Big Digital Energy

Lee Raymond gets his due first, the Exxon legend who turned the Valdez disaster into a safety overhaul and still holds the record for oil's biggest merger. Then it's whether the Iran deal is real or another oil market head fake, why trading houses like Gunvor are buying gas wells instead of pipelines, and the data center that paid fifty five million just to get its power line built four months early. Waha gas math, flaring pain, and a questionable David Lee Roth show close it out.

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BP just fired its chairman after eight months, and that somehow is not even the wildest thing this week. The Texas Senate race opens with Ken Paxton and James Talarico already swinging, vegan campaign ads and all. ERCOT's interconnection queue is buried under 410 gigawatts of data center dreams at a 1.5 percent approval rate, so off grid gas starts looking real. Plus a quant trading lab built with Claude, Cushing draws getting tight, the shaky Iran ceasefire, and a Wuhan study with some nerve.

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Venezuela is suddenly back on the table after being branded un-investable, and the tone shift has Mark and Kirk picking apart who blinked and why Exxon's posture lines up with Chevron's quiet move next door. Summer driving season is squeezing crude inventories, Microsoft pulled the plug on Claude Code licenses, NextEra swallowed Dominion for $67 billion, Devon dropped $2.6B on a Delaware lease sale, and XAI is running 46 turbines without federal permits. Physics keeps showing up uninvited.

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Gas hits $7.90 a gallon in LA and Joe Rogan blames Big Oil, so Chuck and Mark grab the mic to set the record straight on California's fuel island, refinery shutdowns, and why nationalizing oil sounds great until you actually think about it. From there it's the death of climate model RCP 8.5, Anthropic's Claude Mead and the Glass Wing trusted partner group, EIA's call for higher residential power bills, and Geraldo Rivera's wild plan for the Strait of Hormuz.

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Kirk and Mark fly solo while Chuck takes a break, and there is plenty to chew on. Crude took a hit on Iran peace talk leaks, and a suspiciously timed 925 million dollar short has even Marjorie Taylor Greene calling out insider trading. From there it is the upcoming Trump and Xi summit, SPR refill chatter on DoD lands, the voodoo science of reserves accounting, exec comp tied to flaring mitigation, and where Anthropic fits in the gigascale power buildout.

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Petroleum inventories are screaming lower, the SPR is down under 400 million barrels, and gas prices are creeping up just in time to sour the midterms. The guys break down the UAE walking away from OPEC+, Saudi PIF pulling the plug on LIV Golf, the brewing knife fight between AI data centers and the petrochemical industry over Gulf Coast gas turbines, and Permian gas trading at less than nothing. Plus a salute to David Allan Coe.

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Chuck and Mark rip through a week where the White House hauled oil and gas execs in for a drill baby pretty please moment, and capital discipline still isn't bending for $100 oil. They pick apart Trump's energy executive order and its cycle time problem, flag EOG quietly locking up Madison County's Buda play, unpack Paul Sankey on Heathrow jet fuel and Australia's refining collapse, then close with Rick Perry's push to legitimize ibogaine treatment for addiction and PTSD.

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Chuck's back, freshly upgraded to co-founder, and Kirk and Mark have plenty to catch up on. This week the guys dig into the Iran nuclear standoff, JD Vance's Islamabad trip, what $100 oil actually means for US producers, Ro Khanna's windfall profits tax proposal, the case for moving BP to Houston, and a proper sendoff for Astros legend Phil Garner.

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Oil markets are under siege and Kirk and Mark aren't sugarcoating it. From the Iran supply shock draining global inventories to the fertilizer fallout quietly heading for your grocery bill this fall, no topic is off limits. They also break down why US producers aren't just drilling on command, the capital discipline story behind the rig count, and Continental Resources' Mercury Pecos Power project proving Harold Hamm still runs circles around everyone.

Chuck's latest blog:
https://collide.io/old-man-coffee/18-months-ai-s-coming-divide-haves-vs-have-nots-and-it-s-already-ugly

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Kevin Krausert, CEO and Co-Founder of Avatar Innovations Inc., brings a story that starts with a vegan roughneck and ends with a venture studio that's quietly changing how oil and gas companies innovate from the inside out. Chuck and Kevin get into the Avatar model, some clever bets that actually paid off, the coolest ideas that flopped, and why Kevin thinks AI early adopters in energy are about to leave everyone else in the dust.

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Chuck and Mark are back and wasting no time getting into it. Qatar's LNG infrastructure is heavily damaged, a Red Sea refinery just got hit, and oil markets are absorbing a shock that the IEA apparently never saw coming (surprise). The guys break down regime adjustment vs. regime change, what a prolonged Strait of Hormuz disruption could mean for a global recession, and why gas prices matter more politically than anyone wants to admit. Then somehow they land on Mean Joe Green, Chuck Norris, and Astros opening day.

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Oil and gas deals have always been a handshake-and-know-the-right-guy kind of business, but Tokenized Energy is changing that. Chip Simmons and Adrian Macias, co-founders of Tokenized Energy, along with Tim Pawul, President of Minerals and Royalties Authority LLC, join Chuck to break down how blockchain is turning exclusive oil and gas investments into something anyone can access from their phone for as little as 500 bucks.

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Oil prices swung wild overnight and the BD War Chronicles rolls on. David Pursell joins Kirk and Mark to break down the SPR numbers, the Jones Act waiver, and why the IEA's emergency reserve is starting to look more like a price cap than a crisis tool. They also get into Iran's mosaic defense, Strait of Hormuz shipping chaos, and why reservoir damage fears are mostly noise.

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The Persian Gulf just became a live fire zone and crude is barely flinching. What does that tell you about where oil markets really stand? David Pursell, EVP Planning Reserves and Fundamentals at Apache Corporation, joins Kirk and Mark to break down the US strikes on Iran, why this is nothing like Operation Midnight Hammer, what OPEC is actually capable of producing, how strategic reserves are everyone's insurance policy, and whether the real story here is regime change, not barrels.

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Hawk Dunlap, 2026 Republican candidate for Texas Railroad Commission, pulls no punches on zombie wells, produced water injection, and why carbon capture is a taxpayer funded scam. From 27 years of international well control across 100 countries to excavating 150 leaking wells on a Texas ranch, Hawk brings the kind of boots on the ground credibility this conversation demands. The primary is March 3rd.

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Kirk, Chuck, and Mark cover Chevron's settlement to buy a West Texas ranch rather than face trial over decades of alleged pollution, Ken Paxton's lawsuit against a fiberglass recycling site turned wind turbine blade graveyard, and Elon Musk's plan to put AI data centers in space powered by solar panels. They debate whether the space data center concept is real or just Musk messing with software guys, discuss BP suspending share buybacks to reduce debt after their energy transition distraction, and reflect on Expand Energy leaving Oklahoma City nearly a decade after Aubrey McClendon's death, marking the end of...

Kirk Coburn, Mark Meyer, and Chuck Yates tackle Devon's $58 billion merger with Coterra—a Delaware Basin land grab with Marcellus as an afterthought. They break down why scale matters when your cost of capital beats everyone else's, why Oklahoma keeps building great companies Houston eventually swallows, and why data center cancellations reveal America's infrastructure crisis. The real insight? PJM's grid failures prove you can't bolt 21st century AI demand onto 20th century infrastructure with 19th century permitting. Plus: Trump's trade flurry, China's mineral monopoly, and why we have 2 icebreakers while Russia has 54.

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Winter Storm Fern exposed the grid's contradictions, New England burned 40% oil for power while sitting 300 miles from the Marcellus Shale, ERCOT's batteries sat idle during $2,000/MWh spikes, and solar panels disappeared under snow. Meanwhile, the IEA quietly restored their realistic demand forecasts after five years of transition fantasy, revealing a $15 trillion underinvestment hole. Toby Rice reminded everyone what actual energy leadership looks like by getting wells back online in a hard hat instead of pontificating from Davos.

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Kirk, Chuck, and Mark reunite on the Big Digital Energy Show to dissect the week's chaos - from natural gas spiking 75% in five days while Waha trades negative, to Trump's Davos windmill rant and the mainstream media's Greenland invasion hysteria. They break down why Harold Hamm's decision to shut down Continental's drilling makes perfect economic sense at $70 oil, debate whether 50% well-level returns ever translated to actual corporate performance, and explain how OPEC's Amine Nasser is signaling that global spare capacity is actually lower than the 2.5% he's publicly claiming. Plus, the crew explores how AI-native workflows are creating trillion-dollar opportunities...

Venezuela’s “open for business” moment gets a reality check, plus a wild Chavez-in-Houston story that tells you everything you need to know. Mark and David Pursell unpack why Exxon and friends are hesitant, what the EIA gets right and wrong, why the forward curve is the real lie detector, how Iran risk actually moves barrels, BP’s renewable hangover, and Tesla casually speed-running a lithium refinery in Texas.

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Landman day rates have basically been stuck in neutral since 2000, and Kyle Reynolds of RBG Permian walks Chuck through why that’s turning into a real problem as the field vets age out. Along the way they hit what AAPL actually does, why records still aren’t fully digital, how AI is speeding up title work without replacing judgment, and why NAPE is quietly turning into a marketplace for way more than just oil and gas.

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Oil prices, gas at the pump, Venezuela headlines, and a brutally honest scorecard on markets, politics, and global conflict all collide as Chuck and Mark walk through what actually mattered this year. From WTI whiplash and frack spread confusion to Trump’s energy strategy, midterm math, and why narratives keep beating fundamentals, this one feels like a whiteboard session that got a little too real.

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Headlines love tossing around Venezuela’s “303 billion barrels” like it’s a magic switch, but the reality is messy, expensive, and slow. Mark and David Pursell, Adjunct Professor of Petroleum Engineering, walk through why heavy oil, busted infrastructure, and shaky politics make this a long-cycle rebuild, not a drill-and-chill moment, plus what to watch in markets when the story sounds too easy.

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Trading rigs and rock samples for spreadsheets and shareholder battles, Mark Viviano, CFA from Kimmeridge walks through how he stumbled into energy investing, why shale rewired valuation thinking, and how the sector managed to grow like crazy while lighting free cash flow on fire. The convo hits consolidation, why big institutions mostly hide in the top names, and why activism plus a technical bench might be the only way to get boards to move faster.

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Catching yourself rereading last year’s VC emails while you’re back in Silicon Valley is a pretty good way to realize how wild the last 12 months have been. Colin, Chuck, Canisius, and Todd break down how Collide AI is turning fast POCs into real production workflows, why change management is the actual moat, and how a stacked forward deployed team plus community driven distribution is setting up 2026 to be the year everything scales.

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Collide AI 2025 Wrapped Part 1 turns into a real talk on why forward deployed engineers win where AI pilots stall, with Michael Cortez, John, and Nick Smart swapping war stories from completions, geophysics, and the startup trenches while they map out how Collide Enterprise moves past basic chat tools into search plus workflows that actually hold up in the real world.

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Collide basically did its own Spotify Wrapped and the punchline is simple: the community doubled, the conversations got more technical, and the team got way clearer on what Collide is now and where it’s headed. Crystal, Todd, Jacob, and Sydney walk through 2025 stats, why events evolved, how Energy 101 came back, what university partnerships unlocked, why Collider AI took a pause, and the platform upgrades and community goals lined up for 2026.

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Studio one glow up and the gang is officially back as Kirk Coburn, Chuck Yates, and Mark Meyer trade Texas football and tamale truths, then jump into Ford’s EV write down, BP’s CEO shuffle and what it signals, a quick tour of PE continuation funds around Ascent, and Trump turning up pressure on Venezuela before sliding into holiday stories and band lore.

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Adam Crum brings some serious Alaska energy, literally and figuratively, as he sits down with Chuck to talk about where the state’s headed and how he thinks it can get there. He opens up about everything from playing football at Northwestern to steering Alaska through COVID, all the way to why he thinks the state’s future depends on smarter energy development, fixing outdated policies like the Jones Act, and protecting the culture that makes Alaska, well… Alaska. It’s a mix of big ideas, real talk, and a few stories you probably haven’t heard before, all centered a...

Chuck and Mark crank up the camp as they riff on the Landman season two premiere, bouncing from the show’s oil-patch chaos to the real-world energy circus. They torch the DOE Loan Programs Office’s messy reputation while breaking down its latest billion-dollar moves, like the $1B revival of Three Mile Island for Microsoft and AEP’s $1.6B transmission upgrade, along with its surprisingly strong 3.3% default rate and Tesla’s quick 2013 repayment. Then it’s off to China, where a coal-to-liquids boom big enough to replace 1.3 million barrels a day pairs with thorium molten-salt reactors and plans for a 200-MW n...

COP30’s giving big “save the trees… after we bulldoze them” energy, and Kirk and Mark are all over it. They roast the idea of hosting a climate conference in the Amazon while clearing land for roads, hotels, and runways, right as private jets zip overhead and new drilling permits get stamped. It’s peak irony, wrapped in green branding. They unpack the politics, the money, the energy realities no one onstage wants to mention, and why these climate summits keep feeling more like PR tours than solutions. Sharp takes, spicy commentary, and a whole lot of uncomfortable truth about what...

California’s energy situation is getting messy, and the story behind it isn’t what most people think. Mark sits down with Mike Umbro, founder of Californians for Energy & Science, to break down how policy decisions, refinery shutdowns, and halted oil production are reshaping the state’s entire energy mix. They dig into why geothermal isn’t the quick fix it’s made out to be, how rising energy costs and job losses are hitting local communities, and the surprising environmental fallout from natural oil seeps along the coast. It’s a raw, honest look at what happens when politics and...

Bill Gates’ latest climate pivot is stirring things up, and the guys are all over it. Kirk, Chuck, and Mark break down why Gates is stepping away from the emissions-only mindset and putting people back at the center of the climate conversation, think healthcare, infrastructure, and everyday quality of life. From the ripple effects across the energy world to Big Tech’s growing influence, they don’t hold back. The crew also tackles U.S.-China trade tensions, Russian oil sanctions, and how AI could shake up the future of energy. It’s a sharp, funny, and surprisingly optimistic take on...

California’s energy mess is heating up, and Kirk and Mark aren’t holding back. They’re calling out what happens when regulators, like the California Coastal Commission, start flexing too hard, leaving companies like Sable Offshore tangled in lawsuits over something as basic as fixing old oil platforms near Santa Barbara. Between the fallout from the 2015 pipeline spill, shrinking refining capacity, and a growing dependence on imported crude, California’s energy future looks messy at best. The guys dig into whether regulation is protecting the environment or just strangling innovation and property rights. And because no episode’s complete w...

Oil at $500? Yeah, not happening, at least not anytime soon. Kirk, Chuck, and Mark unpack the hype around that wild prediction and explain what’s actually driving oil markets right now. Between OPEC’s chess moves, shifting U.S. production, and global demand swings, there’s plenty to keep traders guessing. They also get into the ripple effects of renewables, how countries are juggling sustainability with economic reality, and a few curveballs, like the MEG Energy deal, that have everyone talking. It’s a smart, unfiltered look at where the energy world’s really headed.

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Real-time frac data isn’t some future concept, it’s here, and it’s changing the way completions get done. Chuck Yates sat down with folks from ProFrac and Seismos to break down how AI, automation, and acoustic sensing are turning traditional fracking on its head. Matt Wilks and Panos Adamopoulos talk about ProPilot 2.0 and how closed-loop fracturing is giving operators instant feedback to fine-tune every stage. Then Larry Carroll and Steven Bourgoyne take it further, showing how machine learning and data-driven workflows are pushing completions toward adaptive, even autonomous, operations. From cutting costs to squeezing every drop of perfor...

Trump’s Climate Week speech was anything but subtle, and the Big Digital Energy crew had plenty to say about it. Kirk, Chuck, and Mark break down his unapologetic shots at global green agendas, the messy reality of rushing energy transitions, and what it all means for regular people facing rising energy costs. They don’t shy away from calling out China and India’s emissions role, questioning high-profile renewable failures like the Mojave solar plant, and unpacking the politics of energy independence. It’s a mix of sharp analysis, fiery takes, and plenty of laughs, the kind of conversa...

Musk is once again moving faster than the rulebook can keep up. The guys dig into his latest play, Colossus AI data centers, and how he’s flipping old infrastructure into giga-scale operations at a pace that makes regulators look like they’re standing still. From Tennessee to Mississippi, it’s a masterclass in sidestepping red tape while pushing the future of energy and tech forward. Kirk, Chuck, and Mark break it all down with sharp takes on what this means for digital infrastructure, the energy transition, and the frustrating grind of government oversight, all with the usual mix of big...

The shooting of Charlie Kirk has shaken the political and cultural world, raising hard questions about free speech, safety, and what it means to debate ideas in a time this divided. We talk about Kirk’s legacy, whether you agreed with him or not, as someone who pushed for open dialogue and challenged people to treat opponents as humans instead of enemies. From the ripple effects across podcasting and media, to the impact on energy policy, academic freedom, and how we argue about politics, this conversation digs into what feels like a turning point for free expression in America.

Norway’s energy playbook has basically turned the country into Europe’s oversized extension cord, but the trade-offs are starting to sting at home. Kirk, Chuck, and Mark get into how Norway’s hydro power and subsea cables made it a powerhouse exporter while leaving its own citizens facing higher electricity bills. They call out how exports are essentially propping up bad energy bets from countries like Germany and the UK, then draw some sharp parallels back to U.S. policy, think EQT’s LNG push and the roadblocks baked into regulation. Along the way, they touch on offshore wind, su...