All right, welcome. I'm Richard Stubbe, Hart Energy’s senior technology editor. I'm here with Neil Modeland, who is the senior business technology development manager for Halliburton. We've been talking about the Haynesville Shale and some of the things that Halliburton brings to it and some of the difficulties that the shale brings here. So Neil, do you want to talk a little bit about what Halliburton is doing in the shale and why it's difficult here?

Neil Modeland, senior business technology development manager, Halliburton: Yeah, I think if you look at the Haynesville in general, we've talked about earlier going to longer laterals and more profit intensity than really any other play in North American land. Take a step back and look at what we're doing at Halliburton. We're really trying to minimize some of the costs associated with doing those huge completions in the Haynesville. So what can we do as a frac service provider to pull out some of those costs? One of those things is electrification. So we've got our ZEUS e-fleet [electric fleet] portfolio, and 40% of our fleets in North America are actually running e-fleets.

RS: And you said that's going up.

NM: Yes, and in 2025 we actually expect that to end the year with 50% on that. And really all of our dedicated fleets in the Haynesville currently are e-fleets. That's really helped on driving out some of the costs on a couple of different fronts.

One [is] just replacing diesel with natural gas, right? You have got a lower cost commodity, and in the Haynesville we have field gas that we can actually burn to create the power generation to power the e-fleets. And that's going to be your total lowest total cost of ownership of any power generation is just burning the field gas. So we have that plentiful in the Haynesville, so that's going to lower the cost. But also the maintenance schedule and just the simplicity of the maintenance is better with our ZEUS fleet. In fact, last month our ZEUS fleets or electric fleets pumped 11% more horsepower hours on average than any of our diesel fleets. That comes because of more simplistic maintenance and just more uptime pumping these jobs and being able to do that better.

RS: More uptime and less maintenance, that sounds like something I would also want for my car or something like that. But Halliburton is also doing a lot of work with automation, right?

NM: Yeah. And really the e-fleets have been a good platform for that. Just the simplicity of control and then the full fleet control through our OCTIV platform has allowed us to step into automation. So last year we commercialized Auto Frac, which is really kind of push-button frac. We upload a typical frac schedule an operator would give us. We then sit down with the operator and talk through ‘what parameters, what target pressure would you like, max rate, target rate, how would you like to ramp up the stage, how would you like to bring down the stage?’ Then once all that's loaded in, it's kind of press button and here you go. So there's your automated frac. If you're riding top pressure, as your pressure breaks down, your rate will increase. That's very common in the Haynesville that we'll see that. We actually commercialized the Auto Frac in the Haynesville last year as well. To put it in perspective, the time savings we're seeing through that automation versus a manual operator, we're seeing about 10 minutes on average. In fact, the Bossier Shale versus the Haynesville Shale is a little more finicky. We actually see a closer to 15 minutes saved per stage pumping time versus a manual operator versus what we're doing with automation.

RS: And we talked about 15 minutes, but it's 15 minutes plus 15 minutes plus times, times, times.

NM: Yeah. 15 minutes times a hundred stages of, well, a two well pad and then several pads throughout the year, all of a sudden you have enough time to actually have that frac fleet go pump another well or two right by the end of the year.

RS: Well fantastic. Thank you for being here and talking with us, and I really appreciate you just being part of the program.

NM: My pleasure. Thanks for having.

RS: Thank you.