ReservoirWave

I very briefly worked at a petroleum engineering ‘AI’ startup right out of college because I wanted to see if I would like non-healthcare/biology work It sucked But what I *did* learn was that picking well locations for oil companies is an incredibly challenging problem. To the point where ML models and fluid dynamics simulations alike were both bad at the problem But you know what was really good at it? An old dude named ‘Hans’ who was paid exorbitant amounts by BP to come in every now and then to the office, pick some points off a map, and go back home. Those points would be drilled down into and usually yielded pretty decent results in oil yield, often better than simulations alone. He worked for less than 5 hours a week, amortized over a year Hans, as I understood it, was just some person at BP who’d worked there for decades and had an intuitive sense of what was and wasn’t a good place to drill down into. He wasn’t alone, multiple, but less than a dozen, employees at BP existed just like him. He wasn’t unique to BP either, apparently all major oil companies had a team of Hans-esque figures that helped pick the wells. It was just widely agreed upon that human intuition is really important in well picking and story was left at that The whole thing really weirded me out and it felt like a ghost story told amongst petroleum engineers, because literally nobody knew more information about him or other people like him beyond what I’ve said here. Multiple people corroborated the story of these figures existing, but nobody had actual details What were their backgrounds? Were the accuracies actually *that* high? What were they picking up on? never found out the answer to any of these oil is such a bizarre field