Wade vs Peter: Music, Movies & Oil & Gas Year-End Special

Peter Brecht00:00

All right, welcome to Local Energy. My name is Peter Brecht and I'm here with Wade Spear. We're back. It's just the two of us today. Man, I'm so excited. We're wrapping up 2025, heading into 2026. What a great, it's been fun. I don't know, this has been a good time.

Wade00:17

It's been a crazy year. It's been a year of growth for me, for sure.

Peter Brecht00:22

Yeah,

Yeah, I've, so many changes, my family, we've moved, or I'm like third year into this new venture. And I'm like, okay, let's do, man, I've got to talk to some great people. Just yesterday, I was talking to another guy in oil and gas that, has a podcast and videos and he just hit a million views. And I'm like, I'm like, all these crazy people that we've gotten to like connect with and talk to, and then, I'm not on the show, but off the show too, but.

Wade00:47

Right.

Peter Brecht00:50

So anyways, I'm like, I'm like, I feel good today because like it's just you and me like we've we're back to what we right where we started and so I what I did was I wanted to go through like where we were at the beginning and kind of just share a couple things that have happened so by the numbers okay so Phil Nicholson winked at me on Twitter okay and that wink honestly it ranks closely behind me meaning Bill Murray

Wade00:51

That's awesome.

Where we started.

Peter Brecht01:16

We just rounded out, so we're eight months of recording. Okay, our first recording happened on April 30th. Okay, we never published that one because it was so bad. But I think I'm going to just for fun, just so people can see like how much we've changed. Okay. We're sitting at almost 5,000 followers on TikTok, hoping to hit about thousand followers on YouTube by the end of the year.

Wade01:23

Okay.

Okay.

That's right. Yeah, yeah.

Wow, alright.

Peter Brecht01:43

We've defined 24 oilfield abbreviations, reinforced half a dozen oilfield superstitions, and talked with 14 people. Okay, we've interviewed 14 people this year. Pretty good. I watched Interstellar, okay, not just once but twice, and I actually, and I like it now. I like it now, I like it now. Yeah, the second time, the first time was terrible, the second time I was like, I can understand it, and I probably will watch it a third time by the end of the year.

Wade01:51

Okay. No kid.

And you didn't fully appreciate it. Oh, okay, that's right. The second viewing, you liked it better. All right, yeah.

Okay. Okay.

Peter Brecht02:13

I saw Tombstone finally and smartest guys in the room, I still haven't seen Tenet. Okay.

Wade02:14

Alright.

Okay,

I watched it on the plane last week again.

Peter Brecht02:21

Okay, so,

How many times for you?

Wade02:25

Can it?

I've gotta be Mirren 15 times. It's not like, like it's great. I love it. But like it's the whole, like it just draws me in. Like the action of it and the, just the complexity of it. I love it. I love it.

Peter Brecht02:26

My gosh. All right.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, alright.

Well, I might have to watch it then, we'll see. I'm still out on it. What I've realized is this

Wade02:44

Give it a shot.

Give it a shot before your next interstellar watch. All right.

Peter Brecht02:47

This

Show has shown me how few movies I've actually seen. We've talked about 15 movies on this show and I've only seen, what, three of them. So I have a lot of watching to do, all right?

Wade02:51

Yeah, I'm blown away by your lack of depth on movie watching.

Okay.

Right.

Okay. Well,

I got to tell you too, it's funny, because from our conversation, like with my kids, my kids go to like a classical education school, right. And so they have like a canon that they have to read in element or middle school. And it's like the Odyssey and like all of these different things. And so I was thinking like, my daughter is a senior this year, she's getting ready to go off to college. And so like, I told him, I was like, all right, I need to get you guys like caught up on on movies, like movies from my generation that are amazing. So like, we're kind of going through a canon of movies that I feel are like,

Peter Brecht03:20

Yeah.

Wade03:34

All right, you got to see these before you go off to college.

Peter Brecht03:36

Yeah,

It's funny, I had a very similar education. It's like, it's called Classical Academy where I lived, it was the school, but basically same thing. You study all like the Iliad and Homer and like all the philosophers and yeah, and you learn, you learn like Latin and Greek and then you forget all of it by the time you go to college. But I think that's a reason why I haven't seen a lot of movies. To this day, I still haven't seen The Godfather.

Wade03:42

Okay, yep.

Yep. Dante and yeah, all this crazy stuff.

Okay.

Peter Brecht04:01

And I refuse to watch it. And I think it's because everyone told me at 18, you're like, have to see the goth. And I'm like, I'm not doing it. So I'm sticking to my guns on that one.

Wade04:01

Okay.

A lot

Of people say that Godfather Part 2 is even better than Godfather 1.

Peter Brecht04:14

And I'll never find out. Isn't that amazing?

Wade04:16

That's so weird.

I don't understand why. Why? It's just pride at that point. You're like, just stubbornness. Okay. All right.

Peter Brecht04:22

It is. It's 100 % pride. That's all it is. It's

A running joke with some people that used to be my mentors, I suppose. But anyways, but I'll watch Tenen. Okay, so I've got a lot I wanted to talk about. I have a full page of notes and we're not gonna get to all of it, obviously, because one thing you brought up before...

We hit record was the Spotify raft. And so I want to hear your Spotify raft and I want to compare it to mine and see if I can maybe find a good suggestion for, the new year.

Wade04:44

Right.

Okay, so my Spotify rep, I'm trying to think here. My top five artists were Zach Bryan was number one. Good Neighbors was number two. I think Will Dorado was number three. Local, I'm almost 100 % certain they're from Tulsa. And then I've got, who else? Mount Joy was number five.

Peter Brecht04:57

Yeah.

Okay.

Okay.

Wade05:22

And Dylan Gossett, think was number four. So like alternative country. So yeah, it was like, yeah alternative country type. Yeah, it's funny though, cause I shared it with my kids and so my kids shared theirs with me and we were looking at things like my son shared his listening age. He's like 47. It's his listening age and mine was 26. And so it was, it's kind of funny there, you know.

Peter Brecht05:24

Okay. Okay.

Okay.

Yeah, yeah. Whoa.

Yeah,

That's mine's 56. That's what and like my wife she hers is like exclusively rap like hardcore rap like 50 cent and it's just it's a whole and it's not my genre but like I married her so we listen to it every now and then right if like when the kids aren't around, but my my so my Spotify list is so my top listen was mark knopfler and I don't know if you heard of them at dire straights. He's

Wade05:50

You

Okay.

Right.

Never heard of them. No idea.

Peter Brecht06:12

Yeah, he's an incredible guitarist. Back in, I think he like, like mid eighties is when he started, but I listen to him all the time. Maylene and the Sons of Disaster is my second and they're kind of a, it's a metal band, like country, like if I'm like working out, I listen to them. And then I have, you're gonna hate me for this one, but Coldplay is my third.

Wade06:19

Okay.

Okay, alright.

Go play that, it's fine.

Peter Brecht06:33

I know, it's embarrassing. All their old stuff though,

Like none of their new stuff, it's like all from high school. And then I have Pink Floyd and then John Foreman. So John Foreman's like a solo musician. He plays in a band called Switchfoot from California. So those are my top five, yeah, Switchfoot. So he's the lead singer, but he does his own thing every now and then and he's got some great solo stuff.

Wade06:39

Okay.

Okay, now I know switch mode. Okay.

I think he has

Like a podcast out that my wife listens to. I think he has like a super popular podcast out.

Peter Brecht06:57

Okay, he might. He's just... Okay.

He very well could. The guy... His dad was a pastor at the church that we used to go to here in Carlsbad. And, not a mega church, but like... he's just part of the community. They run the BroAm every year. They give away millions of dollars to kids in need. And it's just a cool, like... John Foreman. J-O-N...

Wade07:09

Okay.

Right. What's his name again? John

Foreman. Okay. All right. All right.

Peter Brecht07:23

Yeah, John Foreman. Yeah, J.O.N. The Three Johns. Yeah,

Good stuff. All right. So let's talk oil and gas, I guess, which is why we're really here, right? At the end of the day. But so I have a little bit of a debate here. I have some questions from our academy. So these are more the one on one. I think we'll start with those. So they had to go through a bunch of material and kind of learn.

Wade07:40

Okay.

Okay.

Peter Brecht07:49

The basics of oil and gas. And so one question they had was the definition of capping. Like what does it mean to cap a well? And I'm pretty sure it's an easy answer, but I could be wrong.

Wade08:00

Capping a well like at least on the drilling side like whenever we move off of location like we finished drilling You know and everything we put essentially a cap on it. You can this is it's really Depends on where you're at in the drilling process Like if we've still got to drill intermediate if they just set surface or whatever a lot of times where you don't have any kind of pressure or gas or anything like that They'll just put like you can kind of tack weld

Peter Brecht08:22

Mm-hmm.

Wade08:27

Like just essentially like a piece of metal on top of it, you know. But a lot of other times it's much more, depending on what your regulations are and all that stuff, you're essentially just closing in the well. You're putting a lid on it essentially. There's tons of different ways you can do it.

Peter Brecht08:31

Hmm, okay.

So this is not a plug-in, a bin, and a PNA. This is a different process. Okay, okay. So you're still using the well, still producing. Okay.

Wade08:47

No, yes, Yeah, yeah, oh yeah, yeah, yeah. And

A lot of times too, if you're like during the drilling process, we have something like we'll put a cap on it is what we'll talk about. And then we're essentially talking about like a mud cap, so like a weighted pill on the backside and it adds hydrostatic pressure so that when we're tripping out, you don't get any influx of gas or whatever. It kind of keeps your pressure up even though your pumps are off. So there'll be times.

Peter Brecht09:03

Yeah.

Wade09:16

You we can use terminology like that. But I think more than likely, you're probably referring to, actually putting an actual what you'd consider a lid on top of the well. Yeah.

Peter Brecht09:23

Okay, cool, awesome. All right, so second question from our Academy group. Has a shutdown well ever been reopened and then produced more than it did before? And I think we need to probably put some context on this, because my guess is you're not gonna P &A well and then reopen it, but you might go in to do like a refrack or something and get more production out of it, or maybe not, I don't know.

Wade09:29

Okay.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's tons of different reasons why you, like where you could shut in and then get more production afterwards. Let's just say this. So like if you shut in a well, right? That's currently active, like it's flowing and it's doing all those things. A lot of times what happens is, you'll get, when you reopen the well, you get flush production. So like over the first days or weeks, like you'll actually get a lot of more production than what you were getting when you, before you shut it in.

Now that's for a very short amount of time until your pressure is kind of equalizing stuff. And so we normally call that flush production. A couple of other reasons why you'd see an increase. Number one is like you'd say, if you go back in and you refrac it, that will expose the well board, a new reservoir. And so you can get greater amount of hydrocarbons than what you had whenever you shut the well in. Another one would be

Peter Brecht10:13

Okay.

Okay.

Wade10:42

Like you were talking about going in, perfing different zones. So in like a lot of these old verticals, would, they'd perf like a deeper zone or whatever. You come back in, you plug it in that you plug off that deeper zone. If it's, no longer productive and then you can, if there's a zone uphold its perspective, go, pop it and stem it and see what it does.

Peter Brecht10:52

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

So I didn't know that, so I just learned something. Can P &A just a portion of the well, you don't have to do the whole thing. You can just do a section.

Wade11:11

Yeah, yeah. I mean, at that point, you just plug it off. So like you run in the hole with a packer or a bridge plug or something like that and set that. So therefore everything below that is now, it's closed off. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so it's separate from that upholstered zone. Yeah.

Peter Brecht11:13

Yeah. Right. Okay.

Not being touched. Okay. Okay.

I didn't think about that. All right, there you go. That's

Why we're here. Okay, third question is around failure rates. This is a tough question to answer because it's not probably in our wheelhouse necessarily, but I think we could probably come up with a good sort of general answer. But how often do small and mid-sized companies go out of business due to poor evaluation or development?

There's so much to unpack there even, like with how it works, you know?

Wade11:53

It changes. Yeah. I mean, there's tons. I mean, let's just say this. It's an extremely volatile industry, right? There is tons of volatility in it. And a lot of it's due to a number of different factors. Number one is that we don't control price. Like we are essentially price takers at the market. The market is so big and it's affected by so many different things that there's really nothing that we can do to affect, right? I would say there's very little that we can do to affect.

Peter Brecht11:59

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Wade12:19

The price that we get. We're always trying to turn these knobs, maybe sell to a different market or at times, what you'll see is you'll see people do like what we talked about before, ducks, where they drill but not complete the well. They're essentially letting it sit there until prices get better. But I would say as an operator, it's just small little levers that you're pulling to try and get better pricing. So you're kind of at the mercy of that.

Peter Brecht12:30

Right.

Wade12:43

Then the other thing I'd say that we have more control over is like your capital spend and all these different things. And so that's where we can really affect kind of how our companies perform and all that. Now, if you go out and you buy a big property and it's $100 a barrel oil, the volatility says it's eventually going to get back down to $60 at some point. And so if you overextend yourself at the wrong time, then...

Peter Brecht13:06

Mm-hmm.

Wade13:09

Bankruptcy is kind of chasing you and waiting on you. And I think, I don't want to say that we don't see that anymore, because we definitely do. But I think as an industry as a whole, think over last two or three decades, we've probably gotten a little bit more conscious of that volatility and try not to extend ourselves a whole lot.

Peter Brecht13:12

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Wade13:31

Now there's always going to be outliers out there. There's always people using leverage to try and hit it big and increase revenue, increase profit, do all those different things. I think overall as a whole we've seen a lot of that kind of that speculation. I think that risk tolerance has definitely decreased is what I would say.

Peter Brecht13:31

Yeah.

Yep.

Yeah, everybody wants to, I don't know, like I'm a higher, I like taking high risks, like if it's calculated in some way, right? But to pull off something like Jerry Jones, for example, the likelihood of that happening is more difficult, right? Yeah.

Wade13:57

Right.

It's tough, but there's

A lot of people out there. It's funny because like I'll meet a lot of people in the industry or let's say I don't even know that they're in the industry, right? Like people at my kid's school, like I'll meet these dads and like, Hey, what do you do? And they're like a small independent operator, but they're doing great. They, they're, their investments really paying off and they're doing very well. And so, as much as I think you hear about the bankruptcies and the failures, I think there's also a flip side out there. People who are

Peter Brecht14:19

Yeah.

Wade14:33

You know have a good grasp of the risk tolerance and find their niche and are able to make a good profit out

Peter Brecht14:36

Yeah.

I just think of like, talking to Reed Goodman a couple of weeks ago, he's got 40 something wells. I just talked to another guy out in East Texas that, like you can't, you'll never find a guy. You'll never hear about him on the internet. He's very, but he sent me a DM and he's like, Hey, let's talk sometime. And so, but we talked, he's got, about 120 wells and it's just, like live in life and it's great. He's part of it, which is cool. So I think a lot of the,

Wade14:44

Mm-hmm.

Right.

There's out there, yep, making a living off of it, Yep. Yep.

Peter Brecht15:10

Like lot of the stress I see maybe isn't on the operator side. Obviously there, but a lot of the...

I think more of the challenges that I see is on the service company side, like the guys that are doing the wire line and the fractic. I think there's a lot of pressure on those guys because they're sort of the middle man and they're trying to help develop the asset and they gotta compete on bids and work and people. I think there's more challenges for those in the industry than anywhere else, but that's just an observation from talking to people. Don't know if that's the case or not.

Wade15:42

I think that generally speaking, would say so. I mean, see Conoco's laying off 10, 20%. I mean, there's some big layoffs going on. I'll also say too though, I was on the, I started off on the service company side working at Baker Hughes and layoffs there were very, very deep. There were times in 2009 after the 2008 collapse that we laid off, we lost rigs. Every rig that you drop,

Peter Brecht15:48

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Wade16:09

Was four hands, two directional drillers, two MVVs. And Baker Hughes, where I was working, I think one of our highest days that we had was like 70 rigs we had running at the time. You think about that, that's 70 times four, you're talking about 280 guys. And we eventually went down to 12 or 15 rigs. And as a company, you hate it, but you just can't.

Peter Brecht16:21

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Wade16:38

Keep those people on hoping that things turn around quickly because it seems to fall off a cliff. And what's the saying? You take the elevator down and the stairs back up. It's kind of what it is. So it always felt to me like the cuts were deeper at service companies. And that was one of the big reasons why I tried to get over to an operator earlier in my career is because I felt it was a little bit safer. Plus, then it's always tough at a service company side. I always felt like I was getting yelled at from everywhere.

Peter Brecht16:40

Right.

Yep.

Yeah,

Yeah.

Wade17:04

The operator could be

Upset with you like you're saying because your prices, something wasn't done or sometimes you're just a scapegoat. I mean, let's just be honest, I think we've all been in that position to where you have one point of contact at a company, something goes wrong out there. Maybe you had nothing to do with it or it wasn't even your guys. But, the guy in the office doesn't want to take the blame. And so he blames everybody out there on location. And so there's interesting situations like that. And you definitely get caught in the middle.

Peter Brecht17:11

Right, yeah, yeah.

Yep. Yep.

Sure.

Wade17:33

Whenever you're working on the service company side.

Peter Brecht17:33

Yeah.

Well, that's a great observation between the two. It's a... But yeah, either way, the industry is always evolving. There's always something going on. But I don't know, I like talking to the service guys, especially because it's like, they're... I don't know, like you said, they're kind of caught in the middle sometimes, right? And it's like, they're the ones that are putting in a lot of the work too. So it's good. All right.

Wade17:52

Oh yeah. Yep. It's a tough situation. Oh

Yeah, it's...

Peter Brecht17:58

Let's see here. I got one more question from the Academy. Resistivity. What is resistivity? And I don't know the context of this question, so we're gonna have to kind of poke around a bit.

Wade18:01

Okay.

Okay.

All right. Resistivity, when you say that to me, the first thing I think of is like a LWD tool. LWD, logging while drilling. It's a tool we use while we're drilling our wells, vertical, horizontal, whatever. Resistivity isn't a tool that I've run in a while. We've relied primarily on a gamma ray, but, resistivity, essentially what it is, is it's the, you're sending a current out into the formation and you're measuring.

How it returns back to you, right? So how it flows through the formation and the fluid that you've got and all that stuff. So, resistivity and conductivity are essentially the same thing, just inverse. And so resistivity will tell you, a lot of times you can use resistivity to tell like how much water is in a formation because if there's high water, right, like electricity flows through water.

Peter Brecht19:00

Mm-hmm.

Wade19:00

Very very well and so a lot of times your resistivity will go down in these formations, but I'd really you know I Like I said, I don't use it tons. I'm definitely not an expert It probably would have been a whole lot better to talk to a geo about that you know but essentially it's a tool that's it's sending a current out into formation and Measuring how it comes back You've got a you do have a train a transmitter and a receiver whenever you're getting your logging resistivity and so

Peter Brecht19:13

Yeah, yeah. Okay.

Well in the next year, yeah.

The next geo that we have on wall, we'll throw that at them and just get it. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. Let's go deeper. Right. Perfect. Okay. I've got two directions we can go here and we could probably go with both, but, I can either share a couple insights about oilfield stereotypes that I've gathered from the comments, or I've got a handful of abbreviations that we can dig into. All right. All right.

Wade19:31

We'll say, hey, go deep into resistivity for us.

I'm fine with either. You could do both. I mean, I don't care.

Let's, yeah.

Peter Brecht19:55

Yeah,

Okay, well I'll talk about the stereotypes real quick. Our comment section, it just gets better with time, because I just, I mean people are watching videos like from six months ago and it's amazing. But here's something I've learned. So the definition of an engineer is somebody that's fascinated by things that no one cares about.

Wade19:57

Okay.

Right. OK.

Yeah, there's definitely, yeah, 100%. There's, yep, there's some truth to that.

Peter Brecht20:16

Yeah.

There you go. A salesperson, Wolfhills salesperson will send you a thousand TikTok stories, but never return a phone call. Not sure if that's true or not, but I could see that. I could see that. Yeah, I feel like they're gonna return the phone calls, but anyways.

Wade20:27

I don't know about that one. Yeah.

I was gonna say, usually a sales guy, like if you're not

Returning phone calls, that's the...

Peter Brecht20:38

I live and die by my phone, man, that's all I have. And it's usually in my hand and it doesn't matter what time of day. But that's the sentiment. Maybe it was a little bit of a tough one. All right, and then a geologist is the only person at the beach with rocks in their pockets. So I guess my six-year-old qualifies as a geologist, but he probably needs to go to school first. I don't know. So that's tough. That's tough.

Wade20:59

Pretty much. Junior

Varsity. JV geologist.

Peter Brecht21:02

Yeah, yeah, probably.

But man, I don't know. My son collects rocks. That's his thing. And we were up in Utah, and then we were in Wyoming. And what do you got to make your son happy, I'll just pull over to the side of the road, grab a couple rocks, and he was on cloud nine. He loved it. Yeah. Yeah. And in Utah, have you been to Utah before?

Wade21:09

Alright.

Yeah, you're just exploring, you're looking at stuff, learning all kinds of stuff. Yeah.

No.

Peter Brecht21:27

Man, if you're driving through there, if you ever have the opportunity, so we drove from Salt Lake City to Evanston and then Casper. And like Utah's beautiful, but like as you're driving, like you see all the rocks and like how they're like, you can literally see like the seams and like, it's just beautiful. Like I'm sure if I was driving with a geologist, they wouldn't have stopped talking, but I would love to learn. Like I'm actually curious about how it works. It's pretty cool. Yeah. Right.

Wade21:34

Okay.

Right? Yeah, man, they go on field trips all the time. They're always like looking at outcrops and all that stuff.

I mean, we've got some really cool stuff like that in Oklahoma. You know, especially...

Peter Brecht22:00

I thought Oklahoma was like flat.

No?

Wade22:03

I mean, it's kind of flat, okay, so it takes Southern Oklahoma, right? Like there's a big outcrop, where they, call, where essentially like they've dug the highway interstate, it's I-35, going through like the Arbuckle Mountains down in Southern Oklahoma. And you can see like all the different like stratigraphy and all that stuff. It's really cool. It's really cool to see. Yep.

Peter Brecht22:04

Yeah, okay.

Yeah, yeah, okay, yeah, there you go.

Okay. All right. Well, I'll have

To, I might have to do that sometime. I'm like, I need to travel more around. I can't, I just go to the hotspots. Like you go to the big cities and it's like, just get outside in the country a little more is probably better. All right. Let's hit some abbreviations. So far this year we've covered 24 abbreviations. That's a pretty good number, but I don't think you've only missed one. And we have, I feel like we've only cracked the surface of really what's possible.

Wade22:35

Yeah, for sure.

Okay.

I think I've only missed one. Norm.

Okay, yeah,

There's thousands of...

Peter Brecht22:52

It's endless.

All right, first one is I D C.

Wade22:58

No, it's-

Not AADC, okay, because that's exactly what I think.

Peter Brecht23:01

IDC.

Wade23:03

But this one's got me.

Peter Brecht23:04

You have its intangible drilling costs.

Wade23:07

My gosh, I couldn't get off of IADC. International Association of Drilling Contractors, IDC, Intangible Drilling Costs. All right, yes. That's one I should have got, 100%. 100%.

Peter Brecht23:10

I know it's tough. It's tough once you see it Right, yep, take the a out take the a out That's alright. Alright, this one you've got in the

Bag. I'm sure of it s B M

Wade23:26

SBM?

Peter Brecht23:27

Mm-hmm.

No.

Wade23:28

BM makes

Me think of like based mud. Like a saline based mud. Synthetic, okay. Right. Yep. All right. No, I don't know about that. Man, that's a yeah. Synthetic based mud, okay.

Peter Brecht23:31

Yeah, yeah, you're right. All we got. You got no synthetic based mud. Yeah, yeah, Close. All right. Yeah, you had you had to. I'm giving that one to you. I'm giving that one to you. All right.

Man, there's I got to like pick and choose here. I'm going to give you one more, but I'm like, that's easy. That's too easy. That's too easy. All right. Let's do this one. What is

Frack SCFH.

Wade24:00

Standard cubic feet per hour. Okay, well, there you go. Is the, all right, there you go. Yeah.

Peter Brecht24:01

Boom, you got it, all right. There we go, there we go. I love it, okay.

Fantastic, so we've covered now 27, you have gotten, you've only missed two, you've only missed two, you've only missed two.

Wade24:12

I only got one today.

Yeah, two and a half at least.

Peter Brecht24:19

All right, well, hey, I've got other stuff I wanna talk about, like Nevada, we've got like, I had questions about, you why is Nevada not interesting for drilling? And I wanna find somebody it's trying to drill in Nevada to come on the show and chat more. I've got, day work footage, turnkey contracts. There's so much we could like dig into more, but what I really wanna hear about Wade is as we wrap up this year and head into next.

Like what are you looking forward to and anything that you're like man, this is like, I don't know. It's 20, like I don't want to predict 2026, but I feel like it's going to be a pretty good year. I don't know.

Wade24:55

Yeah, for me, I'll tell you this, like 2026 or 2025 was a big change for me. I've been essentially a W2 employee ever since 2006, you whenever I started in the oil field. And so this year brought a whole lot of growth in that sense for me in terms of, kind of dealing with what I would say is even more uncertainty than what I normally had to, you know. But at the same time, it was a lot of excitement around that. Got to meet a whole lot of great people, work with some great companies that I've

Peter Brecht25:05

Yeah.

Wade25:24

Would have never gotten to meet otherwise. So looking into 2026, I'm excited about growing that, just not only just growing network, but like growing my knowledge, getting the drill in some different areas and do some different things that I haven't done before. You can always bring over kind of lessons learned and that experience you've got from other basins and the new places, but it never completely lays over and it really accelerates the learning curve. And so I'm really excited for that.

Peter Brecht25:26

Right?

Yeah.

Wade25:52

Love that gas prices are kind of going up right now. That's amazing for Oklahoma. Is it going to be sustained? History would say no, and I'm pretty sure everybody out there knows exactly. I mean, like we talked about earlier, volatility, like it's great to see those gas prices going up. I'd love to see it, everything get up to 80 and four and just kind of hang around there. 80 and five would be absolutely amazing.

Peter Brecht25:56

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Wade26:17

But it's just one of those things that like I said earlier, like we can't really control it. We just kind of have to go with it and figure out how to work, work within those bounds. And so, I'll be excited. One the things I'm really excited in twenty twenty six to see is where AI goes like, man, it is the growth of it in the past 12 months. Now, granted, maybe I'm kind of new to it. So I've only really been kind of

Peter Brecht26:17

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Wade26:46

Exploring it over the past probably six or eight months, but the growth that I've seen and how effective it makes me as an engineer and everything over the past six months has just been exceptional. It almost feels like it's still in this, I don't want to say exponential phase, but it really is. It's just not this linear growth right now. And so I'm excited to see where that goes, not just in terms of the industry, but just in terms of personal productivity and cool things that we can do.

Peter Brecht26:49

Mm-hmm.

You're going to think this is crazy, so we moved into a much smaller home and

I used to have like a big library of books and I had nowhere to, I don't have anywhere to put the books. But what I learned was, so this is nuts and if you're a reader of books, physical books, you should turn this off now because you're gonna hate what I did. I went to FedEx and I cut the binding off of every single book that I own. Like literally every book, I cut the binding off and then I spent the day before Thanksgiving, I scanned all these books into my

Wade27:20

Okay.

Okay.

Okay.

Peter Brecht27:43

I probably had about 120 books that I'd collected. I scanned all of them, put them into my computer, did an OCR scan on all of them, uploaded them into our AI, my AI system, which is a rag tool in Google Vertex. I had it index all the books. Here's the crazy thing. So I created my my own like AI tool.

Wade27:46

Okay.

Okay.

OK.

Peter Brecht28:08

So basically now whenever I'm like looking for something and like I'm like, Hey, I need to find notes on, like I had some old oil and gas books even that I had reprinted and I'm like, Hey, I want to find out, what happened in oil and gas between the 1800, 1850 and 1900. It'll literally go in there and it does a deep research on all my books, all my sources. And it comes up. Like, have all my, all my knowledge now is an AI and my wife's like, what are you doing? Why are you doing this? I'm like, it is so much more incredible.

When you can take all of your knowledge, everything you've ever read, and then find the common threads, is, AI is just, no one, we have no idea where this is going, but it's gonna be incredible. It's gonna be fun.

Wade28:40

Right.

That's really cool. Tell

Me how you scanned every page. There's no way that you just put this on a scanner and like.

Peter Brecht28:51

I... Yeah.

I did. I sat there and I fed like just like handfuls. Yeah, I got...

Wade28:58

You did not. How long did

That take?

Peter Brecht29:00

It took me probably 14 hours straight. I didn't move. I was like, I'm getting this done. There's a stack of books in my corner, but I've had this scanner. I've had this scanner since college and I'd scan all my work done once I was done with it and I just put it into a flash drive. It was great. The hard part was indexing it all. I had to upload it into a tool to do it because...

Wade29:03

My gosh.

Dude.

Right.

Peter Brecht29:21

OCR scans are super important for AI to understand what it's looking at. And stuff's just not there yet. Gemini's good. Gemini will take picture of the file and then it treats it like a photo and it analyzes it that way. But if you're using Claude or anything else, it can be kind of challenging to reverse it.

Wade29:24

No.

Have you used

The native Adobe tool? It's really good. So like, I got an Adobe Pro subscription and...

Peter Brecht29:45

Mm, no. Is it good? Is it?

See,

I don't want to pay for Adobe. I'm cheap. But it's probably not bad. I know, you're right. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Okay.

Wade29:54

You do it for a month and you scan all this in 14 hours. But like, seriously, it's built into the program. You just click scan and OCR and it has helped. It has helped me. It like it

Has helped Claude be able to read and interpret everything so much. And even the Python scripts that read OCR stuff or create OCR stuff, it's helped that. It's helped that out a lot as well. So like, yeah, so I use that. I've got a power automate, like flow workflow built.

Peter Brecht30:08

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. Okay.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Wade30:22

That I, because Power Automate also has that same Adobe OCR built into it, if you have the Adobe Pro subscription, and it's amazing.

Peter Brecht30:29

Okay.

And I think probably the reason I'm doing it like this is, and I'll have to look at that because that'd be helpful, but like, we take all these insurance policies and what we've been doing is we've been building a database of like books and resources and legal documents and all this and compare it against it, which has been really cool. But

I don't know, man. I think everyone's like, oh, it's gonna take AI like 12 months out. If you're not thinking by quarters now, I think it's like, what's it gonna be in three months? We used be talking what's gonna be in a year or nine months. Yeah, it's crazy. It's so much, I don't know, we'll see. So yeah, next year, I'm excited about AI. We'll see where gas prices go. I hope California can start drilling some wells. I wanna travel more.

Wade30:59

It's weeks. It's weeks now. It is. Yep.

Peter Brecht31:16

You know based on hopefully work allows me to do that and go do some things but Yeah, I still want to come out to a drilling rig, but haven't made that happen yet. I think that's the plan. I think that's the plan. Yeah, cool. Well wait Yeah, we're here. We're 35 minutes in this is where most people decide to tune out anyway, so

Wade31:20

Right?

We'll make it happen in 2026. We'll, all right. All right.

Okay,

Peter Brecht31:38

We'll have a great afternoon

Wade31:38

We'll wrap it up then.

Peter Brecht31:39

And man, I guess the next time that you and I have our one-on-one episode will be at 26, so we've got some great interviews lined up. We're gonna keep lining people up that are either building cool things in oil and gas, putting their hands on tools, and we're just gonna keep learning. Appreciate you all for listening and Wade, thank you for being such a fun co-host and it's good to have you. All right, later.

Wade31:55

Let's do it.

All right,