Endowing Wellheads With Brains

Three years ago, Raymond Welder was still monitoring his company’s 150 oil and gas wells the old-fashioned way: Each day seven guys in trucks would drive hundreds of miles around South Texas checking each well. They’d jot down readings of production volumes and pressure levels and, once back at the office, type up the data and send it around to the rest of the staff. “We thought we were high-tech because we had e-mail,” says Welder, chief executive officer of San Antonio-based Welder Exploration & Production.

Back then, a day or more could go by before the company realized a well wasn’t working. Then a mechanic would have to be dispatched to the site to diagnose the problem and fix it. Says Welder: “Pretty soon, something small ends up costing you a week of production,” which can be a big problem for a small producer with about 700 barrels a day of output.