Major oil companies and smaller shale producers including Chevron Corp. , Devon Energy Corp. , Baker Hughes and EOG Resources Inc. are recruiting computer scientists, who develop algorithms and other tech tools.
At Devon’s WellCon center—short for well construction—in Oklahoma City, a small team of engineers and scientists monitor every well the company is drilling and fracking across the U.S.
From several screens, Kyle Haustveit, a 28-year-old completions engineer—he has a bachelor’s in petroleum engineering—watches the company’s “Showboat” development, where five rigs are drilling 24 wells in a complex project in Kingfisher County, Okla., that will tap multiple layers of rock simultaneously.
One screen displays the progress as a 2-mile-long horizontal well is drilled 10,000 feet underground. A graph tracks the budgetary impacts in real time using customized software. If the drill bit goes outside the sweet spot where the company believes oil and gas to be—an area sometimes no more than 10 feet across—dollar signs tick up and a call is made to workers in the field to adjust equipment.
Another screen tracks four fracking crews working within a square mile. Mr. Haustveit is collecting data on how the sand, water and chemicals the crews pump to release oil and gas from the rock affect the pressure on the other wells. He will feed it, along with microseismic and acoustic data captured by fiber optic cables, into a program that will use machine learning to determine the best way to frack to produce the most oil as quickly as possible.
“I grew up in a small town in North Dakota, so I thought all oil and gas happened in the field, “ Mr. Haustveit said. “I didn’t have a clue that this is what it would be like.”
The center was manned by about 80 people monitoring 40 rigs before the 2014 oil bust. Today, roughly a dozen people monitor the company’s 21 active rigs. Tony Vaughn, Devon’s chief operating officer, said the transition was difficult but has improved the company’s operational efficiency.
“It required a lot of people with an old-school mind-set to leave the company, frankly,” he said.
Devon has around 3,100 employees, down from 5,500 in December 2014. The company laid off 300 workers in April.