James Bautsch

Hey I am James. I am a director, an engineer, and a data scientist. I get to work with and mentor the brightest engineers in oil and gas working to make the industry a part of the solution. I am constantly learning and striving to improve. My passion is solving problems.

I am a very tired dad who drinks too much coffee and has a peculiar interest in mechanical keyboards.

My name is James Bautsch. Currently, I am the Director of Reservoir, Analytics, and Development at Caerus Oil and Gas in Denver. We are private equity-backed natural gas operator focused on the Rockies region. My team evaluates and optimizes our significant acreage footprint while maintaining impeccable regulatory compliance. We are a smaller team, so we must get resourceful and build many of our own tools. I developed a custom program called Olive that runs on a Python backend and Django frontend. With Olive, we can run a massive monte carlo simulation on a financial model involving thousands of individual, unique cases. I also built some neat machine learning workflows that have improved our drilling returns by predicting the better areas to develop. We also do a lot of deals (three in the past two years) and work very closely with Finance on investment recommendations and board deliverables.

While I have about ten cumulative years at Caerus working through the ranks, I had a brief sabbatical at PDC Energy working on business development and corporate strategy.

Before I found a job in oil and gas, I spent a year working odd jobs after graduating from CU Boulder. 2009 was not an ideal year to enter the workforce, so I did whatever I could find. I was a tutor, an office administrator, a contract worker, and most memorably, a bouncer at the Tavern where I mainly threw out drunk people.

In my spare time, I am entertaining my tiny humans, providing pro bono IT support for my dad’s company, or tinkering with new projects.

I grew up mostly in Colorado. My athletic career peaked in high school as a bench warmer on the freshman basketball team. I went to CU Boulder to study chemical engineering where I co-founded ChemE Happy Hour with Amanda Parker. After college I found my way into the oil and gas industry and got addicted to (now recovered from) CrossFit. My quarantine hobbies included building mechanical keyboards, telerobotics, and drinking too much wine. Today, I am a very happy dad of two tiny humans and continue exploring weird hobbies.