How oil fracking boom-bust startup plans to survive climate change era

In this weekly series, CNBC takes a look at companies that made the inaugural Disruptor 50 list, 10 years later.

By 2013, when Microseismic was selected for the inaugural CNBC Disruptor 50 list, it was pretty far from the “start” in startup, already in its tenth year as a company. And that preceding decade had been one during which the company, which performs subsurface monitoring using passive seismic technology, had grown up amid the boom in U.S. oilfield hydraulic fracturing, better known as fracking, and which by 2013, was about to go bust in a major way.

When the company and its founder and CEO Peter Duncan had first raised money from investors in 2003, the idea wasn’t to ride the shale boom. Helping energy companies perform environmentally sensitive geological exploration was a core focus, with its approach more like a stethoscope, Duncan says, compared to the conventional technology of the time, seismic vibrators, which he says worked more like an ultrasound. But of all the things the company put on the list of uses for its seismic technology when it was raising money, “frac monitoring was at the bottom,” Duncan said. “We’re not going to do that,” he recalls saying. “A big red X.” 

For one, there were other players already in the market, and the dominant oil services companies, including Halliburton and Baker Hughes, were buying up firms doing science similar to Microseismic – Halliburton already owned seismic mapping company Pinnacle Technologies.

And in a way, Duncan thought the science wasn’t a good match for the blunt process of oil and gas drilling. “You drill a wellbore to produce oil and gas, not to put fancy science experiments down,” he said.