Our speaker Todd Parker

Posted by David Holden
 
Eric Bennett introduced the speaker Todd Parker of Blue Spark talking about "Challenging the Oil & Gas Industry’s Innovation Cycle". See the presentation slides.
 
Todd Parker began Blue Spark Energy in 2011 and continues to serve as the CEO and President. Prior to that, he was the Canadian Vice President for Weatherford International – an oilfield service company whose products and services span the lifetime of an oil or gas well. Beginning his career in 1991, Todd has since lived and worked across Canada, the USA, Latin America and the Caribbean. With a keen interest in technology and challenging the status quo, he continues to find ways to innovate, create and communicate. Blue Spark Energy (Blue Spark) is a private oil and gas services company that specializes in enhanced oil recovery techniques using proprietary high pulse power technology. Since the company was established in 2011, its internationally patented WASP® technology has a greener footprint than other commonly used oil recovery techniques, and has been used in over 400 oil wells by more than 25 companies around the world. Thanks to equipment that is very mobile, the company is able to operate not only across Canada, but globally with only 25 staff. In Canada, Blue Spark has worked in the provinces of Newfoundland, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, and British Columbia. The company has also operated in the United States, Romania, Norway, Denmark and Kuwait. It has received numerous prestigious safety and technology awards.
 
  • Todd has been in oil and gas industry since the early 1990s, in technology implementation side
  • Spent first 10 years with Schlumberger across western Canada
  • Worked briefly for Siemens in Ontario
  • Moved back to Calgary to work for and Weatherford
  • All this lead Todd to high-pulse power
  • In 2011 became employee #1 for Blue Spark
  • Faces many challenges which showed Todd how little he knew about technology or the oil and gas industry.  Main challenge is with technology adoption within the oil and gas industry
  • Oil and gas industry is slow to adopt and are risk averse
  • One study suggests it is one of the slowest industries to adopt (3 times longer)
  • Innovation is a code word for change and change scare people
  • They ran into corporate inertia which did not want change
  • Perseverance has allow Blue Spark to become active in Canadian market although there is still room for more activity
  • Working in many counties
  • Change in process, effective use of power, key is delivering a relatively small amount of energy very quickly and task is to unplug down hole wellbores (clogged by fines or scale)
  • Pulsing this energy quickly creates a powerful pulse then subsequent vacuum re-bound pulse pushes the clogging material into the wellbore and clearing the holes through which flows the oil or gas
  • This helps improve output of underperforming wells
  • This process works on all clogs with no need to design a solution for a specific clog problem
  • 250 MW pressure pulse from energy from a tablespoon of orange juice
  • This is connected to the surface AC power so 1000s of pulses can be generated very rapidly
  • Using the electricity from one light bulb for three hours, an average well can be re-invigorated
  • This is a greener footprint for well remediation
  • Eliminates the need for explosives (or acids or chemicals) being transported to site or a fleet of fracking trucks having to get to site
  • This process reduces the relative production costs by improving the well output
  • More business lately (last 6 months) as production companies are realizing they can increase production without any drilling as there are over 1 million wellbores in western Canada
  • A new viable business model is to fix production to improve the economics of their wells
  • Disruptive technology in terms it will change how we remediate wells
  • Technology is solid, challenge continues to be how do we work it into risk averse organizations
  • Solution involves trying to educate as many people as possible to improve rate of adoption
  • Last comment: The worst thing that can happen with this technology is … nothing
  • While other solutions have their own worst case scenarios
  • Oil prices stabilizing, oil use will be around for a while longer (in spite of what you may have heard on twitter), companies using this technology may have a leg up related to costs and investor attraction
  • Anyone waiting for the good old days of 2013 to return so we can get back to doing business that way, may not be around too long
Bill Kaufmann thanked our speaker Todd Parker.
 
 
 
 
Speaker Todd Parker