender and the oil field Hardy. No, it wasn't oil filled. Hardy.
- [38:05]
B
So yeah, so that was one of the things. When I very first started in the oil business, I was with Getty Oil Co. And the issue there was there'd be new kinds of logging tools. This is just new. Right, right. And the question was all, is it oil field Hardy? Can you put it in the back of a truck and will it survive when you go bumping down the road? Yeah. So those are the, those are the of kind kinds of things. Now we're, we're far better than that now. But look how long it's taken.
- [38:36]
C
Right.
- [38:36]
B
I mean I'm in the business 40 plus years already. So those are the kinds of things. It does take some time, but we're seeing, we're seeing technology develop in exponential fashion as opposed to a linear fashion.
- [38:49]
C
Yeah. There's some really cool new technologies that people are trying right now. You know, you hear ExxonMobil talk about their pet Coke.
- [38:58]
B
Yes.
- [38:58]
C
You know, pumping in and they're seeing, you know, I don't know, 10, 15%, you know, increase in production.
- [39:08]
B
So that was an awkward ending, I guess. Another case of user error. Carrion and I were having a great
- [39:16]
D
conversation and for some reason the recording stopped and I didn't know and we
- [39:20]
B
kept going and so But I do
- [39:23]
D
appreciate Karen joining us for this interview at the 2026 Hydraulic Fracturing Technology Conference in the Woodlands, Texas. It was a great event and Karen was a great guest. Her specialty is championing infield solutions for onshore oil and onshore and offshore projects across the US and in the North Sea for major multinational oil and gas industry leaders. She has 36 years she has 36 years of experience in senior leadership and technical roles for various operators on across the US And Norway. Her resume goes on and on and she's had so many fabulous accomplishments. In addition to founding Olson Turner Enterprises, such as the co founder and chair for SPE's Women in Hydraulic Fracturing, she's the first female field engineer for the Western Company of North America. She was honored as the 2019 SPE International Sustainable Sustainability and Stewardship Awardee. She championed the first energy sustainability program in oil and gas industry history. She completed the first commercial horizontal wells in the parks, Devonian Shale for mobile oil. Karen is recognized as an industry leader with 16 publications and numerous organizational positions including SPE Dist Distinguished Lecture I appreciate the time Karen took in talking with me at the 2026 Hydraulic Fracturing Technology Conference. Thank you Karen. And thank you everyone for listening. This is Elena Melkert, your host. More next time.
- [41:07]
E
Thanks for listening to oggn, the world's largest and most listened to podcast network for the oil and energy industry. If you like this show, leave us a review and then go to oggn.com to learn about all our other shows. And don't forget to sign up for our weekly newsletter. This show has been a production of the Oil and Gas Global Network.