Digital Innovations in Oil and Gas with Geoffrey Cann

A brand new digital bludgeon whose nearly sole purpose is to beat up on the oil and gas industry, is about to be launched. As usual, this is both bad and good news. The global oil and gas industry is the single largest source of avoidable methane emissions, emitting 80 million tons per year through venting, flaring, and unintentional losses (fugitive emissions). These Scope 1 emissions represent t...

The upcoming changes to mobility fuels are important enough that Boards should be paying close attention, and challenging management with keeping pace. For the first time in my life, there are now really big changes coming to the fuel industry. These changes will impact every single participant in the mobility fuel supply chain, from producers to consumers . The level of investment required in new...

Process industry professionals have long known about the risks of failure hidden in piping infrastructure, but robotic inspections are poised to solve this safety and risk problem. The pipes with the highest risk profile are undoubtably those used in the petroleum industry, and detecting and assessing their condition under layers of coatings and insulation is one of the most important challenges f...

There is a new career pathway now available, that of the digital engineer . This career pathway is open to any engineer who is curious how digital innovations intersect with the traditional engineer job, creating this new role of the digital engineer. Identifying and discovering these new roles is not hard, but for most engineers, it will take them out of their comfort zone to confront some uncert...

Upskilling of oil and gas professionals in the digital era is a topic everywhere, including the Caribbean island economies. Upskilling means the acquisition of new knowledge and skills, and in digital, this means topics such as cloud computing, artificial intelligence, app development, and sensor technology. It's tough enough to acquire new capabilities and stay current in big metropolitan centers...

It's rare to hear directly from a business leader who has a broad range of oil and gas experience, coupled with a personal front-line role in leading digital adoption, but today's podcast offers just that. Lewis Gillhespy is a former senior leader with Suncor, including roles as Global Chief Geologist, major asset developer, head of a major acquisition, R&D, and lastly, digital transformation lead...

Emissions management in energy is in drastic need of improvement. Carbon management is not carried out in an auditable and transparent way, is not standardized for the energy industry. As a result, carbon measures are subject to misinterpretation, claims reversal, misstatements, and greenwashing. Trust in the industry has eroded. A number of leading energy companies embarked on a journey to transf...

The world of consumer loyalty for fuel brands is undergoing tremendous change because of data. With the huge penetration rate of mobile phones, the rise of app stores, and always-on websites, fuel retailers have a new opportunity to create a tighter link to their customers for fuel and other services.  Even in the Middle East, where fuel prices are historically very low relative to other countries...

Description Turnarounds, shutdowns and outages in heavy industry are key processes for keeping industrial infrastructure running at peak performance. Some plants, such as oil refineries, will plan and execute annual turnarounds, during which time accumulated work orders are tackled, substantial repairs or upgrades are executed, and regular maintenance activities are executed. LNG facilities, which...

In this episode, I'm in conversation with Serge Guzenko, Founder and CEO of Wezom, about custom code. With over 24 years of experience in the industry, Serge has led WEZOM to become an international IT company known for its innovative solutions and client-centric approach in developing custom code. Wezom is a global custom code business. I'm really interested in this niche and critical role of cus...

Where Energy meets Facts: Empowering People to Reduce Energy Costs The average western consumer has no idea how much energy they use. It's not really their fault — the energy system was never designed to give the consumer visibility into their energy consumption. We even measure energy in many different and confusing ways. Gasoline is in gallons. Power is in kilowatt hours. Propane is in pounds. ...

Marketplace Launched! The upstream oil and gas supply chain is about to get a much needed boost in procurement efficiency with the launch of a new e-commerce marketplace. Such marketplaces are very common in the consumer industry (Amazon being an example), but rare to non-existent in oil and gas. Despite years of investment in big enterprise systems, buyers of goods for the upstream industry still...

Australia is the lucky country when it comes to energy transition. The country is blessed with ample non-renewable energy resources, including gas, coal, uranium, lithium, and oil. In addition, the country is bathed in sunshine, surrounded by coastlines and tides, and is largely empty, suitable for wind farms. The LNG sector is now incredibly important to the national economy. Australia is 20-25%...

About the Episode The world of geospatial analytics is transforming how we manage industrial infrastructure. In this interview with Sean Donegan, the CEO of Satelytics, we discuss the use of satellite data to tackle major challenges like methane leaks, water contamination, and infrastructure damage with cutting-edge AI technology.  The traditional methods of inspecting linear infrastructure (pipel...

In this interview with David Khani, we discuss pipeline tariff negotiations and how regulatory analytics can help shippers win big. Policies such as the Inflation Reduction Act are reshaping energy infrastructure, along with global events, such as the Ukrainian conflict. Natural gas market dynamics are changing rapidly, and systemically. Dave and EQT leaned heavily on Arbo to help with complex neg...

Where are oil and gas prices going, and why . That's the focus of this wide-ranging interview I had with Andrew Botterill, head of Deloitte's chemicals and oil and gas industry vertical. Deloitte produces a regular price forecast for oil and gas, and we provide the context, covering the turmoil and volatility in global markets, heavily influenced by geopolitical conflicts and policy shifts.  We to...

AI innovations are helping transform regulatory processes by providing access to data that has been beyond analytical reach. AI tools such as ChatGPT, Bard, and CoPilot are revolutionizing how energy firms and professionals tackle complex regulatory data, especially in sectors like energy infrastructure. These generative AI tools ingest the huge volume of documents and commentary associated with e...

In the US lower 48 states, between $200 billion and $400 billion are spent in the supply chain every year and are still run with practices designed decades ago. The energy sector's supply chain is broken and needs a new vision to take it to the next level. In this interview podcast with Joshua Trott from WorkRise, we'll look at the outdated practices of supply chain management in oil and gas, expl...

Business risks and opportunities surface whenever supply and demand go wildly out of balance.  Energy transition is creating supply and demand imbalances in many ways. For example, the supply of clean energy infrastructure is lagging demand because of slow permitting processes.  Sellers gain because the price point for green energy will rise to meet the demand. Buyers risk being unable to purchase...

If you're working on a digital innovation when your oil and gas company has been acquired , you're at risk, and you need a plan. I once worked on a major merger to create Canada's largest oil company, and I know how these mergers go down, and you don't want to be a victim.  In this solo narration podcast I describe why mergers are happening now and why they'll continue, how to tell if you're at ri...

Digital twin solutions are rapidly advancing to a point where the model will be running tightly coupled with the actual asset it models, using live data. It's not a stretch to see how the digital twin can become the day-to-day supervisor of the actual asset. This kind of work even applies to brownfield assets that predate the internet, mobility, cloud computing, and other modern inventions. Connec...

Every year at this time I put forth my outlook for the coming year, with a focus on the digital trends that I believe will have the greatest impact on the fortunes of the industry. These are not so much as predictions, as they are speculations on the trends that I see marching along, and how those trend lines will play out over the next 12 months or so. If you're working in industry, you might kee...

"First thing you need to connect the assets first and get the data. So that's we call it like static digital twin, and then you can use it for simulation. Then you move to the second version, which having like a shadow, digital twin, which you have an image of what's happening, but you can monitor. But the truly digital twin is monitor and control." In this episode, I'm in conversation with Ammar...

To break free of the limitations of yesterday's technologies, the oil and gas industry is accelerating its adoption of private 5G networks. Some time ago, I helped an  oil field logistics company  respond to customer feedback that its services were "in the  Stone Age ". Its systems were entirely  manual , inaccurate, slow, and  error  prone. Virtually every invoice was  disputed , causing cash flo...

"We really kind of focus on the data and analytics side, really helping identify challenges where innovative data solutions, machine learning and AI technologies can be leveraged to drive more data driven insights." In this episode, I'm in conversation with Clark Lai, the CEO of Motiv Innovation Group. Clark's team helps businesses apply data analytics, machine learning and AI tools to some of the...