Digital Innovations in Oil and Gas with Geoffrey Cann

Oil and gas companies are sitting on vast amounts of surplus inventory, often without realizing its true scale or value. Equipment purchased for major projects frequently ends up idle, and stored across warehouses and laydown yards, while tying up capital and incurring ongoing costs. While some of this surplus results from project changes or cancellations, much of it reflects a deeper systemic iss...

EHS and AI are starting to transform safety and reliability in oil and gas. But most organizations are still managing safety as a compliance exercise , not an operational advantage. That approach is under pressure. Operations are more complex, regulations keep shifting , and critical EHS data is scattered across systems, spreadsheets, and sites. When something goes wrong, the impact isn't just reg...

Digital twin technology is evolving rapidly, and when combined with artificial intelligence , it is starting to reshape how oil and gas operations are run in real time. For years, companies have relied on simulation tools to design and test assets, but these tools are slow and limited to planning use. In this episode, we explore how new approaches are closing the gap between simulation and real-wo...

Global energy markets are under acute pressure as geopolitical disruption tightens supply and drives volatility. Events like the conflict in the Middle East are no longer regional—they ripple through fuel supply chains everywhere. Companies are not short of data. They are overwhelmed by it. Yet despite this abundance, assembling a clear operational picture still takes hours, leaving decision-maker...

Turnarounds are one of the most critical and expensive activities in oil and gas, yet many are still managed using spreadsheets, manual coordination, and tribal knowledge. Despite years of investment in digital systems, there remains a persistent gap between turnaround planning and execution in the field. This gap creates real consequences. Turnarounds often run into the hundreds of millions of do...

The global oil market still runs on a horribly fragmented system where physical barrels, paper contracts, and financial settlement operate in parallel but disconnected layers. Transactions are dependent on manual processes , emails, PDFs, and handshake relationships built over decades. For a trillion dollar industry, the core trading infrastructure remains slow, opaque, and largely inaccessible fo...

Large-scale capital projects sit at the heart of the oil and gas industry , and across all infrastructure sectors (power, petrochemicals, rail, water, telecoms). These projects require tight coordination of  people, equipment, and timelines , often under pressure to deliver quickly and safely. Despite heavy investment in planning tools and scheduling systems, the day-to-day reality remains fragmen...

One thing I've learned from producing lots of videos is that you can't really trust with your own eyes what you see presented to you anymore. Green screens, video editing, and AI are so good now, and so inexpensive, that anyone can create compelling video content of scenes that didn't happen in real life. As a result, I'm now very skeptical of claims that companies make that they don't offer to ba...

Industrial operations have spent decades optimizing for safety , reliability, and uptime . Control systems, sensors, and field equipment were designed to be stable and predictable, often isolated from the outside world. Cybersecurity , by contrast, evolved largely in IT environments , on a separate track, with different tools, assumptions, and incentives. That separation is no longer holding. Oper...

Oil and gas companies generate enormous volumes of operational, geological, and production data . Despite this abundance, much of that data remains fragmented , inconsistent , and difficult to trust . Teams often spend a significant portion of their time preparing datasets rather than analyzing them. The result is delayed decision-making, inflated costs, and reduced operational agility. The core c...

Diesel generators have long been the default answer for powering  upstream and midstream oil and gas sites . They are familiar , mobile, and deeply embedded in operating practice. Even in regions with abundant natural gas, operators often rely on fleets of diesel gens to run pumps, wireline units, and auxiliary equipment, treating gas as either waste or something to move to market while importing...

Data centers have shifted from supporting enterprise IT to running large parts of the digital economy . They now host AI model training , AI inference , and many critical digital services . As this shift accelerates, data centers are placing greater demands on power systems and operations teams . Managing energy use , uptime , and physical infrastructure has become central to how these facilities...

Oil and gas operators have always known that surplus equipment is part of doing business. Projects get cancelled. Long-lead items are over-ordered. Assets are parked in yards, warehouses, and sea cans "just in case." Over time, those decisions quietly turn into idle capital sitting on balance sheets, often forgotten until space runs out or write-downs loom. What's changed is the cost of ignoring i...

Upstream oil and gas companies continue to be very reliant on spreadsheets , legacy systems , and manual workflows to manage thousands of wells, compliance filings, and capital decisions. It's labor-intensive, error-prone, and slow. In light of global energy transition moves, operators are now facing ongoing margin pressure , a supply glut , tighter emissions regulations , and a shrinking pool of...

The energy industry is rapidly adopting artificial intelligence . Its promises of improved productivity , safety , and operational insight are too good to ignore. But these tools are only as good as the data that feeds them. And therein lies the problem: data across the sector is often incomplete , inconsistent , and scattered . This historic lack of discipline around data now has consequences. Po...

Have you ever given thought to the possibility that the suppliers of your core business technology, brands like Microsoft , Oracle, and SAP , might simply turn you off with no warning? It sounds fanciful, absurd , a black swan event so far beyond any reasonable risk matrix as to be unworthy of consideration. Yet it happened this year, 2025, to a major oil company in the world's most populous count...

Most large enterprises rely on a handful of expansive technology platform solutions to run their business, and the most prominent and widely deployed in oil and gas is SAP . As I've outlined in my books, enterprise solutions such as SAP are also migrating to digital technologies, which triggers a major question: what is the optimal upgrade path for an SAP customer, or any enterprise technology, to...

Motors are the quiet workhorses of industry. They drive pumps, fans, compressors, and heaters, and they consume more than  sixty percent of the power in most industrial operations. When operators need to control motor speed, they historically relied on mechanical adjustments or trial-and-error testing to keep processes stable and safe. As motors get larger and drive trains more complex , tradition...

Canada's energy sector has long struggled with low productivity on the front line, as indeed the entire Canadian economy. Despite heroic efforts by tradespeople , their effectiveness is hamstrung by badly dated processes , old disconnected systems , and paper-based workflows . The problem isn't the workers. It's that they're too often sent out with the wrong drawings , the wrong tools , the wrong...

Oil and gas companies are finally confronting the huge communications and stakeholder challenge they face with their asset owners and stakeholders. Production assets such as oil and gas wells almost always have many part owners (land owners, JV partners, interest-holders, trusts, first nations tribes). Managing these hundreds or thousands of parties across tens of thousands of wells is really dema...

Latin America is entering a period of rapid economic growth , urbanization, and industrial expansion. Unlike North America and Europe, where primary energy demand has been flat for more than a decade, the region's energy consumption is rising sharply . A young, increasingly urban population is pushing electricity and fuel demand higher, placing new pressure on infrastructure and supply. This deman...

Electricity powers nearly everything in oil and gas, from pumps and motors, to compressors and digital systems. But while production engineers obsess over volumes and temperatures, the quality of the electricity driving their systems is often overlooked. Most teams only discover power issues   after equipment fails, leading to unplanned downtime and costly repairs. Unfortunately, traditional power...

In all my years of experience in energy , I rarely worked in pure regulatory areas, but regulations loomed large over everything I touched. The energy sector is very highly regulated , and for very good reasons. From environmental standards to carbon pricing , energy companies are held to a high standard and must demonstrate that compliance to operate locally, regionally, and globally. The regulat...

In the UK oil and gas sector, the record on major accidents looks encouraging. Serious incidents are very rare , and the industry appears to be operating safely . Beneath the surface, the data tell a different story. One-third of safety inspections fall below the legal standard , and more than half of process-safety professionals are expected to retire within the next decade. At the same time, age...

Unconventional oil and gas is massive . Every year, over $100 billion is poured into steel, sand, and water just in Canada and the US. Yet, most of the planning behind these extraordinary investments still runs on Excel spreadsheets . Spreadsheets were fine in the 90s, but today they struggle to handle the complex interdependencies and real-world constraints of modern tight plays. The hidden cost...