Podcast: Oil and Gas This Week | June 11 2025 | Ep 380

Listen in to this exciting podcast about weekly news in oil and gas. Terradepth is covered at 18:03. Link to Podcast

Transcript:

“Terradepth awarded five-year offshore contract for autonomous surveys.”

This sounds like robots come into your house and ask you what laundry detergent to use.

Well, that’s very specific.

That’s actually way bigger than this. So this is really cool. Terradepth has been awarded a long-term contract to use robotics and AI to do the work of people—as far as geoscience, 3D surveying, seismic surveying, offshore.

This is huge. This article is short. It just goes into the financials and the reason they’re doing this.

But this is the future of industry. This is exactly—when I started talking a year ago—that we were going to have this round of layoffs, which is happening right now. And how that round of layoffs wasn’t going to be the usual cycle of low crude, but had to do with the adaptation of technology in our industry, having to become more efficient, and that those jobs would disappear because of technology.

Here’s a perfect example. If you’re in the geoscience world—specifically, if you’re doing 3D seismic offshore—you need to read this. You need to understand what’s going on.

Your job’s not threatened now. It’s going to take a decade for this type of technology to actually start replacing people. But here’s the first pin drop.

And it’s not going to go away. This is not going to disappear. This could continue.

And the work that Terradepth could do with this is going to be better than what people can do. And boy, I know I’m going to get hate mail from y’all on this. Sorry.

It’s just going to be better. The AI learns. The AI works just as efficiently today as it did yesterday.

It doesn’t matter how much sleep it got, whether it got in an argument with its wife or husband. And the AI just continues to improve. And with the robotic sampling and doing the surveys using robots, you’re not putting people in danger.

This is just where our industry is going. So this article is great to showcase what I’m talking about. This sort of stuff is going to become more and more standard in our industry.

And yes, somewhere soon, there will be some jobs lost to this. But right now, you know what’s going on? There are jobs to be gained—learning how to train the AI, learning how to design the autonomous survey robots.

So don’t look at this as a threat. Look at this as an opportunity. And bottom line is, it doesn’t matter. This is where we’re going as an industry.