User:Leahmarie75/sandbox

Early Life
Blake C. Burnette was born in Corpus Christi, Texas in 1966 and moved to Houston at age 5 where he grew up. By age 10 he had his first job with multiple paper routes in neighborhoods in and around what is now known as City Center. He used the money he earned from his paper routes to support his insatiable quest for knowledge of all things mechanical, chemical, electrical, and mathematical.

Blake and his friends began experimenting with alternative fuels by building their own distillery to ferment raisins and make ethanol, and then converted their go-cart to run on ethanol. This led to experimenting with running engines on hydrogen separated from water using electrolysis. At age 12, Blake turned his attention to writing video games for the TRS 80 Micro Computer Systems, one of the earliest mass-produced and mass-marketed home computers launched in 1977 and sold by Tandy through their Radio Shack stores. As if teaching himself computer programing languages was not enough to keep him occupied, he began building robots which evolved into a robot that could sense it needed a charge, find an electrical outlet and plug itself in, similar to the technology used today by Rumba vacuum cleaners.

Blake continued to develop the TRS computer, building his own TRS microprocessor and teaching himself assembly language programming. At age 16, Blake was recruited by the founder of Valco Instruments to develop some of the very first computer numerical controlled (CNC) machining tools. A CNC machine processes a piece of material such as metal to meet specifications following coded program instructions without an operator (think automated). Blake developed at Valco some of the first microprocessor-controlled gas analyzing equipment, considered the best available technology at the time. One of the CGA products Blake developed is still available today on Valco’s website.

Blake, while still a teenager, worked with NASA to build a microprocessor-based temperature programmer and control system for a cryogenic focusing unit used on the space station and space shuttles. Blake’s prodigious work with NASA set in motion a multi-year attempt to recruit him. The amount of money and the working conditions required were so unusual by NASA standards that it had to go way up the chain for approval. By the time approvals were secured and the final offer delivered, Blake had accepted another offer.

Career
At age 22, Blake was recruited by Baker Hughes, the oilfield service giant, and placed in the pressure pumping division to develop microprocessor-based hydraulic fracturing equipment. Over the ensuing 26 years, Blake worked in 25 countries and oversaw the construction of 8 hydraulic fracturing ships, multiple land-based drilling rigs, water-based drilling rigs, and drilling ships in shipyards around the world. One of the drilling rigs that Blake developed and built required a long-term stay in Singapore where he developed many business relationships that he maintains to this day.

During his storied career with Baker Hughes, Blake accomplished many service industry firsts, including the first electric frac job that was pumped using power off the power grid, and the very first all-natural gas-powered frac job where all the trucks were run on natural gas. Blake retired as Baker Hughes Director of Research and Development for Equipment. Blake holds many patents granted before and after his association with Valco and Baker Hughes- well over 20 and counting. One of his patents is considered so essential to the hydraulic fracing service segment that it is the center of a major lawsuit between BJ Hughes and Evolution Well Service, with BJ suing Evolution for breach of Blake’s patent; if BJ prevails Evolution could be out of business. Using AI and the ability to manipulate a very large database, Blake has developed a program that can find theft and under-billing for utilities, water, and sewage that is in wide use in the southeastern US.

While at Baker Hughes, Blake pioneered, championed, and employed technology in its infancy, the “Internet of Things” that enables the use of dissimilar physical objects embedded with sensors, processing ability, software, and other technologies to connect and communicate with each other and when used in association with artificial intelligence give birth to smart machines. Blake and his team conceived the idea of connecting thousands of trucks together using the trucks internal Controller Network Bus (CANbus) via satellite to a cloud database and developed a website that allowed the trucks and eventually all of Baker Hughes mechanical equipment, both fixed and mobile to upload performance data on a massive scale enabling Baker Hughes to seek out operational inefficiencies and busts employing artificial intelligence.

From a war room in Tomball, Blake’s team using dashboards was able to monitor the health of and track one of the largest truck fleets in the world as well as monitor global well-servicing activities. Immediately upon turning the system on they observed abnormally high transmission temperatures within the truck feet 1,000s times per day. Upon manipulating the data further they were able to determine that the radiators were not being serviced properly and identified the maintenance personnel responsible. Blake was the first speaker at the first oil and gas conference that featured IoT presentations. His inaugural presentation, “how to drive efficiency and costs savings by leveraging artificial intelligence and the internet in the energy sector, ”was well received and sparked great enthusiasm in the industry which continues to this day (see: “Blake Burnette IoT in Oil and Gas”).

In 2016, Blake founded an “Internet of Things” company, IOT-eq which developed some very unique and powerful Internet of Things Gateways. IOT-eq is famous for its pump vibration monitoring systems which employ IoT-eq sensors and IoT-eq Algorithms that can predict catastrophic equipment failures. Months after co-founding SANCTUARY DEX CORP, Blake and his Chief Technology Officer had already developed a suite of proprietary software and hardware products and Blake drafted the patent descriptions and filed for patent protection. Blake’s long-time patent attorney was so impressed by the proposed patent that he asked to be part of the Company.

Additional Information
Blake speaks three languages; English, Spanish, and Portuguese, and calls Texas and Thailand home. While visiting Thailand, Bake fell in love with the friendly and happy Thai people and their culture for its promotion and nurturing of merit, personal freedom, and free enterprise. “Everybody in Thailand owns some sort of business”. Over the years, Blake has repeated and refined a pattern of success that involves spotting and hiring exceptionally bright, self-reliant kids of a good character straight out of college, placing them in positions outside of their comfort zone, requiring skills they were not taught in school and teaching them the skills they need to succeed while pressing them to never stop learning and improving. This method has proven extremely successful; however, it takes a lot of caring and physical energy to push these young people to grow and reach their full potential.

Blake’s biggest achievement is raising five children to be responsible and productive adults. For most of their sports and scout careers, Blake was their team coach or their scout leader. Blake is a patron of the Vietnamese Dominion Sisters, which operates orphanages and a leper colony in Viet Nam.