What The Funk?

0:00 what the Ellison is going on around here. We've got Jason Ellison, who has a big personality and somebody that I've really enjoyed from our brief interactions. So far, he's a Denver area guy,

0:15 he's worked at places like in various, he's currently at spool, decent sized, LinkedIn following, carbon capture specialist, understands sort of the whole oil and gas ecosystem, both from a sort

0:31 of a high level strategic financial project development, sustainability perspective, so fairly well rounded. And I knew, you know, we got introduced through some of the leaders over at spool that

0:46 I met at a conference, they said, oh, we got a Denver guy, you should, you should have lunch. And I knew from that one lunch, I'm like, I need this guy in my podcast. Big personality makes no

0:56 bones, it seems about anything. I'm truly one of a kind. So without stealing all of your thunder, I'm going to hit you with the question that I won't let this with. Who are you, man? Who's

1:08 Jason Ellison? A strange cat. Usually I describe myself as a tall bald guy who really loves rocks, you know? And that, especially if my professional career goes would be pretty accurate. I tend

1:24 to be, I don't know, a non-linear thinker, which can be awesome except for when it's not. It's either my superpower or my liability, but usually I think I'm pretty damn funny. So nothing else,

1:38 at least there should be a good laugh-track going for whatever silly thing that I've gotten myself into at any point in time. But no, yeah, I've been serving as a geologist in, well, oil and gas

1:51 mostly, and then more recently and kind of energy 23 for projects transition

1:56 , 24 years now. Um, and it's been a wild ass ride with all sorts of twists and turns that I had exactly planned on, but, um, it's, it's, it's all part of the ride. So it's, it's, it's been a

2:08 blast, if not kind of crazy. So, all right, before we end, I want to go way back, right? I want you to kind of talk about maybe your upbringing, your past, college, early career, everything

2:19 that kind of brings us to today. But I just have to say, getting to know you, even though we've probably only spent an aggregate of two hours together, and some of that was on a demo, I just

2:31 don't understand how you worked for Inveris. That just feels like, what do they say, round, peg, square, hole, or the opposite. And of course, you know, I reached out to Patrick Ruddy,

2:44 because we talked about him. Awesome, awesome guy, also from New Hampshire, like myself. And I was like, dude,

2:52 how did that guy work in Inveris? This is just so one of a kind. He's like. Yeah, I just sort of learned to let him run free and be himself within the parameters of a large multi-million dollar

3:06 organization. So how did you work at Invariest, man? How did that happen? So I'm a bit of a useful problem child, if you will.

3:18 I think that when Ruddy was actually my hiring manager and I was looking for work and was open to some different ideas and he had posted this manager of technical position or manager of technical

3:32 sales position and I had never done sales before. So I'm like, all right, I know Ruddy, let's go have coffee and talk. And honestly, one of

3:40 my big concerns is like, okay, is the Houston tractor beam going to get ahold of me trying to suck me back down to Houston? That was my biggest concern. Sure. 'Cause that's a thing living in

3:50 Denver. And no, he really kind of described what the role is about which effectively was, okay, This is gonna be different. You're gonna have to learn sales, business development, et cetera,

4:01 but you're, you know, they were looking to have someone more technical come in and lead

4:07 the technical advisors, which I always described them as like the ninjas, the SWAT team that show up and give all of the demos or the technology previews as Invaris would prefer that I say and

4:21 really just kind of show how everything works, the data, the solutions, so on and so forth So what I didn't expect to like was actually the sales and business development part of it. It was

4:33 actually really fascinating, actually learning how to run Salesforce and having dashboards and being able to really kind of see where everything is and what you need to do to get off your ass to go

4:44 find more business quickly was a really valuable skill set. I will say that I was probably one of the more technical people in the company. And I'm a little bit more old school where I do love AI,

4:58 I use it a lot, and I love Python and coding and all that sort of stuff, but at the end of the day, I do want to know like, Okay, great, your algorithm spit out, but this is where we should

5:08 drill. Why? Explain it in like, use words and things, not, you know, not some R-squared of 035, I don't care, you know, use your words, that's what we have them for So, you know, I really

5:24 valued the time that I had with Invaris, got introduced to a lot of great people, a lot of really cool kind of machine learning techniques, things like that. But that was one of the reasons why I

5:36 was like, I want to be more technical and especially with the way things have taken off with regards to whether it's hydrogen or CCS or other things, it was like, I just want to get back to my

5:49 roots and do more of that stuff. Yeah, and Varys was interesting. I've had many interesting jobs, but they all looking back on them, they all gave me something I didn't have before. And

6:01 that's, I think, the most important thing, like I can even look back at gut miserable experiences. And I try to think positively, 'cause I think just negativity in general is bad. It creates

6:15 stress and bad juju vibes that I don't want anywhere near my life But I think back to 20 years ago when I had an absolutely horrible boss. And I was a young sales guy, and I remember we had a

6:31 meeting. It was in Q1 of

6:36 2006, and we were debriefing Q4. And I was given a number for the quarter of75, 000 in software sales, and I

6:47 did86, 000 in software sales, which, quick math, I. I am not a human calculator by any means. It's about

6:56 1148 of quota. So I thought this was gonna be a good meeting. And I came in there and it was immediately, yeah, I really, really didn't get what we needed from you last quarter of kind of a

7:08 disappointment, I would say. I was like, well, then why don't we just get into the numbers then, right? This is a quantitative role. So I sold86, 000 with the software and a75, 000 quota.

7:21 And the boss is like, you did? He said, yeah, it's here in Salesforce. That's what you tell us to use. And so he's like, yeah, okay, interesting. So he looks at it, takes out his old

7:36 calculator, one of the ones that like prints out paper and type of thing. And starts typing it deal by deal the number. And he's like, huh, it was like he didn't believe it. and started doing

7:48 the math out like that, and typed it and went to his phone, phone calculator. He goes, huh, 86, that's it. That's 114. I go, well, 115 if we're really doing the math and rounding out, but

8:05 either way, it's pretty good, right? He goes, hmm, not bad, not bad, not good. Definitely not good, not bad. I'm like, I'll take, I will take that as a compliment I will take the not bad

8:19 as a compliment. So now, it's something that like in my family, with my wife and stuff, we use that joke, like fairly consistency, like, yeah. What'd you think about dinner tonight? Not bad,

8:30 not good, definitely not good. So, you know, even with that, it's like, wow, at the time it just took me out. I'm like, I hate this place and this guy's such a loser and I can't work for an

8:40 asshole like this. But now, you know, I run a company, I manage people. They probably have their own, They certainly have their own. scars from past bosses. So what did I learn from that? Do

8:52 the opposite, right? Whatever you learned from a negative perspective, just flip that. What do you, what did I hate bosses doing to me and do the opposite? So experience can be a great teacher.

9:04 Let's go back, man. Where are you? Where are you from? Where'd you grow up? So I am a hick from the sticks. I grew up out in the country in Northwestern Nebraska and, yeah, I grew up, well,

9:17 I lived in a massive city of Shadow Nebraska, a population of 5, 000 until I was like eight or nine, and then we moved out into the country. And yeah, that's where my full hickness began. But

9:32 dad was a, well, he did whatever he could to pay the bill. So farmer, rancher, we built terraces and dams and

9:43 land diversions, things like that, sprayed crops. sold firewood. It's sort of what you have to do to make ends meet

9:52 back that way back in the day. But yeah, grew up there and it's kind of funny because most people don't think about Nebraska in terms of geology. You're a geologist, you're from Nebraska. What

10:06 the hell is there's nothing there. There's like one contour line across the entire state, otherwise there's nothing. It's like well, maybe, but actually in my corner of the state, if you know

10:16 where the Black Hills are, it's where Mount Rushmore and all that stuff is, you know, we're the southernmost edge of it. So, you know, when I was, I don't know, I was in 4-H, she was, I was

10:28 9 or 10 or something like that, and they had what they call his day, which was dad's taking all the boys out to go do stuff. So, we went fly fishing, and we went hiking, and we also went to this

10:40 outcrop of what now, I know, it was pure shale and collected fossil, you know, ammonites, baculites, all these crazy fossil shellfish things. And then went to another outcrop where it was

10:54 fossil horses, little tiny horses, and I was like, holy shit, this is amazing.

11:01 And basically that day I collected a whole bunch of rocks. I went home, opened up all my clothes drawers through all my clothes, browns, and put all my rock samples in there, and got out labels,

11:12 and labeled, you know, what it was, and where it was from, the day I collected it, and I just kept doing it forever. So, and I still do, there's rocks scattered all over this house. So, yeah,

11:22 it got started early.

11:25 That just doesn't surprise me about you at all. I don't know, to me that just encapsulates the Jason Ellison that I've gotten to know, here in 2025, so I love it. So, Shattering, shout out

11:38 Danny Woodhead, I believe he went to - We are, yeah. Yeah, one of our, he's our claim to fame, or something Is that where you went to school? I went two years there, get some of my

11:49 undergraduate stuff out of the way, they had a couple of geoscience classes, but then I transferred to University of Nebraska for my undergraduate and then University of North Carolina for my

11:59 master's degree. Okay, cool.

12:04 And then what, right? So did you go straight from Nebraska to Chapel Hill to get your graduate degree? Or was there work in between there? Yeah, no, there was, it was, you know, I had a head

12:15 of steam built up and frankly, I don't know, some people like take gap years and go to Europe and stuff and I don't know, I'm just kind of poor white trash. It's like, I don't have any time or

12:25 money for that. And I also, I've got a specific target that I want to shoot at. And at the time, especially because of the influence of my undergraduate advisor, I got started in nano fossil bio

12:37 stratigraphy So I was looking at the teeny tiny books and thought it was cool. It's like, you know, hey, who wants to look at fossils you can actually see? when you could look at teeny tiny ones

12:47 under a microscope. So, hey, let's do this. And so I ended up getting support from a professor at University of North Carolina to come study under him, did a project while I was there, and

13:03 Exxon actually came recruiting in that area. Hold on a second, let me mute this conversation. Somebody's been - Yeah. Jason, we need you on this call right now Yeah, I know, well, I'm kind of

13:16 a big deal, you know, if you don't mind,

13:20 I think everybody knows that about me at this point. Okay, that should be muted now. Apologies. That's all good. So, anyway, so yeah, when I was at North Carolina, having a great time,

13:33 didn't love the Carolina barbecue, it kind of grows on you. I preferred that the barbecue out of my mind, out of Texas a whole lot more. Sort of so like vinegar based pulled pork as opposed to

13:44 like the saucy pulled pork as an example. Yes, and it can be done better. It still is never like in my view, the best of the best. Like Kansas, you know, kind of take Kansas all the way down

13:60 through Texas is sort of mine's style.

14:04 But I will say the, you usually get that, but they also have hush puppies, which, you know, hey, why not hush puppies with barbecue? 'Cause it's a thing. Brunswick's do. And actually the big

14:17 thing we always did when I was in grad school there was the churches in the area absolutely, they would put on these big events like once or twice a fall where it was, you show up, you pay five

14:32 bucks and then they have,

14:36 you know, all this kind of barbecue, all these meats, all these vegetables, and then like this table of pies that was like just dozens and dozens of pies. And, you know, we're like starving

14:46 grad students. We show up there slapping our five bucks and would be, you know, chowing down. And it was always sort of interesting 'cause the little old ladies be like, Oh, are you students at

14:54 the university? And so, yeah, and then they'd ask what we're studying. We'd say, Geology, and then they're like, Oh, okay. And they probably thought we were all atheists or something like

15:03 that Earth is 45 billion years old, but whatever. We ate their food, and it was delicious, and they were very nice. So, Caroline, barbecue people are the and,

15:13 super nice, and there's other food you can get there that's pretty tasty as well. Yeah, that area is cool to my wife went to Duke. So, of course, we started dating, and all that. She's like,

15:27 You gotta see where I went to schooland all this stuff, so we would goand stay in Durham or stay in Chapel Hill My little sister. The Final Opportunity to work in Chapel Hill so they actually bought

15:39 a house in Durham and she and her partner work in Chapel Hill so really nice place to visit my parents actually recently just bought a an apartment there they it's so interesting my parents like you

15:52 know they're old now right there my Dad's almost eighty my mom's mid seventies and every decision is like so laborious and laid out they have nothing but time to the things that like stress them out

16:05 are

16:07 can have to do a lot of laundry today and and go to the dump my wife sounds like a stressful day what do you have you know sixty two fuckin Zoom calls and I have to send six invoices and put out seven

16:21 fires of my Guys and in between all that pick up My kids from three different schools and make sure that they're eat and bathe But yeah, no, besides that, it sounds like you've got a tough day

16:32 going, dad. But then they texted us like two weeks or like. So we put an offer on an apartment in Durham and it was accepted. I'm like, what? Like you stress over these like little things and

16:44 now you're buying an apartment. But kudos to them. I'm happy for them. They get to be near my daughter who probably is like the nicest to the parents. She was the baby. So she was raised a little

16:56 bit differently. And it gets them So, you know, they only stay in contact with you every now and again, probably. Yeah. If, you know, if I need something like money or something like that,

17:05 but they. Hey, and kudos to them because they have, you know, I grew up in New Hampshire in the sticks like you, town that I grew up and had about 1500 people, the nearby metropolis of Plymouth

17:17 had maybe 5000. And this is not an area that's seen any population growth. In fact, a couple people die goes from like 1500 and one to 1499 because there was babies in the tab, but, you know,

17:31 it's cold up there, man. And for them to like go this long into their lives in retirement and still be in New Hampshire. Yeah, go to North Carolina where it's a little bit warmer. So anyways,

17:44 it's beautiful, right? A little bit sticky, a little bit hot, but if you've ever been to Houston, everything else pales in comparison, so no. Yeah, yeah, no, it's, yeah, Houston can

17:55 certainly, they both are, well, particularly living in Denver, and I don't know if you feel this way, but it's like there is really no humidity here whatsoever. So whenever I leave anywhere else,

18:07 like my skin just inflates automatically with moisture, 'cause you step off the plane and your skin's like, Oh my God, thank you. But then the mosquitoes come and attack you, and you're like, Ah,

18:17 okay, yeah, there are no. Having some moisture in the air. I love the dryness here So take me.

18:26 So you finish up Chapel Hill, right? Now you've got your graduate degree, you've got your undergrad degree. You know that you love rocks. You know that you love fossils. What next? What'd you

18:35 do? So I had an internship actually, and this was back in the good old base, which are probably gone forever, but when oil prices were on the rise and a lot of companies were looking to add new

18:50 staff. And so Exxon recruited in the research triangle area and

18:56 I'm told because the recruiters liked the golfing there, but they could also hit up three universities at once, because you can do it in C and NC State. So whatever, I'll take it. And their

19:06 Biostrack group was looking for someone for a summer internship. So I got an internship that summer and came down to Houston, drank a shit ton of beer, had a really great time and it's like, I

19:17 could do this, let's do this.

19:20 So yeah, that's. there was a job offer in hand before I got out of grad school. And so it was, it was kind of like I had my, my career path set to, to head to H-town, where I spent 12 lovely

19:37 years working at Exxon.

19:41 At Exxon the whole time, the whole dozen years that you were there. Yeah. And what did you do while you were there? Was it like focused geographically on, because I know that the bigger companies,

19:51 the majors tend to do this, right? You don't get to take a massive, wide swath that all of their assets and operations and look at every single thing. Did they put you in like, we're going to

20:01 need you to focus on the Gulf of America. Probably not what they called it at the time. The Gulf of America,

20:10 or there's this thing called the Permian Basin. Or, you know, we're curious about what's happening in the Marcellus shale. What was your area of focus? Or did it change throughout that 12 years?

20:20 So, initially, you know, they had hired me on to be a bug picker, which is what we call these micro paleontologist weirdos. And but they said, you know, we'll put you in the generalist training

20:31 program, which last two years, we're going to swirl you around to different groups, having you do different kinds of work. And then you can decide at the end whether you want to stay general or if

20:40 you want to be, you know, kind of a micro paleontologist for the rest of your career What became clear to me is that, like, if you're going to do micro paleontology, you better love it because

20:52 that's all you're going to do. Yeah. Literally, there's like a hand cuff that attaches to your microscope to keep you there. And then on year 30, they come on lock it and then you can retire.

21:03 But it was just like, I don't think I want to do that. There's like way too many other cool things out there. And for me, that's just, that's the way working the subsurface has been It's this

21:14 delicious geologic smorgasbord

21:17 and I want to eat it all. And so I tried to gorge myself on as many geologic delicacies as I can and certainly getting to do that at Exxon was easy because even after the little training program,

21:31 just deployments all over the place. So they put me actually after that point into a carbonate internship program where I learned carbonates and then worked in assets in Kazakhstan, worked assets in

21:45 offshore Brazil, did field work all over the world. And yeah, it was really a great place to be the rock guy because you got to go to where the rocks are, whether it's now crop or whether they

21:58 drilled up some core. So yeah, I'd be drinking a really nice Malbec from somewhere in Argentina calling my wife and she's dealing with screaming babies at home. She loved that so much, that period

22:11 of time. Oh yeah, that was your favorite now. Sweetie, I got a little indigestion from, I just ate too much steak and she didn't want But no, anyway, so it was really really fun. Yes. Yes.

22:23 She's she is a saint. We all well She's married to me. She must be a saint for real, right? I think about that with my wife I don't know how many times I called her where the noise behind me was

22:32 like the white noise of a happy hour at at nape and The noise behind her is two kids screaming in the bath And one of them pooped and I gotta go I can't and not only was this frustrating But it was

22:45 more frustrating because you were on the phone drinking and having a good time with your friends So enough of you, right? I'll see when you get back on Friday and the kids are yours and I still have

22:53 to be like well Now I'm kind of zombie mode, you know, I'm nape. I'm tired. Oh, yeah, it's like you are the worst You're the worst. Yeah, you might you might get a check on that one I've heard

23:06 I was always so just Johnny on the spot Just on top of everything when I got home because that's that's just how I am all the time. Just just a just an amazing dad and husband. My wife is, she

23:19 babysits me and she needs to be 'cause I don't know, if I'm left alone here with sharp objects or flammable items, God only knows what's gonna happen, so. So we work well, we're a good match.

23:30 Yeah, if she's the grownup, you like to play with rocks and put them in your clothes drawer, right? Yeah, I get it, I get it. So a dozen years and you got to see the globe a little bit, you

23:40 got to play with all different types of rocks, you got to really learn the front end of oil and gas and then see what level of production, you know, all of

23:52 the different commodity types that spew out of that rock, which is super fun. Did you move to Denver after those 12 years? Yeah, we made the decision to move up here in 2013. And there was, yeah,

24:07 my wife, she'd grown up coming to Colorado 'cause she was from Houston as well She grew up coming to Colorado out by Crested Beauty. camping in the summers. And she loved Colorado and would always

24:17 try to kind of nudge me in the direction of like considering a Denver job. But honestly, until the shale boom, there just weren't many jobs to be had out here.

24:28 And I was not, I was like, I've got a great thing going on at Exxon. I'm going to be a lifer here. But, you know, one of the big things was that her parents moved from the East Coast to about

24:40 two and a half hours away from Denver, which kind of started the gravitational pull that way. And then, you know, Denver is a hell of a lot closer to Shadrne Nebraska than Houston is. Right. And

24:50 my kids didn't know my parents, really.

24:54 I love Houston, but people don't come to Houston to visit unless they absolutely have to. It was my experience. And so, it was just like, well, all right, let's do Denver. So, made the

25:07 decision to move up here and got a job and started working in 2014. So you left Exxon Mobil and moved at the same time yup Yup Yup it was a whirlwind adventure of getting the job offered to getting

25:22 moved up here like a month and a half two months later or over over the holidays as well as over Christmas and new years so but we we made it work out and yeah a move for the better I think I we

25:34 really love living in Denver Yeah and you did this with with young kids too right oh Yeah Yeah so I mean i I remember around that so we're probably around the same age and I would guess our kids are

25:47 around the same age as well but there was a point in time for me it was it was early two thousand and thirteen where I changed jobs and actually went to a competitor which adds like a different layer

25:58 of stress especially on the sales side of things wasn't necessarily I Guess I would say I was persona non Grata in some circles which I don't like I like people to like me at want to be liked your

26:10 your your your agree Well, you don't just have to say that, Jason, because I paid you to say it like it's, it's okay. Well, you stretch my back. I'll scratch yours. You validate me here more

26:20 in a minute and tell me I'm awesome. I, well, let's, I will. You already, you spent the first bit doing it, but, but my ego is fragile. It's not enough, right? You've already forgotten them.

26:29 You've moved on. Yeah. Yeah. Um, but it was changed jobs right around the time that we closed on a new house So then you have to move and we had two kids under three and that it actually took me a

26:45 while. I want to say maybe like five or six months to like just get my like heart rate down. You know what I mean? Like there was a, there was some real stress around that time, even though it

26:55 was a lot of wonderful things. It's great to have a young family and to buy a home and take a higher paying job doing it all at the same time I don't recommend that to people, like, don't do that.

27:09 Yeah, no, when we moved up here, after it was over, I was like, that was a one and done. I don't ever want to do that again. I mean, our car broke down on the way and we were stuck in Kansas

27:19 for three or four days. And then when we got here, it was, you know, especially coming from Houston, not used to sub-zero temperatures and all that sort of stuff. Just, you know, when was

27:29 blowing the kids, we're like, what is this? And honestly, just packing up all your crap, transporting it across the US and then trying to figure out where everything is and getting your life back

27:41 in order. You know, all the while, the kids still need to be taken care of and all that stuff. It's like, oh, so you moved. We don't care. Feed us breakfast, you know? Yeah, yeah.

27:52 Admittedly, I think my wife took more of the brunt of that than I did, but it was still just trying to get the house sold, the new house bought, all the rigmarole that went along with it was,

28:03 yeah, it was, it was, We survived it and we got a good spot, so that was good. Sorry to bring you back to the PTSD of that time. I definitely had some of it. Like, I remember when things

28:16 finally come down, I was like, Phew, not doing that again. Not doing all of those things with young kids at the same time again. But, you know, you bought your house, I'm reading between the

28:29 lines. It means you bought your house up here in like 2014. That would have been a good time to buy a house in Colorado Yes, yes, and I thought it was highway robbery, what I had to pay for it

28:39 versus what the little ranch style house that we bought in the suburbs of Houston. But, it was bargain basement prices compared to, I mean, it's worth probably more than double what we paid for it

28:51 and we didn't buy it for an investment. But, yeah, it's what I always tell the kids is like, look, me and mama, we got ours. You gotta figure out what you're gonna do to get yours because it

29:04 like, I don't know. Mary very well, because Denver is getting to the point to where, especially if you want to live in Metro Denver, I guess if you got a million bucks laying around, cool. But

29:16 it's hard. Jason, I don't know how people do it. Like we bought our starter home here in Lafayette, which at the time was sort of just coming up. You know, we got the post brewery out here and

29:29 restaurants were coming in and there was mass gentrification. Our starter home was like360, 000

29:35 That same home today is probably like850,

29:41 000 or900. Who with a young family can afford in their early 30s, a starter home, that's close to800, 000. I don't get it. I don't get it. I don't know and the thing that's strange to me too is

29:51 that things don't stay on the market that long and that's with interest rates being up at six and 7.

30:01 Who are these people? And I guess probably they're just going to do a refi later on and get a more reasonable mortgage. But I don't know. I had the good fortune of being able to get into a home in

30:13 Houston, build up equity, and then apply that towards a down payment on a much more expensive home here. But yeah, I mean, that's what a lot of the millennials, et cetera, are struggling with

30:25 is how am I going to make this happen? And a lot of life, frankly, is there's just luck and good timing right place, right time. So I do feel fortunate to, you know, our house isn't anything

30:36 fancy, but it's a house in Metro Denver. That's in a nice neighborhood, I think. So yeah, feel fortunate to have the spot that we do because there's a lot of people who can't find a way to make

30:51 that happen Yeah, and I mean, just as you're talking about houses, some of my closest friends in California don't have a house right now. So, you know, when I'm in a crummy mood or thinking

31:03 about that, it's always good to kind of check yourself and be like, well, at least I'm in a bad mood in my office, in my house, which is standing and not trying to figure out what I'm gonna do

31:11 for the next two years if my house gets rebuilt and there's still fires near my house. So, you know, constantly thinking about that, checking in with my people in LA. So back to you a little bit

31:23 on, who did you start working for in 2014? Do you stay in the operator side of things? Yeah, I started work for the infamous Coke Brothers in the Coke Exploration Company. And yeah, I was doing,

31:37 kind of did a bunch of things, you know, sort of operations and stuff for the acreage that we had out in on the western side of Colorado, and really just kind of exploring basins willy-nilly. So

31:50 looking at the Eagleford, looking at the

31:54 Bakken, did a little tiny bit of stuff in the Permian, stuff in the in the library, you know, plays both in the peonets and over here in the in the DJ base, and so just kind of doing all of the

32:04 above, and learning petrophysics, things like that. So that is definitely a big difference moving away from a major to smaller companies is you're gonna do everything, and so initially, which is

32:19 like, well, where's our petrophysis? That's you,

32:23 you know, and where's our geotech? That's you, you go do it, so, but there's the opportunity to do a lot of really cool stuff, and especially learn new tricks. I think that's a good thing.

32:38 Everybody should be learning new tricks as they go in their career. Yeah, yeah, I mean, good for you, right? 'Cause the big companies, I just talked about this in my last podcast, they want a

32:49 need, and it makes sense, specialists, right? You go to a smaller company of any kind, could be an operator a be could, farm. You need to be a generalist, right?

33:03 some level of slant toward expertise in something. So it was probably good for you, right? To learn new things, tap into new areas, and you strike me as somebody who has a thirst for learning and

33:11 trying different things. Did you like the experience working for a small operator? Yes and no. So

33:20 I'll try to keep this politically correct.

33:25 So what I liked was the opportunity to work a bunch of different kinds of things across a bunch of different basins and learn new stuff. What I didn't like was their approach towards technical stuff.

33:35 And I felt like corners were cut. And frankly, that division got shut down years ago because of I think some pretty poor results that came in from wells that were built. So that has been a theme

33:49 with a lot of the companies that I've worked for. I tend to, I apparently am the black angel of death 'cause usually when I show up at a company, they implode shortly thereafter So, you know, It

34:02 is one of the reasons why I get on an occasional soap box and turn into my dad where it's like, you need to do the work, and you need to really have an integrated story of what's going on, or it's

34:13 not if it's when Mother Nature will bitch slap you upside the head be like, no, you're wrong. You were completely wrong Be a little humble, open the after a little bit, be open to different ideas

34:25 about what could be going on, because, you know, it's two miles deep. Who knows what's going on down there. Totally.

34:33 Yeah, so chronologically walking through this a little bit more, right? So you're a coke. And then, then what did you go to in various from there? Did you do your own consulting stuff? What was

34:44 the path after you moved to Denver? So from there, I went to another company called Nios Geosolutions, which,

34:53 oh gosh, I just have worked at some interesting places. So I really enjoyed my time there. I was there for a little over two years. And we were, it's basically a company that had died and been

35:04 reborn about 15 times. Literally, you can Google this

35:11 company. And I think it's known as the third or fourth largest private equity failure of all time. And it was all predicated on an idea that somebody working at NASA was doing kind of remote sensing

35:27 of the Earth And he was looking for something, I think, to do with groundwater. But using this remote sensing techniques, he ended up finding locations of oil and gas fields. And so the idea was,

35:38 oh, OK, well, hey, if it works so well, let's go turn this into a business and make money using gravity, magnetic, ground MT, all this sort of stuff to remotely sense where the sweet spots are.

35:53 And this guy went so far as to buy some Russian migs to mount.

35:60 Graph Mag equipment onto how that's going to work flying a mig at low speeds over I I don't know but literally spending that your tens or hundreds of millions of dollars on this crazy stuff that

36:10 entity died was reborn as Neo Geo Solutions and I was brought in because they needed that the idea was Okay We were going to try to get a business with oil and gas companies but we also want to go

36:24 after Sovereign nations and say hey we're going to come in and do regional screenings of your basins and help you find sweet spot you could find before and they needed someone who who knew Kazakhstan

36:34 and I'd worked at several times at Exxon so they brought me in and that's what I was there to do partially was was worked out but I ended up getting roped in to enter into other projects across the

36:48 across the world including Argentina and so it was Super Fun Super interesting they had no money so sometimes the patient sometimes they didn't laugh that Sucks Yeah but but it was Super fun they were

37:06 they drank a little bit too much of their kool -aid and and frankly just kind of sort of shady investors and things like that didn't end up panning out but I it was Crazy fun and if not insane and

37:21 Yeah so so you're taking the value from that it was like coming off of my first lay off and and kind of getting back up on the saddle and it really just doing fun fun geoscience work again and Yeah

37:35 unfortunately that company imploded so so there was another lay off in the works from there I went to what was known as Curious oil and gas Nowitzki entertaining and they they own a boat load of stuff

37:48 out west now I think they've basically just collapsed back to their core assets in the in the Piazza They're kind Of 800 pound gorilla for, for, for the Pian's basin, the basin that time forgot,

38:00 for the most part, but it'll, it'll, it'll have its day again sometime. Yeah. I mean, it's, you know, the, the companies that are there, they, they know the rock. They know how to produce

38:10 and maintain. And, you know, I'd look like Karis got a good deal with their exit. So, um, kudos to those guys. Uh, so you were at Karis too, which to me is, I always felt like they were, um,

38:24 I don't know, it was kind of like a dry culture, right? It wasn't like a high energy office. I've been into a lot of offices, not oil and gas industry. And I just sort of felt like, wow, this

38:35 place is a little bit muted. You don't strike me as a muted guy.

38:42 So no, uh, what I will say is I've run across my fair share of weirdos, uh, in some of these, some of these smaller companies, probably none as weird as I am. Um, but. No, there was

38:55 certainly was a certain culture there to say the least. It changed. It's been changing, particularly since they got bought out by, I think it was quantum. That's right.

39:10 But yes, it's maybe not the most dynamic environment, but they're really kind of in rinse and repeat mode on a lot of these wells. They're not drilling horizontals. That was what I was brought in

39:22 to do, was work up the Nile play there in that basin. But they're just drilling these, you know, spaghetti wells, whatever, the octopus arms from a single pad into the Williams fork and making

39:35 bone dry gas and making it work. So yeah, they have survived some ups and downs. Got let go from them after they had a pretty big debacle as far as some drilling results, but they managed to

39:51 recover and actually buy more assets and seem to be doing fine from what I can see. So good on them. So when a company does have poor drilling results, right? And, you know, a drilling program

40:03 for people who aren't in oil and gas and listening to this can be really, really expensive, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of dollars, you really need it to work. Who gets blamed for that?

40:13 Is it the rocks, guys? Is it the drilling team? Is it the vendor partner who actually owns the rig? Like, who, who did the fingers get pointed at most severely when that happens? Well, you

40:28 know, what what I will say, and actually part that I enjoyed right right before the the axe dropped, was that, you know, we, all of us were getting together, all the all the worker bees were

40:39 getting together in work rooms, trying to figure out, you know, WTF, what was that? What what happened here? And so, you know, the geologists were talking to the engineers about concepts of

40:51 what could happen. The journaling department, well, it was not so much the drilling, but really the completions department there talking about what happened.

40:60 And for me, it was a really cool, nerdy experiment of like, well, this is real-time data. This didn't go the way we had thought it would. And it kind of harkened back to some of the sort of,

41:12 let's get back to geology 101 andor engineering 101. What do we think actually happened here that created this? So it's not the fun way to discover these things Sure. But, I don't know, that's

41:24 the benefit of experience in a career is you will drill some dry holes. And you will swear

41:32 that something's going to be some way that it really isn't after you poke a hole in the ground. And yeah, I love that stuff, especially on the exploration side. It's like I kind of tend to chase

41:44 risk in that way. It's where the fun and interesting stuff can happen can happen. And ultimately. where the big bucks can get made

41:53 if you find the right spot. If you're right, I mean, you mentioned Argentina, I think they've recently said there's a massive play down there where they think there's billions of barrels of oil

42:03 that could be recovered, right? Which is cool. Like you think that people would have found everything by now and we have it. There's still more out there, which is really the kind of need. Yeah,

42:13 yeah, yeah. And I think as time goes on, I mean, obviously there's a vodka more to play down there that's, you know, it's, it's, I would say it's the equivalent of the Eagleford, if you will,

42:22 in terms of its, how it behaves.

42:25 Yeah, there's a lot of these things. Once, once the shale patch dries up, that I expect a lot of the geo's skills will be sought after in these other countries that have shale that, you know,

42:35 you've got to export the know-how over there. I don't know if they're going to want people to come live over in those locations. But yeah, we have been the test kitchen for all of this stuff,

42:46 which is for shale and it's valuable.

42:52 I got to say, one of the things that I've really liked about this conversation so far is we've gone 43 minutes and we haven't talked about your current employer sprule at all. So I think it's only

43:02 fair for them since this many people are going to be listening and they're cutting you checks to talk about them. So who is sprule and what do you do for those guys? So first of all, I love that

43:15 you know how to pronounce their name and the way that I always help people to remember is that I am cool and I work for sprule and sprule rhymes with cool. Okay? So that's locked in your hand for

43:28 forever now and all the listeners who are going to be like, oh my God, they were actually probably just throwing up on themselves. But that's okay. Yeah. Yeah. I'm really, really happy that you

43:36 did that. Thank you. Well, you know, there's always time for a dad joke. So I found.

43:42 So Sproul was interesting. I actually wasn't looking for work. I had had my great stint at Inveris, but ultimately I wanted to lead to go start my own consulting business to chase the CCS stuff.

43:54 And I'd spent a year plus doing mapping, site screening, things like that for a Kansas geologic survey, some different groups here out of Denver. And I tend to be what I call a LinkedIn loudmouth

44:07 where I post a lot on LinkedIn and I found that it's a useful way for me to get my name out there, my brand out there and also maybe help some people with some ideas or thoughts or insights. And

44:20 yeah, so one of the guys said, Hey Jason, let's go out for coffee and talk. And I thought, Sweet, spool, I know those guys. I'm gonna get consulting work. And they were like, No, no, no,

44:29 we want to hire you. And I was like, Hire me? What are you talking about? That's not what I thought this was. But, you know, ultimately, you know, Sprull is a pretty well-known brand in

44:41 Canada. In the US, it's not as well known, or if anybody knows about them, they say, Oh, okay. You guys do reserves automatically. And yes, that is what Sprull does. That is one of the

44:50 things that Sprull does. But we do a lot of other stuff, too. So I won't talk too much about the other segments. There's asset management. We oversee about 15, 000 BOE of production in Canada

45:03 for other owners in Canada Mostly in Canada. We've got a geothermal division out of Voorberg in the Netherlands, which is near the Hague. And we've got a lot of geothermal experts over there.

45:19 We've got reservoir services, which they're the main ones who do the volumetric assessments and kind of auditing-type stuff. But they also do all the other stuff that a regular oil and gas company

45:31 would. We're kind of like an oil and gas company just without the assets, if you will. I reside in the Energy Advisory Group, and we do a bunch of things. So obviously, my background is in CCS,

45:44 but I've been picking up things like hydrogen, helium exploration, hydrogen storage, et cetera, doing advisory and consulting work for a variety of groups. Anywhere from, we've got frankly

45:56 operators who either they are seeking out our opinion, or they need to have an independent third party kind of review of their work for their investors or

46:06 for the regulators as

46:10 the case may be. We have landowners who say, hey, I own all this land. So apparently I've got this poor space rights below me to inject CO2 into it. Is any of it good or who should I partner with?

46:22 What should we do? Literally tell us, give us the advice and kind of lead us of what our next step should be

46:30 We have insurance companies that actually hire us, because as it turns out, for every ton of CO2, you pump into a saline aquifer and have it stay underground. You get paid85 from Uncle Sam, at

46:42 least under the current rules and regulations. And so if it leaks, you've got to pay the government back, that volume of whatever leaked, plus you've got to pay penalties and fees and fines And so

46:56 there are insurance companies that create insurance products to protect against that. But insurance companies don't have big subsurface teams that understand how hydrogen storage works and

47:09 stuff. And so yeah, we've been writing up some of the reports that support the underwriting for insurance companies to create these products. So it's fascinating. Actually, some of the first in

47:18 the US have been done by us So we also do oil and gas advising and I've got, I mean, at this point, I'm like a short order cook. That's like, what do you want?

47:30 You want some CCS, you want some hydrogen, you want me to work in jail or find some nice juicy oil for you, I don't care, just whatever, wherever you want. So we do

47:40 kind of MA valuations by side, self-sides to provide guidance and advice on that. We actually do expert witness testimony. So if

47:53 someone's fracked damaged your acreage or something like that and you want to take someone and cord over it, we can serve as an expert witness for that, for oil and gas, or especially anything

48:03 subsurface. We do also have some surface level screening capabilities as well, it's not all subsurface, but that tends to be our bread and butter.

48:15 Yeah, so those are all kind of the variety of different things that we do. And I like it because literally, I don't know where I'm gonna be working next I mostly have been working CCS projects and

48:29 screening in the United States, but over the last three, four months, I've been doing kind of auditing of exploration projects in Kosovo, in France, offshore UK, offshore Italy, offshore

48:43 Netherlands, hydrogen helium exploration, hydrogen storage, and it's all just so cool. So fast. Yeah, it is cool. And I think that it leads me to sort of a natural question that I've been dying

48:57 to ask is like, so what changes now, right? Trump comes in, it's back to drill baby drill. Maybe we're gonna get rid of wek charges and emissions aren't quite what they, we thought they might be.

49:10 Who knows what that means with the IRA. What does this change in administration mean from these carbon capture sequestration, hydrogen green centric projects that you have real insight into?

49:26 So we're early days and it's funny because we've had a lot of clients who've been pretty concerned about this, who've been reaching out to us like, Oh God, what's gonna happen? And so it's a murky

49:38 crystal ball that we peer into, but a couple of things to stand out is that one is that these credits for the most part have bipartisan support, particularly for talking about the underground stuff,

49:50 the wind and the solar, things like that, maybe they don't have as much support, but whether you are a corn farmer or you're an oil and gas producer, you stand to benefit from these tax credits or

50:07 midstream companies, et cetera. So there's a fairly powerful group, if you will, sort of lobbyists, et cetera, who are advocating for, leaving it alone, if anything, really what they want to

50:20 see is streamlining of the permitting process, which ironically enough. You know, right now Trump has put the IRA in the penalty box and it's got to sit in there for whatever 30 days. It will get

50:33 led out of the penalty box. You know, could he throw sand in the gears of the IRA machine? Yes, but to completely get rid of it, it's gonna require legislative action. And right now, they're,

50:46 especially on the Republican side, there are a group of senators and House of Representatives that basically could block any efforts from that who said if anything, we want to increase CCS,

51:01 particularly by creating parity safe for what you get from injecting to a saline aquifer versus using it for an UR program. Because they'd like to see equal dollars paid for both programs 'cause hey,

51:14 it's still CO2 getting stuck underground, right? Sure So right now people are kind of pausing a bit. And, you know, who knows what Trump can do, but there's only so much that executive orders

51:29 can do. Certainly Chris Wright being put in, you know, assuming all of these folks get approved for, you know, heading the Department of Energy. And oh, shoot, I forget the fellow for the EPA.

51:44 But, you know, I think that they're definitely oil and gas leaning and I don't want to say climate skeptical, that not skeptical that climate is changing, but that could we really are we really

51:56 going to move the needle by doing these things? Right. Yeah, which is a valid, you know, question to ask, I think.

52:05 But, you know, I think it will be hard to completely dismantle, especially the subsurface portions of the IRA. And if anything, the legislation that gets pushed through, really what I see

52:17 happening, and this is, you know, looking at the world through rose colored glasses perhaps. is that we'll be writing the coattails of oil and gas, but there will be regulatory reform as a result

52:28 of it that will allow you to get a fricking classics injection permit in less than two or three years, which is currently kind of the timeframe that it takes. So, hopeful, but if I know anything,

52:44 it's just that the Trump administration is a bit of a wild card as far as what's gonna happen here, which is

52:52 why it's nice to be working in a multinational or a company that works in a mesh. We may press pause a little bit here, but we also still do actively do oil and gas projects. We're kind of energy

53:03 agnostic. And what I've found in my career is that all these things that I learned in oil and gas, it's not a perfect one-to-one translation to these other industries, but oh my God, am I at an

53:15 advantage for all those dry holes I drilled over three years. Sorry guys, but thank you for the experience. I mean, I think it was a wonderful lesson learned for me. Yeah, thank you for paying

53:28 for that.

53:30 I'm with you on this too, right? If I look at the Funk Futures, my company portfolio of clients over the last year or so, there's been a pretty heavy slant toward methane centric, whether it be

53:44 detection, quantification, or mitigation. And I don't really have a great degree of concern because a lot of these companies that are buying this stuff are public companies and they still wanna try

53:55 to get some level of bipartisan support, or their state level fines and regulations that probably aren't gonna go away. So they still have to care about these things and there's still innovation and

54:09 improving technologies that will drive down the price and create more competition for these types of solutions. So I think it's a, it's a positive thing. And then I think for traditional oil and

54:20 gas, I think we're generally heading into a good spot as well. But it really sounds like with sprule, like given sort of your versatile background, big company, small company,

54:31 international, local, doing lots of different things, it seems like a really good fit for you. I don't know, I'm the outside. It wasn't anything I was planning on. They approached me, but it

54:45 is, especially for me, my definition of hell would be having a 5, 000 acre position that I make with cheese out of for the rest of my career. It's like, I'm out. If that's what my career is,

54:57 I'm out. I don't want that. I want to be thrown in the middle of really complicated messes with maybe not much data and I've got to wave my overly sized arms and maybe take flight with so much arm

55:11 weighting, but whatever, that's like,

55:15 really enjoy production environments, but exploration is super fun. And a lot of times these areas may be mature, but they're brand new to me. It's like how often have I worked with the Aquitaine

55:24 Basin in France? Well, not until recently, but it's fun. It's, and who knows? Maybe I'll get to score some boondoggles over to France out of this. I doubt it, but, you know - I want a

55:24 boondoggle France. I want a boondoggle France. So listen, we're coming up on time, so I'm not gonna hit you with a few more other questions that I have I might need to have you

55:45 come back at some point to talk about some of the other things, more softer touch types of things, but this was actually really informative, and I could see you sitting on panels and answering

55:57 questions diplomatically, but also passionately, and it's one of the things that I've enjoyed about getting to know you. So sprull is cool, fine, I'll take it, I'll accept it.

56:12 Thank you You know Ellison, Swell, this is him. That's him, this is him. Swell, this is him.

56:20 Yeah, it's dad's jokey, Swell, this is him. Where can people find you? Where can people find information about your company, about you? You're pretty active on LinkedIn. Yeah, I've seemed to

56:29 have a pretty decent following. You add some valuable content on there. So where can people find Jason Ellison? Yeah, I would say that the main areas are obviously spruly, you can go to sprulecom

56:39 and check out all the amazing things that we do As far as me, yeah, probably the best thing is just to follow me on Facebook or not Facebook. Well, you can follow me on Facebook too. You can

56:50 really find out where the dad jokes live. No, on LinkedIn. Or if you want to connect, that's cool too. I have people reach out to me, connect to me all the time and then say, Hey, I'm new and

57:00 I want to get this kind of a job, or, Hey, do you know more about thisand I'll send some papers their way, or whatever. So whatever you want to shoot the bull about I, try to help in as much as

57:10 I can I'm not a miracle worker, I do have people say. Hi, give me a job. It's like, well, okay, nice to meet

57:19 you. I'll let, what do you like? You know, let's maybe slow the role a little bit, but you know, whatever. It's, it is cool, you know, being able to help people because I've been helped a

57:30 ton my time pay it forward, you know? Exactly. Well, I will say for those people, flip those people to me. We're on the recruiting side of the house for our business right now. It is, I don't

57:40 say gangbusters, but showing the signs of gangbusters, 2024 was just terrible. It was like very little hiring and just not a ton of roles. And if there were roles, it was because somebody was

57:51 underperforming and they had to backfill. We're seeing more growth oriented positions and hiring happening at traditional oil and gas operators, which is awesome. So excited about that. And, you

58:04 know, for people in the Denver market because of the consolidation, there's stuff out there. So what you do with those people, you flip them to me.

58:11 Yeah, absolutely. That is good to know. I will, I will say, hey, I got a buddy named Jeremy and he will, he'll find you a job overnight. I, let's not. Okay. All right. All right. Anyways,

58:21 Jason Allison, thank you so much for coming out. What the fuck you are one of a kind and look forward to getting to know you more. Thank you, guys, sir. Great to be here.