Jennifer Pallanich, senior technology editor, Hart Energy: Standardizing decision making is one of the big goals of hydraulic fracturing operations. I’m here with Thomas Johnston of ShearFRAC to talk about one of the latest partnerships in that effort. Tell me about this partnership you guys have struck with Drill2Frac and Corva.

Thomas Johnston, ShearFRAC COO: Yeah, so for the last five years we’ve been committed to the real-time decision making during completions operations and with this partnership we get Drill2Frac to give us at-bit data and then we can leverage the big data that is in Corva’s data lake to really, like you said, standardize that decision making during the operation.

JP: And why is that important?

TJ: It’s very important. Humans make a lot of great decisions, but they also equally make very different decisions. And with what we can do is look back on production data and look back on completions data and from that determine the best decisions that humans made and then standardize that across everything, using our platform.

JP: Okay. So what is it that your first goal is?

TJ: Our first goal is to use that data from offset wells, bring it into our software to allow us to make decisions from wells around it. And then from there what we’ll be able to do is start having our computer software rather than recommending decisions to humans in the field to make changes. It’s actually recommending those decisions directly to the frac pumps themselves.

JP: That sounds fascinating. Thank you so much for talking to me about automation. I look forward to an automated future, and that’s this week’s Tech Trends.

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