About this episode
Paul Brown discusses his journey from drilling engineering to data management in the energy sector.
Paul Brown, Founder and Principal Engineer at BDE Data, joins John and Bobby all the way from Scotland for a conversation that covers a lot of ground. From his days as an international drilling engineer dodging pirates off the coast of West Africa to building WellSchematic.com and tackling the nightmare of digitizing 50-year-old multilingual well files, Paul is the rare person who speaks both languages fluently. Click here to watch a video of this episode. Join the conversation shaping the future of energy. Collide is the community where oil & gas professionals connect, share insights, and solve real-world problems together. No noise. No fluff. Just the discussions that move our industry forward. Apply today at collide.io Click here to view the episode transcript. 00:00 - Oil prices, energy costs, and life in Scotland vs Texas 01:50 - Paul's background and path from drilling to data 08:19 - WellSchematic.com and legacy well data as a service 10:52 - Drilling war stories: West Africa and the Falklands 15:00 - UK oil industry and energy policy 34:41 - Legacy well file digitization 38:06 - The PDF table extraction problem 42:22 - Open source models vs foundational models 44:31…
People in this episode
Hosts: John, Bobby
Guest: Paul Brown
Topics covered
- energy industry
- data digitization
- drilling engineering
- AI in energy
- well data management
- programming for engineers
Keywords
- oil prices
- energy costs
- legacy well data
- AI stack
- cloud infrastructure
- coding journey
- data privacy
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: BDE Data, WellSchematic.com, collide, UK
Places: Scotland, West Africa, Falklands
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