E29 – Is Data The New Oil? – For the Love of Data

Is Data the New Oil?

Concept originated by Clive Humby, the British mathematician who established Tesco’s Clubcard loyalty program. Humby highlighted the fact that, although inherently valuable, data needs processing, just as oil needs refining before its true value can be unlocked.
Why it is the new oil
- Valuable commodity
- Different uses among many applications
- Currently the big buzz of most large companies (Google, Facebook, Apple, etc.)
- Quantity is generally better in both
- AI is the darling of so many industries right now, and it is entirely dependent on data
- There are ethical concerns with how we source and use this, just like there were and are geopolitical and ethical concerns with how we source and use Oil
- Certain things cannot function (currently) without oil (passenger airplanes, boats)
  - Same with data: Oil & Gas, Netflix, Agriculture, Manufacturing, Healthcare, a general enabler
Why it isn’t the new oil
- Oil is finite, but data is not
  - Rob’s Counterpoint: There is a shelf life on data that makes it less usable over time
- Data does not have a standard price benchmark like oil
- Not a physical asset; can be duplicated or shared relatively easily
- Oil requires huge amounts of resources to recover and transport
  - Rob’s Counterpoint: building a successful “app” with the scale to generate meaningful data does have some costs, albeit not the scale of oil
- Data is more useful the more that it is used, whereas oil loses energy the more it is used/processed
  - Rob’s Counterpoint: Oil is not useful by itself to most people; it’s really the product oil becomes or enables that is useful

The Data of Oil

Difference between operating on surface vs. subsea: small tubing error occurs…
- Surface: 2-3 hours downtime; a few thousand $$ to fix
- Subsea: 3 months downtime, $40-50mm to fix, not including lost revenue due to deferred production (ex. 15,000 bpd well * $67/barrel * 90 days = $90.45mm)
A good sized offshore platform generates revenue greater than the entire country of Belize ($2.3bn vs. $1.8bn)
Of all the oil we can find, we generally only recover 10-20% in a field with current technology
45-50% of oil generated in the US is used for transportation
US consumption per day is about 2 ½ gallons of crude oil / day / person
The U.S. has 4% of the world’s population but uses 25% of the world’s oil
Total daily oil consumption around the world is 84,249,000 barrels/day
Top 3 countries by proven oil reserves are: Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, Canada; US is #10
Gas is 12,200 Wh/kg vs. Li-Ion at 265 Wh/kg (~46x more energy dense)
MTTF (Mean time to failure) – 500 years on some parts – needed to operate in subsea environments for 30 years
Area of dinner plate = 10.5”
- Area = Pi * R^2 * 20,000 PSI
- Area = ¼ * Pi * D^2 * 20,000 PSI
- 0.25 * pi * 10.5 * 10.5 * 20,000 = 1.73180295029137E6
- = 1,731,802 pounds on a single dinner plate (equivalent to ~9 737 Jets)
Length Records
- Analogy: Standing on top of the Empire State Building in NYC and trying to put a straw in a coke can sitting on the sidewalk below
- Deepest Well (scientific study) = Kola Superdeep Borehole= 40,230 ft.
- CHAYVO WELL – SAKHALIN-I PROJECT-The current world record holder for longest well; depth of 44,291 feet with a horizontal reach of 39,478 feet
- DEEPWATER HORIZON – drilled the deepest oil well in history. The well was drilled to 35,050 vertical depth
Well depth by year