Data mining/analysis

Accelerating the Uptake Cycle Through Collaboration, Outsourcing

A newcomer in the arena of oilfield market research has set an ambitiously high bar for itself: to speed up the oil and gas industry’s widely acknowledged and painfully slow rate of technology adoption.

jpt-2016-10-acceleratingfig1.jpg
A new look at the innovation cycle proposes operators identify a challenge and then hand off many of the subsequent vetting duties to an outside firm before deploying the technology in a test environment.
Source: Darcy

As a newcomer in the arena of oilfield market research, Houston-based Darcy Partners has set an ambitiously high bar for itself: to speed up the oil and gas industry’s widely acknowledged and painfully slow rate of technology adoption.

Founded in 2015, Darcy is trying to accomplish this by melding its in-depth research studies with a collaborative approach to consulting. The latter part of this strategy involves placing a group of promising young com­panies and their potential suitors into the same room where the free flow of ideas is encouraged.

The firm’s ultimate goal is to prove to oil and gas companies that technology validation becomes a much faster process when done collectively and openly compared with when it is all done internally.

“We are saying let’s do innovation more efficiently,” said Hossein Rokhsari, a partner at Darcy, adding, “which means outsourcing elements of the work that is required for technology development to a group like us, where we do the research, scouting, screening, and evaluation.”

The culmination of all that groundwork is quarterly technology forums that Darcy hosts and moderates. The com­pany has held two of these day-long events this year: one on advanced data analytics and another on new water management technologies for unconventional developments. Its upcoming forums will focus on unmanned aerial vehicles, completion optimization, cyber security, and another on advanced data analytics.

In attendance are key decision makers from oil and gas companies whose biggest pain points are used to steer the direction of the forum. Presenting are the entrepreneurs that Darcy has high-graded based on their ability to cure those issues.

For the up-and-coming technology vendors, the forums are a chance to get invaluable face time with their target audience. Darcy takes a hands-on role with those entrepreneurs by providing them with corporate coaching to make their message as effective as possible. Once the pitch is made, operators have the opportunity to put questions to the entrepreneurs about the feasibility of their innovations.

Another of the firm’s partners, Jeremy Sweek, emphasized that this sort of transparency is rare in the oil field but necessary to address the fact that the industry has a tendency to run too many pilot tests in isolation. He explained that when operators test-drive startups, the results are typically not shared publicly but end up percolating through word-of-mouth between professional colleagues and field workers.

This practice of informal information sharing is less than desirable from a startup’s point of view because it makes it hard for the company to appear on another operator’s radar screen and grow its business. According to Sweek, it also means disinformation about those startups often goes unchecked and leaves operators in a position where they are unable to fully leverage the sum of their aggregate experience.

“Most of the operators we have talked to have tried a pilot with one, two, or three of these companies but it is a different combination for each of them,” he said. “So why as an industry do we need 100 pilot projects to determine that there is a clear winner, or two or three winners?”

Another problem Darcy is trying to address with its approach is vendor deluge. Using data analytics as an example, in this space alone there are hundreds of companies trying to break into the oil and gas business. Darcy has narrowed the list for its clients by distinguishing the startups selling what Sweek referred to as “fluff” vs. those selling actual breakthroughs that can lower operating costs or enhance reserves.

“When you say big data, we ask what do you really mean, and when you say analytics, what do you really mean,” he said. “You have to pull it back to see whether or not it’s really just a business intelligence tool that has a different user interface.”

Rokhsari, who worked at an energy-focused venture capital firm before starting Darcy, insists that the point of all this is not only to encourage operators to become investors in the startups—it is to also encourage them to consider becoming paying customers.

The initial results of Darcy’s research efforts and technology forums appear to be positive. The company reports that every operator has discovered at least two or three startups that they plan to work with, and in turn, each startup has walked away from the forums with three to five operators as potential clients.