Oil Is the New Data | Hacker News Reader

Oil Is the New Data

logicmag.io

84 pointsjeffreygoesto57 comments

Hasn't Big Oil been a leading edge customer of IT all along? Wasn't processing of seismic data one of the drivers for commercial High Performance Computing and then for Beowulf clusters?

Oh yeah.

I almost took a job with Halliburton in the early 90s. Everyone I talked to had 4 shelf-feet of orange VMS manuals and a huge color display for looking at seismic plots in 3d. They were absolutely at the confluence of 3d visualzation, DSP, fluid dynamics, geology, and all sorts of things.

I'm glad I didn't participate.

If you're working in what we commonly call tech, and you're not in the clean energy or automatization sector, you're part of the problem. I know I am.

After the clean tech bubble burst, there's a lot less funded positions that directly work on reducing GHG emissions. So you'd have to be willing to take a big cut in pay - and lifestyle, unless independently wealthy. Very few people do.

Anything else is at best neutral on GHG.

That doesn't make sense. If you offset your GHG emissions you could be better than neutral. Perhaps you could even do it more effectively. It's the classic case of the doctor treating and then using a percentage of his income to buy soup rather than working at a soup kitchen himself. In the latter case, comparative advantage is being thrown away.

There's no known way to sell (or buy) GHG offsets at scale. Current GHG offsets are all artisanal efforts that don't scale.

Scale would be something like the Sleipnir field Carbon Capture and Sequestration, times 40000. That's what it would take just to stop increasing athmospheric CO2. The Slepnir CCS sequesters at best 1M ton CO2 per year. Human emissions are currently 40 Gtons CO2 per year.

Yeah, but you're an individual. It doesn't have to scale. It only has to be economically comparatively advantageous to you doing it yourself. At some point the lack of scale will cause the price to rise to the point where your labour does not provide a comparative advantage.

Prices are currently not there and I predict I'll probably be carbon negative for the next ten years and still come out ahead working in something else and just buying.

For what it's worth, if you're really hardcore about it buy some grazing land and reforest it with native species (if appropriate - in some places peatland or wetland restoration makes more sense). You'll at least sequester the carbon that was lost when the land was destroyed for grazing and you'll make it infinitesimally more challenging to produce livestock, a very carbon-intensive activity.

In some places you can even get small grants for this - Ireland has a little bit of money for afforesting with native species, for instance.

I'd love to find ways to make my career focused on fighting climate breakdown and haven't figured out how to do so without defaulting on debts/obligations

You're not alone in that. People are out here working to pay not only their own debts but their landlords debts as well.

Debt, combined with shortages of necessities (often unnecessary) is a fantastic way to ensure people work on what makes the most money and not what they'd like to be doing.

https://www.climate.careers/

> The TCO managers claimed that monitoring workers was necessary for keeping them safe, or to prevent them from stealing. But it wasn’t convincing in the slightest.

OP clearly has very little experience with a post-soviet work culture. In Russia, Kazakhstan and other nearby countries, drinking at the workplace (and I mean, getting blackout drunk) and stealing from your employer is still very common for blue-collar workers.

It's such a blind cultural arrogance. Build a narrative of how the world works in the high-tech areas of the USA and just bring that with you everywhere.

Slightly tangential, but:

> Chevron alone has thousands of oil wells around the world, and each well is covered with sensors that generate more than a terabyte of data per day.

That's around 12MB/s, which sounds extremely high for something as "boring" (for lack of a better word) as an oil well. What could they possibly be monitoring, and at what frequency, and most importantly: for what purpose?

I would guess it's part of some kind of early-warning system. The pressure and density of fluids in a well is extremely variable moment to moment, and knowing when a well is about to 'kick' makes it possible to prevent an awful lot of problems.

If you think of an oil rig[1] it's not hard to imagine it having a lot of sensors monitoring the state of the equipment needed to pump oil out of the well. The wells on land aren't as complicated because they don't need crew quarters or things to keep them afloat, but the oil drilling equipment is basically the same.

[1] Eg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ab/Oil_plat...

Yes, it's easy to imagine for an oil rig, which is huge structure with lots of activity on it, and all of it running in a highly dynamic environment.

I'm having trouble imagining it for an oil well [2]. In contrast to an oil rig, a field of pumpjacks looks downright boring. What could they be measuring beyond temperature, pressure, and oil flow (which, even at millisecond rates, wouldn't amount to 12MB/s for 1,000 sensors)?

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_well

down hole, surface, annulus, multiple legs, pump speed, pump current, pump vibrations, liquid volume, separator pressure, separator water, separator oil, separator gas, valve positions, tank levels, tank temperatures, tank pumps etc..

Monitoring 11000 wells (in the US alone, according to Wikipedia) at that rate is only roughly 1KB/s per well. I'm actually surprised it's so small. Sampling intervals for most sensors must be on the order of multiple seconds - or there's not many sensors.

Isn't a single CCTV camera going to give you MB/s? To be honest I'm astonished that there are oil wells without video cameras. Or perhaps those are counted elsewhere.

Note that wells are kilometers deep and well measurements are usually done every meter, so 1000 datapoints for every measurement, say, temperature, pressure, density, etc.

I work in the Oil & Gas sector, and have been involved with subsea well monitoring in the past.

Keep in mind that an oil well is a lot more than just a hole and a drill bit - there is a lot of equipment sitting on the seabed[0], and a wellhead and a lot of equipment "topside" too

There are a lot of components with a lot of sensors, including vibration (you want high frequency for that), position, flow measurement, pressure, temperature, seismic, sand detectors, water sensors, gas detectors, bearing sensors...

Rigs/platforms typically have restricted bandwidth, and it's very expensive to add more. The amount of data generated has always been a problem, and in some projects we've actually logged to disk, and had techs ferry the disks back and forth with them as they rotate in/out.

[0] https://www.akersolutions.com/globalassets/products_1920x108...

Looks like that author suddenly became aware that Oil companies use IT more extensively than Uber. Wow. So many new things to know.

Good on you for knowing already. But not everyone knows or knows how deep the rabbit hole goes. And articles like this are good reminders or good ways to learn.

This comment section is full of people criticising the tone, the writing style and the "injection of personal politics" to avoid facing their compliciteness in fundamentally unethical businesses.

How would you suggest we work on improving technology without having it be useful in "evil" ways? Or are you suggesting all of us not take data jobs (or even work on any generalizable tech) at the risk that it somehow in a tangential way could be used for evil purposes?

I understand what you're saying, and actually kind of agree with you (that people are commenting minutiae to avoid an elephant in the room), I just don't know if there's a solution.

I sadly have no solution to offer. I'm not even saying the people making these comments should all solve the problem or immediately quit their jobs. But at least acknowledging the problem would be a start.

One can report facts about unethical businesses without asserting personal beliefs, otherwise it's just bad journalism. If the background and evidence are sufficient, the readers can draw their own conclusions. There is no need to tell the readers what is evil and what is not.

In this case, the author emphasized too much on his/her own belief, which erodes into the integrity of the valuable facts he provided. His/her personal opinions turned an exposé into an editorial.

This is hyperindividulaism driven to an absurd degree. Activism is a good thing. We shouldn't all be limited to apolitically spout facts at eachother, hoping enough people will independently come to the right conclusion and spontanously solve the problem.

Convincing people and trying to organize are essential in affecting change.

You're criticizing this article for failing to meet standards it never purports to uphold. This is an essay / personal account of events, not journalism.

For an essay, in my opinion, it stays in rather neutral territory, making some uncontroversial observations that climate change is bad, that big oil plays a major role it, and expressing some enthusiasm for standing up against partnerships with big oil, but not otherwise making strong claims about what should be done.

The number one thing that will derail the whole “public cloud” is the idea that the cloud is not public. It is highly likely that every Fortune 500 company has at least some business that someone in the tech sector would find unseemly. If they get the idea that they are an employee protest away from losing their business, they are not going to transition to the cloud.

For this reason, Microsoft, Amazon, and Google have been signaling that they intend to keep it a public cloud. Going forward, it is reasonable to expect that the workers who do these type of protests will find themselves let go from the companies.

Public cloud already disallows spamming. Additional restrictions don't seem implausible.

Very interesting to see how tech-giant employees are recognising their positions of leverage and feeling compelled to take a stance for what they believe in, even if they are unsure of what the implications may be.

climateaction.tech [0] has a useful community and provides some ways to get involved if this sparks curiosity. I'm using it to inform my opinion on where I stand.

[0] https://climateaction.tech/

What's the point of using a pseudonym? It won't be so hard for Microsoft to find out who the writer is.

But not as easy for other parties. Maybe that person wants to be able to get a job at other companies in the future and not get pointless hatemail from randos?

Let's imagine American tech bails out from oil contracts in those countries - overnight. What happens? Russians will replace them immediately, or Chinese. That won't help those countries in any way. There is no quick process to get those countries jump over hundreds of years in general education and gradual development of business and manufacturing culture.

While the essay's main drive is on climate, can we put that aside for a minute and talk about the orwellian surveillance apparatus talk in the central section of the essay? Or am I supposed to take the lack of comments on that as a combination of apathy and the increasing acceptance of persistent surveillance?

> When I reflect back on this meeting, it was a surreal experience. Everyone present discussed the idea of building a workplace panopticon with complete normalcy.

I get being uncomfortable working with Big Oil when you care about climate, but that kind of discussion spooks me way more. That goes way beyond climate and uncaptured externalities - that's pretty much a direct line on helping repress a people (in the service of ossifying existing power structures, ofc); potentially an attempt to utilize technology to help enforce a modern day kind of class slavery. Is that not the most obviously wrong new piece of information here? Isn't that that most notable component of this essay? Big Oil seeks to extract more Oil - that's to be expected, given their profit motivations, however unfortunate. You feel about that how you feel about that, and with respect to this essay, I don't think it's putting up much new information. But the surveillance goals of the management there? Those feel _new_ - like, if some engineer made the mistake of agreeing to assist creating those tools, that seems like it'd be _much_ more likely to goad people to anger. Me, at least, clearly.

> In particular, they wanted to implement computer vision algorithms that could detect suspicious activity and then identify the worker engaging in that activity.

Using ML to pick people out of a crowd for enforcement before they actually do anything seriously wrong... Literally the plot of a bunch of fictional dystopian thrillers, no? I find the concept that we'd actively seek to build such a thing quite disconcerting.

>before they actually do anything seriously wrong

In this context, it's preventing industrial accidents before they happen. Obviously, after they do something wrong, the harm is done.

This is already done currently by human supervisors BTW. Go look at any construction or industrial site. Why not free that supervisor from this burden ?

You could call it Luddite, but I think I'm much more comfortable with human judgement being involved. Especially since that also provides an obvious place for blame to lie, if such preventative enforcement is used extrajudiciously or without reasonable cause (there is a degree of tension between supervisors and workers - that's part of why unions exist). I can also trust to some degree that the supervisor will pull someone aside and engage in a conversation, as a fellow person - robosupervisor might not be so considerate without serious consideration by it's implementors and executors (especially if such consideration doesn't help the bottom line).

Why do people jump so easily from "lets build an efficient monitoring system" to terminators? Why do you think that first action that will be taken in such a condition will be something bad for the employee in question? Might be a simple notification for the human supervisor to check the situation out or it could even be a notification for the employee: "don't walk there, you might fall in the bloody tank".

Because in terms of human relationships, there's such a thing as "too efficient". Compassion, mercy, discretion, joy, friendliness - they all exist in the inefficiencies of a system, they happen in places the ruthless process hasn't reach yet. They die when turned into code - whether on computers or in papers, as bureaucracy is nothing but software running on a distributed protein runtime.

People aren't worried about a system that can deliver a timely safety warning to an employee. People are worried about a system that can spot everything that looks like wrong or inefficient use of your time, everything that may perhaps lead to a problem but didn't yet, and count all that against you, and then keep counting until you cross the threshold of getting fired, and there's no one who cares or even can do anything to help you.

Systems are buggy, their inputs aren't reliable, they have no understanding - and it's all too easy to everyone in the command chain to excuse themselves from responsibility by saying "but the system says so", or "but the system doesn't let me!". Next time you're wasting hours dealing with a customer support clerk of a bank or a corporation, constantly hearing "the system won't let me do that", think that at least it's just some product you're paying for, and not your very livelihood.

> Systems are buggy, their inputs aren't reliable, they have no understanding

Unfortunately this gets less and less acknowledged by many of today's technicians and engineers (I'm a programmer myself). People need not necessarily focus that much only on the Kafka-like stories or on the Bentham-inspired panopticon (both of these being real problems, I agree), but instead they should also go back to (re-)read Stanislaw Lem's "The Cyberiad" [1] in order to see what unreliable and buggy systems can do to a society that relies too much on them.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cyberiad

Why do people jump so easily from "lets build an efficient monitoring system" to terminators?

Probably because humans (especially governments) have repeatedly proven their willingness to take innocent tech and use it nefariously. That's how you go from CCTV being installed to "catch a few crooks" to it being used to monitor citizens for social credit systems. Or people's innocent internet use being hoovered up by massive surveillance projects.

It doesn't seem that crazy for people to wonder at how initially innocent tech might be weaponised.

Because there are far too many working environments from America to Kazakhstan where that is the default action.

Also the psychology of the original panopticon applies. It's a source of stress to be watched when you can't watch back.

>Why do people jump so easily from "lets build an efficient monitoring system" to terminators?

Because every technology that can be effectively used to oppress people has been.

While you can't stop technological progress it's farcical to pretend that people trying to oppress people will not use all the technology at their disposal. You cannot get the good with the bad.

If history is any indication I'm betting many people will have to get hurt by <thing> before society forms a consensus that it isn't ok to use <thing> to hurt people. It took WW1 to convince practically everyone that chemical weapons weren't worthwhile). It took the holocaust to get society to agree that genocide in developed nations (note the qualifier) is not ok. I'm not going to guess who will go down in history as the reason we don't build skynet but someone will likely have to before we stop building skynets.

How you can continue reading after such childish intro:

  Big Tech is forging a lucrative partnership with Big Oil, building a new carbon cloud that just might kill us all.

Worse yet, this is the fourth submit in 36 hours:

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Oil%20Is%20the%20New%20Data&so...

This exposé would have been more convincing if the author/whistleblower did not inject so much of his own political views into it. State the facts and let readers decide.

I am a big proponent for climate actions, but excessive vilification and oversimplification are counter productive to the cause.

Username checks out

>I am a big proponent for climate actions, but excessive vilification and oversimplification are counter productive to the cause.

I'd argue the opposite. Excessive "it's too complex", overanalysing, and spreading the blame thin, is counter productive and is used all the time to obfuscate pressing issues, delay action, and deflect blame...

Dear OP,

The basic principles of economics show us supply means little withour demand. The dependence on fossil fuel is not due to current supply of the fuel source but rather a result of how the global economy has evolved to rely on it. You don't even have specific actions recommended as solutions big oil can implement to alleviate fossil fuel dependance. At this point you can't even blame them for the cost disparity with renewables since they are much more competitive. These "oil" companies call themselves energy companies because they are investing well outside of petrol for energy supply (such as wind farms).

Fossil fuels are not strictly oil and gas. And petroleum had many many critical uses well outside of fuel. R&D is focusing on making "smart" things instead of cheap renewable powered solutions. The likes of Exxon spent a lot of money trying to lobby against climate change mostly to protect their business interests but why are your politicians sk easily bought out? It seems you have a political problem here. Should they listen to big tech's lobbyists instead? Or maybe big tech should protest government's being bought so cheaply by any big corp?

Regardless, what is your solution? Make it harder for them by denyig them business? Slow them down? That won't happen. How hard is it for big oil to buy out one of the lower end cloud providers and offer it as an industry optimized alternative to big tech?

How about protesting car and plane manufacturers,airlines and cruise ships,etc... as well? You're picking on big oil because they're big and loud not because they can affect the most change.

Is this much different than targeting drug cartels in the drug war? Did it work? The solution it appears after all this years is solving for the more difficult problem of why dependence is formed and how to legally and safely administer drugs while solving for the root cause.

The problem is too critical to waste time and attention on curing symptoms. The root cause needs solving. The planet was dependent on oil long before climate change research was established, why was dependence formed and what steps can be taken to elimnate it?

It feels nice to blame on big bad guy and have a villain to terminate but in the process you're wasting time and effort.

And also, please ffs stop trying to do activisim by making companies do things politicians should do. Figure out why the election ballot is not effective before you vote with your wallet.

How much did an energy company pay for you to write this garbage?

None. If someone has an opinion different than yours this is your reaction?

These conversations about how "[industry 1] is helping facilitate the the proliferation of [industry 2] and indirectly is part of the [problem || solution]" is deeply disturbing and signals to COMPLETE fragmentation of entire civil societies.

Fill industry 1 with the likes of tech, finance, government, oil.

Fill industry 2 with the likes of CO2 emitters, military, human rights violators, deportation police, surveillance machines.

Proliferations and advancement in harmful tech (nukes) leaks into helpful tech (nuclear medicine). And vice versa. One cannot exist without the other.

But if we start choosing who to help based on some random ideology and random understanding of when an indirect action becomes complicit in an act, we are destined to become unstable in our judgement and motives.

There needs to be a line drawn.

Canada president Trudeau is anti carbon. But supports the proliferation of Canadian oil. And he hears vitriol and accusations of hypocrisy. But being anti carbon doesn't mean you have to hurt supply. It means you only hurt demand.

Thoughts like if you don't like war, then hurt weapons manufacturing, can also create war by causing weak rich countries envied by strong poor nations.

There is more to say and more examples to give but I'd rather ask the more intelligent hn crowd to say them.

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