First come the roughnecks. The oilpatch lunatics. The men who don’t ask for permission and don’t wait for consensus. They crack the code on how shale can actually be done, not in glossy decks but in mud, blood, busted rigs, and trial-and-error economics. Then come the independents. They civilize the chaos just enough. Procedures get written, repeatability emerges, a money pipeline is laid straight to Wall Street, and marketing does what marketing always does: it turns risk into a story people are willing to fund.
And then, finally, the mastodons arrive. Exxon. Chevron. The heavyweights. They don’t bring romance. They bring scale. They bring capital, technology, and — most importantly — project management expertise on a level most nations can only dream of. These people have run projects so vast they make national budgets look like household expenses. They know exactly how to squeeze the lemon, and they will squeeze it until the rind screams.
But shale has a dirty secret: it is brutally labor-intensive. Which means that everyone’s golden goose is the same thing it always is — automation. Fewer people, more output. More producing wells, fewer boots on the ground. Robotization. Optimization. Custom-built systems. The machine that builds the machine.
ConocoPhillips just cut its workforce by 25%. Low oil prices, relentless optimization, and robots working hand in glove. This is not cruelty; it is arithmetic. And demographics make it unavoidable. Every developed nation is shrinking, and quite a few of the so-called developing ones are right behind them. There simply won’t be enough people left to do things the old way.So yes, we will need automation. We will need robots. And the big boys — Exxon included — are very, very good at that.