Laid off from a tech startup and on the prowl for a paycheck, Nate Richards heard from a fellow barfly's girlfriend that a small, independent oil company needed a contractor to program databases.

To Richards, the job sounded boring, well beneath the skill set of a whiz kid computer science major who had been writing his own software since he was a boy.

"I'm this elite C&& coder guy," Richards remembers thinking. "A baby can do that job. Then she said it pays $45 an hour. And I'm like, 'OK, I'll do that.' "

A decade later, Richards has turned that desperate career change into his own Houston-based software development company, Entrance, which is geared to the oil-and-gas industry. It was a decision that would prove prophetic.

Faced with the overwhelming task of interpreting and analyzing the reams of big data spewing from increasingly sophisticated tools, drillers, pipeline companies and refiners are turning to Richards and other programmers, software engineers and data scientists for help.

In a trade long considered the domain of roughnecks, geologists and wildcatters, a new brand of worker is joining the ranks: The techie.

Information overload is only part of the problem. The U.S. shale boom that touched off a resurgence in domestic crude and natural gas production heightened pressure on oil and gas companies to quickly consume vast amounts of new data and make speedy decisions with big financial implications.

"The difference between a successful oil company and an unsuccessful one is their ability to deal with information," Richards said. "And that information is growing exponentially."

The rush to hire workers with computing skills is pitting energy companies against Silicon Valley behemoths as both industries seek to recruit people who know how to code, program and write algorithms.

"Shell's competition is not Exxon," said Jan Odegard, the executive director of Rice University's Ken Kennedy Institute for Information Technology. "Shell's competition is Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Microsoft, Intel."

And for some students, the appeal of a steady paycheck in the booming oil and gas industry outweighs the lure of a sexy but unpredictable position with a Silicon Valley startup.

"These innovative companies just pop up and fade away," said Jasmine Meng, who earned her doctorate in electrical engineering from the University of Houston and got a job processing seismic data for Houston-based oil field services company Baker Hughes after emigrating from China, where three generations of her family worked for the national oil company. "Oil and gas is more stable and promising."

Loads of data

Data needs aren't new to the energy industry, which was an early adopter of super-computing technology. But the volume, complexity and diversity of that data has accelerated dramatically in recent years, leaving energy companies scrambling to draw meaningful conclusions from a geyser of 1s and 0s.

A single oil well produces enough data to fill a DVD every seven minutes, according to Entrance. Every day, Chevron generates more than 1.5 terabytes in internal data alone, the equivalent of information contained in 1.5 million books.

Subsurface imaging tools and other sensors pump out so much information that some companies now have entire buildings dedicated to data storage, a throwback to the old days of computers that filled an entire room.

The three-story office building on Interstate 10 - with its rounded angles and stacked floors designed to evoke images of rock layers and circuit boards - houses BP's Center for High-Performance Computing. The company's global hub for processing and managing geophysical data opened last year with the disk space of 40,000 average laptop computers.

"Today, the notebook computer that I carry around would've been the largest supercomputer in the world 15 years ago," said Keith Gray, BP's director of technical computing.

Yet, the lingering stigma of the energy industry as a low-tech and blue-collar sector continues to stand in the way of efforts to lure computer scientists, mathematicians and electrical engineers with multiple degrees behind their names, Odegard said.

Odegard has tried to change that stereotype and expose students to energy job opportunities by hosting an annual workshop at Rice's Ken Kennedy Institute specifically focused on oil and gas industry computing.

In six years, the conference has nearly tripled in size, now attracting a contingent of energy companies on the prowl for students with information technology backgrounds.

Students often leave the sessions with job interviews and internship offers, Odegard said.

The demand for students with computational backgrounds is so pressing, energy companies will hire people with little to no background in energy and sometimes pay for employees to get advanced IT degrees.

"The valuable candidate has that oil and gas experience already, with a strong technical background," said Darrell Donaho, an engineer at Houston pipeline company Kinder Morgan whose data-heavy job entails integrating company records.

The scarcity of people with experience in both industries has benefited Richards, who carved a niche for his company 10 years ago by combining data skills with an insider's perspective of the oil and gas industry, creating a rare bridge between two widely different cultures.

'Information problem'

In Entrance's glass-encased office suite on East T.C. Jester, a replica oil derrick cast in glossy Lucite adorns his desk, propped near a poster explaining the taxonomies of beer.

The company's conference rooms carry the names of Texas shale plays and employees get quizzed regularly on their knowledge of oil field operations, from drilling to production.

But on Friday afternoons, you can catch them swigging St. Arnolds root beer from an in-house kegerator or battling it out in a fierce game of "volley-pong," a company invention with rules so complicated, they take up four pages in Entrance's 10th anniversary commemorative booklet.

"We're more Google-like," said Melissa Villamarin, a senior business analyst at Entrance.

But while Entrance may have the swag of a tech company, the company speaks the language of oil executives, Richards said.

"We want to be known as the 'Frac your data,' company," Richard said, pointing to the company's slogan with its deliberate elimination of the "k" sometimes used in the shorthand word for hydraulic fracturing. Some in the industry object to the extra letter.

In the same way advances in hydraulic fracturing unlocked vast quantities of hydrocarbons from dense rock formations, advances in data analytics can unlock clues to help energy companies make better decisions like figuring out where to drill, a costly decision that can mean millions of dollars gained or lost, Richards said.

"There's really no big secret to finding oil anymore," he said. "It's really about getting to the acreage, the land position. If you come early to a new frontier, you pay a lot less than if you come a lot later. There are people paying 100 times more for an acre in the Eagle Ford shale than others did. That's an information problem, not a science problem."

An opportunity

Many see big data as a promise to remedy once-unsolvable problems with solutions that could reap huge financial benefits.

"The size of the prize is the largest in the oil and gas industry versus any of the other industries GE has exposure to," said Ashley Haynes-Gaspar, general manager for software and services for the oil and gas division of the multinational corporation with operations in health care, aviation and transportation.

For example, in an industry that can pull only a fraction of existing oil and gas reserves from the earth before having to drill a new hole, using data analytics to figure out how to improve the rate by just one percentage point could open up vast new stores of untouched hydrocarbons, Haynes-Gaspar said.

Pipeline companies want help crunching the streams of information pouring out of assessment tools, capturing info as often every 1.5 millimeters, to find hairline cracks buried within miles of steel before they lead to costly and dangerous failures. Refineries are banking on big data's promise to reduce the number of days they are shut down because of unplanned maintenance and repairs.

While big data has been posed as one of the industry's biggest challenges, it also holds vast possibilities.

"We can't look at this as a problem," said James Nickel, an engineer at Kinder Morgan whose job entails data processing and management. "It's a heck of an opportunity. The tech jobs are not only here for the taking, but there are opportunities to create new rules. An industry is being built up in an industry. It's an incredibly exciting time."