Digital Oil And Gas

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 negotiations and understanding the growing demand for natural gas. Dave also covers how the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) regulations influence pipeline operations. Another key factor is decarbonization, which has an impact on pipeline throughput. Companies like EQT Corporation navigate tariff increases and negotiations with shippers, with outside specialized help. The future of energy includes coal and nuclear power within our evolving energy mix, and to succeed, companies have an indispensable need for data science in regulatory negotiations. Understanding these dynamics is crucial for anyone involved or

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 touch on the adoption of sustainable practices, including hydrogen and sustainable aviation fuels. Policy moves, such as the Inflation Reduction Act, create both challenges and opportunities in the U.S., but with ramifications globally, particularly from major consuming geographies, incuding the EU and Asia.  We also discuss the future of energy demand in growth economies like India and continental Africa, highlighting the complex relationship between advancing technology and addressing energy poverty. Digital technology plays a key role in enhancing cost efficiency, resilience, and safety within the industry, setting t

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 energy infrastructure submissions to regulators (briefs, complaints, dockets, applications), providing fresh insight into what makes for a successful application, and why some fail to gain acceptance. These tools also transform the way experts prepare regulatory documents, analyze dynamic regulatory environments, and address energy transition policies like those outlined in the Inflation Reduction Act. In this podcast, I help you understand the business value from AI gained from analyzing regulatory content and creating new, efficient pathways for submissions and compliance. If you're an energy industry professional,

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, explaining why many projects go over budget and schedule. Josh is the Chief Revenue Officer of WorkRise, an industry-leading labor business and a leading supply chain platform used by many of the biggest energy companies in the world. WorkRise's innovative solution is aimed at completely overhauling the industry’s supply chain model rather than just tinkering with point solutions or with narrow scope. This concept emphasizes the power of data-driven decisions and efficiency to revolutionize project management and execution. We uncover the major issues impacting the current supply chain system, and how WorkRise plans to m

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 green energy after they have committed to do so, or paying a much higher price.  In this solo narration podcast I describe four looming supply and demand imbalances, why they are happening, the impacts they'll have, and what you can do to either manage the risk or take advantage and profit.  The four are:  Slow pace of permitting delays the supply of transmission infrastructure.  Supply of oil tankers lags demand, causes prices to rise for shipping oil Mergers in oil and gas create a surplus of oil and gas professionals looking for work. Demand for commodities for clean energy outstrip supply, making clean energy p

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 risk, and what you should do if you are working on a digital innovation as part of your job.  If you're an engineer, IT, or digital professional working in oil and gas, this episode is for you.  You can find the transcript on my weekly substack, 'Digital Oil and Gas'.  Please hit the share button or leave a comment if you find this episode helpful.  Visit 'Engineer Career Pivot' for insight into transitioning your oil and gas career into new energy fields.  Contact me at geoff@geoffreycann.com

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. Connect with the Guest:

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 keep these in mind as you consider your projects and investments in the coming year. If you are in technology, you might want to reflect on strategies to pursue that will accelerate your success or help you avoid some of the problems that I foresee. Timestamps: 0:10 - Introduction 1:04 - Short Term Issues - inflation, emissions, markets, capital 2:54 - Longer Stride Challenges - energy transition, assets, talent, M&A 5:18 - Artificial Intelligence Tools 7:14 - Digital Twin Technology 9:05 - Mobility and networks 10:46 - Data 12:06 - Conclusions Additional Tools & Resources:

"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 Sabbagh who is the Vice President Industry and Partnership for Private Networks for Oil and Gas at Ericsson. 5G networks are a huge step forward for telecommunications, offering a step change performance boost over 4G. If you want to run an industrial-grade, resilient, and secure network for your digital devices, you need to be on 5G.  Here are some of the key questions addressed in the episode:  What is 5G, and why is it better than 4G? What is a private network?  What kinds of problems does a private network solve? What kinds of innovations are enabled by 5G? What are some of the use cases that 5G unlocks

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 flow problems. Worse, its multi-year contracts were coming up for renegotiation, and there was a real risk that the contracts would not be renewed, stranding an enormous fleet of 750 vehicles. We decided to create a fundamentally new business model that would upend the prevailing customer service standards in the industry, dramatically improve the utilization of the fleet of assets, staff, and facilities, and transform for the better its overall competitive position. Market-leading companies in oil and gas recognize that the status quo industrial network (SCADA) and public networks are simply not fit for the purposes of respondin

"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 their more intractable problems. A great example is letting generative AI models feast on proprietary company data, such as engineering content, and using those models to create first drafts of new engineered assets. They won’t be perfect, but the speed to get to an editable first draft is the real prize.  "Our client is able to simply search through unstructured text and the AI will be able to retrieve and reference the associated documents within their workspace." Clark Lai is the CEO of Motiv Innovation Group—an internationally recognized, award-winning digital innovation and venture building company. Since 2013, Cla

"There's been a real reluctance on the part of operators to jump back in to some of these higher-cost opportunities. That's further constraining  exploration and development of supply." In this episode, I’m in conversation with Howard Crosby, the Founder and CEO of LGX Energy Corporation. Howard and a partner acquired an oil company in Indiana and the acquisition included some 400 miles of 2D seismic data that had been shot some 15 years earlier, but never processed. By putting this old data through new tools, LGX was able to reveal oil plays that had been overlooked. The team then shot the highly prospective locations with 3D, which helped pinpoint more precise drilling locations. What was thought to be 15 possibilities turned into 50+.  "Instead of stringing wires across farmer's cornfields to set up the geophones prior to making the recording, they’re using wireless geophones that don't need to be strung together with the wire." Howard Crosby is the Founder and Chief Executive of LGX Energy Corporation. Ho

Halloween. A gory and ghastly night of ghouls, ghosts, and goblins. And as with previous years marking All Souls, I reflect on the latest digital demons molesting the oil and gas industry, how best to exorcise them, and how to speedily return them to the land of the undead. When you open the front door to this season’s mob of treat-hunting ghouls, just remember that your work world is not only facing its own cyber spooks at the gate. There’s a better than even chance that you have more than one zombie system staggering around, AI Apparitions secretly messing up your performance system, and a cloud vampire sharpening its fangs. Good luck.

A pioneering application of artificial intelligence at Woodside Energy is finally ready for wider deployment in oil and gas.    I learned about this use case back in 2016, at APPEA’s annual conference in Perth, where Woodside’s data science team presented their work. Surprisingly, few companies bothered to replicate this innovation, even though it was both proven and easy to execute. Many oil and gas facilities have been in production for decades, and want to be in production for decades more. Not only do these assets handily outlast their designers, but they’re now outlasting their maintenance engineering staff, operations, logistics managers, and key suppliers. In short, the complete original workforce. But the oil and gas industry has long relied on the memory of its people to recall critical information about its assets, information beyond the kinds of data easily found in modern systems. Answers to questions like “why did we design it this way”, and “have we encountered this problem before” depend on the

"Aviation fuel because it is a big amount of emissions, roughly 2% in actual measurement, but about three and a half percent in terms of impact. It's not likely to change because you need high density fuels, so batteries aren't going to work for long haul flights. And 90% of aviation is long haul flights." In this episode, I’m in conversation with John McDougall, who is the CEO and founder of SynBioBlox Innovations, a company seeking to solve the global emissions problem by applying synthetic biology to the creation of sustainable aviation fuel. Imagine the ability to design, test, and then build, at scale, a biological microorganism that ingests a given feedstock and produces, at scale, a valuable compound. That’s the promise of SynBioBlox.    "The GHG that's being emitted and being thrown away essentially, is the opportunity to create value by turning it into products." John McDougall is the founder and CEO of SynBioBlox Innovations Ltd.  A fourth generation Albertan, he spent two decades as President of th

If you want to be a successful digital leader, you need to be able to sell your ideas to a reluctant oil and gas buyer.  Selling is so innately human we don’t even know when we’re selling or being sold. Have you ever been to a restaurant and found yourself ordering something you would usually not ever have at home, like some decadent dessert? The end of the main meal arrives and the server kindly brings you a fresh menu already open to the dessert page. They innocently ask “can I tempt you with some freshly brewed coffee?” Next thing you know you’re scarfing 2000 calories of cheesecake drizzled with butterscotch sauce. You were sold. Selling your digital ideas to a manager in oil and gas is more complicated. Virtually everyone in oil and gas start out as digital doubters. This is a structural feature of the industry, part of the culture, linked to its safety and process adherence needs, and rooted in how the industry trains its people to manage risk. Here’s some tactics to consider.

"Turnover and mergers are one of the biggest disruptions in companies. So when you have that factored in, if you have someone who leaves the company, then everything that they've ever done, that human brain of knowledge as well and experience within that company is gone." In this episode, I’m in conversation with Wendy Hamelin, the CEO of Astraea Energy, an advisory firm in the area of high performance organizations. Wendy notes how there is a significant loss of organizational know how when we adopt new technologies that displace human capability (think of how the lowly calculator has eroded our ability to do math by hand). Extend this to an organization scale, as we are now doing with tools like AI, and our organizations are at some risk.  "I use an iPhone, for example, an iPhone is the actual device itself. And then we add our apps to our device. So the hierarchy of information and device software, if we add a hack, or add a hacked app to our iPhone, then that violates the entire phone." Wendy Hamelin is t

"Those who are working in any energy sector right now are best place to be working in that sector in another 10 years, even if it's going to be on a different technology." In this episode, I’m in conversation with Corinna Frye, who is the National Head of Renewable Energy and Clean Technology, with LVI Associates. As a recruiter focused on the energy industry, Corinna has seen first hand the demand pull from the energy industry for talent, and the best positioned to satisfy that demand are professionals already working in energy. However, it takes foresight to see the opportunity, and not all professionals anticipate the coming changes to the talent landscape.  "Clean energy is employing over 40% of all energy workers in America at this stage." Corinna Frye is the National Head of Renewable Energy and Clean Technology, LVI Associates, a Phaidon International brand in Boston, Massachusetts, US. "We're going to end up pulling from the traditional oil and gas backgrounds, because there aren't huge numbers of peo

Canada’s largest private oil company, and operator of the largest oil refinery, is carrying out a strategic review, which includes the possible sale of the company. Why would they do this? I grew up in Saint John, and had the privilege to work at this company for a few years. My extended family members who still live and work in the area, have reached out to me for a perspective. They are naturally concerned about what the sale of the largest business in town means for their future. Setting aside any private reasons that the family might want to sell out (from the complexities of intergenerational wealth transfer to family taxation strategies), the most important reasons involve upcoming market changes. My advice: keep calm and carry on refining.

In case you missed it, WPC24 took place recently in Calgary, Alberta, for the second time in its history. WPC itself was established way back in the 1930s as a forum for the global industry to discuss common themes on a triennial basis. As a global event, it attracts an audience from around the planet.. The voices discussing the global energy industry’s challenges included the Energy  Minister from Saudi Arabia, and the CEOs of Saudi Aramco, ExxonMobil, Repsol, WestJet, Accenture, Pertamina, KNOC, Kuwait Petroleum Corp, ONGC, NNPC (Nigeria), NOCK (Kenya), Oil India, and managing directors, presidents, vice presidents, and board chairs from Cenovus, Petronas, Petrobras, Petronet, Suncor, Deloitte, Brookfield, Platts, S&P, Shell, and many others.  You never know who you’ll meet at such a gathering. As I ascended the escalator to the event floor for the opening ceremonies, I found myself standing beside a trade ambassador from Libya, who shared some personal details of the immense tragedy stemming from the f