Energy Bytes

Building a nuclear reactor in America used to take three years. Now the paperwork alone can eat a decade. Kevin Kong, CEO and Founder of Everstar, went from scaling Bird scooters to using AI to untangle nuclear permitting, supply chains and robotic welding. We get into why large reactors can beat SMRs on cost, how the US lost its nuclear supply chain, the jobs a new reactor fleet could create, guarding export controlled data, and how they always knew when Shaq was riding a Bird.

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0:00 Intro
1:12 From Bird to Everstar
6:33 The library book that started it all
10:16 Nuclear myths and the Watts Bar story
13:49 How the US lost its nuclear edge
19:38 AI for nuclear permitting
27:05 Models, physics and regulation
32:58 SMRs vs large reactors
41:34 Data centers and nuclear jobs
44:05 Knowledge gaps and robotic welding
50:16 Security and export controls
53:43 Simulating plant operations
58:43 Building across teams
1:01:54 AI native energy companies
1:06:59 Scaling chaos at Bird
1:09:39 Book picks and where to find Kevin

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Scale builds up downhole and the usual fix means chemicals, pumps, and a pile of equipment on surface. Mahyar (Matt) Mohajer, CTO at Blue Spark Energy Inc, breaks down a wireline tool that fires electric pulses to shatter it instead, and why bringing samples back up matters just as much. Plus twenty years at Schlumberger, opening a Houston headquarters, and what a five month old team can build when AI does the heavy lifting.

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00:00 What Blue Spark Does

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Upstream finance teams have been white knuckling giant Excel models for decades, and the husband and wife team behind WellWorth thinks that era is over. CEO Samra Nawaz and co-founder Vinay Acharya talk with John and Bobby about automating capital structure logic, running 50 scenarios at once, why they built an Excel add in after swearing they never would, and how AI lets a two person team ship like a much bigger one, plus a detour into local models and soaring GPU prices.

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0:00:00 Intro
0:00:51 Meet WellWorth
0:03:23 Why finance still lives in Excel
0:09:02 Building for flexibility
0:11:20 Getting data in and out
0:17:08 Automating capital structure logic
0:19:53 Build vs buy
0:22:25 A&D vs FP&A workflows
0:28:07 Living models and faster decisions
0:34:55 Scenario analysis
0:36:44 Lookbacks and actuals
0:39:44 How AI fits into WellWorth
0:41:53 Day to day AI tools
0:45:07 Agents and plan mode
0:50:19 AI for everyday decisions
0:53:27 What's next for WellWorth
0:58:17 Scaling across business units
1:03:19 Speed round
1:04:42 Local models vs cloud compute
1:11:09 Wrap up

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Utilities are drowning in paperwork long before a repair crew ever leaves the yard. Aarya Borele, co-founder and CTO of Evardi Energy, walks John and Bobby through outage requests getting rejected a day out, FERC 881 pushing line ratings from seasonal to hourly, and why 95 percent accuracy is a failing grade when the lights are on the line. Also in here: the grid as cloud infrastructure, Griddy's flameout, and a 49ers conspiracy theory involving a substation.

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0:00 Agents, VMs and running everything at once
3:26 Back in the studio
4:34 What Evardi does
5:45 Uri and the incentive problem
10:28 When the ISO rejects your outage
12:35 How the grid actually works
15:02 FERC 881 and hourly line ratings
17:46 Where Evardi fits in
21:37 Blackouts in India and Kenya
25:28 The grid as cloud infrastructure
30:17 Griddy and the wholesale gamble
33:45 The stack, compliance and weather models
37:40 Accuracy in critical infrastructure
40:22 Jargon, bad data and context
45:56 Models, local hosting and token costs
55:29 The 49ers substation theory
57:13 Speed round
1:05:38 Physical AI and robot ducks
1:11:25 Paying attention in a granola world
1:14:09 The ask

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Everybody in oil and gas has been sitting on mountains of completions data and barely using it. Ben Dickinson and Bryan Frantz of NexTier Completion Solutions built the fix from the inside out, an end to end frac data platform made by the people running the pumps. John and Bobby get into why the closer you are to the equipment the closer you are to the truth, where frac data standards are headed, and whether efficiency has hit its ceiling. Plus AI coding and the hunt for a good Pittsburgh wing.

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0:00:00 - Back from summer break
0:00:41 - Trying to keep pace with AI
0:10:16 - Who NexTier is and where it came from
0:12:22 - Building an end to end frac data platform
0:15:17 - The industry's siloed data problem
0:20:39 - Agnostic architecture and one tool for everyone
0:26:44 - Borrowing solved problems from other industries
0:31:41 - The tech stack and starting greenfield
0:35:17 - Control systems and the job data schema
0:44:11 - Why frac data has no standard
0:47:08 - Fleet Stream and getting data to customers
0:53:23 - Has operational efficiency hit its ceiling
0:59:58 - How opinionated should the software be
1:03:08 - Physics vs data driven modeling
1:08:41 - The AI coding tools they use
1:10:35 - Western PA wings and pierogi

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Paul Brown, Founder and Principal Engineer at BDE Data, joins John and Bobby all the way from Scotland for a conversation that covers a lot of ground. From his days as an international drilling engineer dodging pirates off the coast of West Africa to building WellSchematic.com and tackling the nightmare of digitizing 50-year-old multilingual well files, Paul is the rare person who speaks both languages fluently.

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00:00 - Oil prices, energy costs, and life in Scotland vs Texas
01:50 - Paul's background and path from drilling to data
08:19 - WellSchematic.com and legacy well data as a service
10:52 - Drilling war stories: West Africa and the Falklands
15:00 - UK oil industry and energy policy
34:41 - Legacy well file digitization
38:06 - The PDF table extraction problem
42:22 - Open source models vs foundational models
44:31 - AI stack, data privacy, and cloud infrastructure
51:54 - AI's role in the upstream industry
56:04 - Getting tech adopted in the drilling world
59:06 - Coding journey: from PHP and Laravel to Python
1:02:22 - Advice for engineers getting into coding
1:09:38 - Programming languages and AI-assisted development
1:11:56 - Cursor and Claude Code
1:13:55 - Speed round: Scotland, whiskey, and cloud platforms

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When you have 80 patents and a lifetime achievement award in hydraulic fracturing, you have seen some things. John William Ely, Founder of Ely and Associates Corp, and Jon Harper, Vice President of Sales and Marketing, talk frac history, pre-job diagnostics, the slick water revolution, geothermal, and why the industry keeps pumping the same thing and expecting different results.

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0:00 - Intro and guest backgrounds
3:25 - John William Ely's origin story
7:45 - Offshore blowout and well control in the Middle East
11:25 - How fracturing has evolved over 50 years
19:30 - The slick water revolution and where we went wrong
27:40 - Pre-job diagnostics and what operators overlook
36:55 - Geothermal applications and completions challenges
43:50 - Parent-child well interaction and offset communication
47:00 - Refracing and diversion
54:15 - Increasing recovery factor
1:06:35 - Longer laterals, U-turn wells, and land-driven decisions
1:12:35 - Knowledge gaps in the next generation of engineers
1:25:20 - The untapped tight conventional opportunity
1:30:02 - Advice for young engineers entering the industry

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Owner relations in oil and gas has been shoved in a corner forever, basically a "here's your check, don't call me" situation, and Deren Boyd, Dagen Boyd, and Josh Wright, co-founders of Firm App, are building the platform to fix that. These three started in oilfield safety software with iScout, got acquired by KPA, and now they're tackling the massive gap between operators and their surface and mineral owners with AI-powered multichannel communication. We're talking voice agents with adjustable accents, auto-responding emails, chat widgets that actually work, and an owner-facing app that puts payment info and well data in people's pockets. Plus the OKC crew gives their take on Devon and Expand relocating and what that means for the city.

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0:00 Devon and Expand leaving OKC, what it means on the ground
4:42 What is owner relations and why has it been ignored
7:18 Timing and the generational shift driving tech adoption
10:10 How operators have been duct-taping owner relations together
12:05 The owner-facing app and multichannel approach
14:38 AI voice agents, email auto-response, and chatbot workflows
18:15 Building and rebuilding AI architecture every six months
21:29 Under the hood on voice AI, latency, and conversation nuance
26:37 School districts, 10,000 page websites, and unexpected use cases
34:58 The iScout origin story and oilfield safety software
42:17 Getting thrown in the penalty box and winning work back with data
46:13 Revenue statements, vendor portals, and what owners actually ask about
52:24 NAPE plans and the land community
54:48 Business model and implementation timeline
55:58 NIL, college athletics, and the dumpster fire
1:04:36 Dev tools, Claude Code, and the future of SaaS

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Bobby Neelon and John Kalfayan sit down with Kayla Ball to break down why the methane compliance space is stuck in the trough of disillusionment, how she ended up cleaning up Petra's flat file nightmare at IHS, and why vibe coding with Claude feels like training your own replacement. They dig into sensor data chaos across ops teams, why public data companies should be worried, the wild difference between building lovable prototypes versus commercial deployments with SOC2 governance, and how AI is forcing everyone to confront the fact that humans shouldn't be entering data into anything anymore.

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0:00 - Devon and Chesapeake leaving Oklahoma City
4:50 - What SensorUp actually does beyond sensors
11:40 - Methane space challenges and compliance markets
18:30 - Why standardizing sensor data is so hard
26:40 - Getting into product management from geology
32:45 - AI automating regulatory workflows and field inspections
38:50 - Vibe coding prototypes versus productizing for enterprises
45:15 - Public data moat questions for IHS and Enverus
52:30 - Duck Lake and licensing components over custom dev
58:15 - Product management changing with Claude Code
1:04:40 - Data problems holding back AI adoption
1:11:20 - Speed round on youth sports complexes and baseball
1:22:40 - Hot takes and wrapping up

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Hussein Shel, CTO and head of business development for energy and utilities at Amazon Web Services, joins Bobby and John to talk about his journey from Chevron engineer to cloud technology leader. They explore how AI coding tools are changing the game for energy companies, why the barrier to entry for building apps has never been lower, and what it means when your reservoir engineer can now spin up their own solutions in minutes instead of months. Hussein shares why he thinks we're only scratching the surface of what's possible when you combine domain expertise with modern AI tools, discusses the cultural shifts needed for energy companies to move fast, and explains why he's both excited about AI's potential and concerned about its massive energy demands.

If you’re into energy tech, you’re in the right place. John and Bobby have built a deep catalog of conversations with the minds modernizing energy inside companies like AWS, Snowflake, Devon Energy, and more. Listen to the full library on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, or watch at https://collide.io/community.

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00:00 - Welcome and introductions
03:14 - Early AI experiments and low-code tools
08:11 - Core principles that haven't changed
12:04 - Managing costs and governance
15:15 - Data access and shadow IT
17:16 - Building apps in weeks vs months
19:25 - Domain-specific foundation models
21:10 - AWS infrastructure and energy footprint
26:21 - Custom silicon and partnerships
29:11 - Current AI model landscape
33:36 - Enterprise adoption challenges
38:58 - Cultural change from the top
42:06 - Scoping problems and quick wins
46:16 - Legacy systems and technical debt
52:18 - Building AI-first energy companies
56:57 - Tech debt acceleration
1:00:04 - Speed round and favorite spots

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