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: 👉 David Reinhart : https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidreinhart/ 👉 Visionaize: https://www.linkedin.com/company/visionaize/  You might find my previous articles on digital twin of interest! 👉 Digital Twin is More than a Clone: https://digitaloilgas.substack.com/p/a-digital-twin-is-more-than-just-a-clone 👉 Evolution of Digital Twin Technology in Energy: https://digitaloilgas.substack.com/p/evolution-of-digital-twin-technology-in-energy Connect with Me: 🖥️ Blog series: https://digitaloilgas.substack.com/ 📇 Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/training-digital-oil-gas/ 🤬 X: https://twitter.com/geoffreycann Contact for Lectures and Keynotes: I speak regularly on these and other topics. Contact me to book a brief call about your upcoming event needs. Click here 👉 https://geoffreycann.com/contact/ Disclaimer: The views expressed in this video are my own and do not constitute professional advice.

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: 🎓 Take my one day digital strategy training course for oil and gas:  👉 https://www.udemy.com/course/digital-oil-and-gas/?referralCode=0161D4D49AB75735A185 You might find my previous annual predictions articles of interest!  👉 2023 (part 1) https://open.substack.com/pub/digitaloilgas/p/the-trends-to-watch-in-2023-and-beyond-part-1 👉 2023 (part 2) https://open.substack.com/pub/digitaloilgas/p/what-are-the-relevant-macro-trends-for-2023-and-why-part-2 👉 2022 https://open.substack.com/pub/digitaloilgas/p/digital-oil-and-gas-trends-for-2022 Connect with Me: 🖥️ Blog series: https://digitaloilgas.substack.com/ 🎧 Podcast: https://geoffreycann.com/broadcast/  📇 Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/training-digital-oil-gas/ 🤬 X: https://twitter.com/geoffreycann Contact for Lectures and Keynotes: I speak regularly on these and other topics. Contact me to book a brief call about your upcoming event needs. Click here 👉 https://geoffreycann.com/contact/ Disclaimer: The views expressed in this video are my own and do not constitute professional advice.  Download the Transcript!  Want the actual script that this podcast is based on? You can download the transcript for this podcast here:  👉 https://open.substack.com/pub/digitaloilgas/p/my-digital-oil-and-gas-outlook-for

"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? How do you deliver 5G networks where there are no towers? Ammar Sabbagh is a technology professional specializing in 5G private cellular networks, cloud, decentralized cloud, and IOT solutions for business and industry. Currently, Ammar serves as vice president of industry & partnership at Ericsson for energy and ports, where he leads business development and global partners management. Ammar holds a BS in Electrical Engineering from Portland State University and an MBA in Management, and has completed various executive leadership training courses, including Design Thinking for Innovation from the London Business School. AMMAR's QUOTABLE QUOTES  With 4g, you're getting 100 megabits per second. With 5G you are getting one gigabit per second and even 20 gigabits pers second planned for next year or after. So 20 gig per user device. A single 5G radio station can connect over a million connected devices at one radio station.  With WiFi 6, you can stream one gig, but the reliability of the Wi Fi is a concern, because Wi FI struggles to penetrate metallic structure [common] in the industry, for indoor. You can trust 5G for robotics, for autonomous gantry vehicles, for assets moving. With 5G we are not planning to replace any [SCADA] wiring. 5G [latency] operation, we are talking about 20 millisecond max. We are dropping it to one millisecond in the next version updates… But the requirements from our Oceaneering partner is only 100 millisecond. The first question we ask what are the use cases or application you want to use? And then it's a journey. It's like you start today with one thing, and later, you move to other applications as needed. If you have a worker with a mobile phone or connected, you know, worker, you will know exactly where they are. And you can communicate with them and support them during that session. We like to call it dynamic  digital twin. We believe the 5g will be you know, hugely valuable, because you don't want to run all these cables connecting all these sensors to the main data center, you're just wirelessly spread them. And they're connected, and sit and analyze and collect all the data and take actions from there. Wind turbines are virtually autonomous. I mean, we connect them with cellular network, we have several references. With a cellular network, they connect the operator connect cameras and control functionality. And they remotely see what's happening on the outside and inside and adjust accordingly. 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 CONTACTING AMMAR ammar.sabbagh@ericsson.com

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 responding to the pressures. Private 5G networks offer a highly appealing alternative. As private networks, they eliminate the problem of contention for third party access or bandwidth. Solutions are free to run as designed delivering continuous near real time service. 5G networks run at much lower levels of latency compared to other network technologies such as 4G, and private 5G networks lower the latency further. Private 5G networks offer dramatically improved bandwidth compared to 4G, operating at gigabits per second, versus megabits per second. Private networks are far more secure as network access is under much tighter control. 5G networks can be deployed far more quickly than wired networks, and offer improved future-proofing for assets intended to run for years.

"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, Clark has led the strategic vision, execution, and expansion of various business units within Motiv. Under his leadership, Motiv has helped its clients and partners increase shareholder value by over $2 billion. "Now that you have your documents embedded within this AI model, using generative AI, you can now generate net new content and net new value as a result." With a commitment to excellence, Motiv has been honoured with several prestigious accolades, including The Webby Awards, W3 Awards, German Design Awards, and Ember Awards. He has over 16 years of software development experience in full-stack development, system architecture, cloud computing, data science, and machine learning. Clark has also successfully launched multiple ventures across a range of verticals, including advertising and PPC, health and wellness, data analytics, e-commerce and social commerce, professional services, and AI. "We are solving the challenges for our team that actually matter. Rather than just building the next shiny toy." USEFUL LINKS LinkedIn profiles (personal, business):  Personal: https://www.linkedin.com/in/clarklai/ Business: https://www.linkedin.com/company/motivdigital Website:   https://motiv.digital/  

"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. Howard was raised in the Pacific Northwest, and is a successful entrepreneur who has founded several companies over the years.  With his background in finance and natural resources, Howard has over 40 years working with mining, gas and oil developments. "You look at the Lima Peru field where [Rockefeller] had the first 100 million barrel field in Allen County, Indiana. They recovered over 100 million barrels, but they estimate, because of poor technology in the 1890s and early 1900s, they left 100 million barrels behind, stranded." USEFUL LINKS LinkedIn profiles (personal, business):  Personal: https://www.linkedin.com/in/howard-crosby/ Facebook pages: https://www.facebook.com/lgxenergycorp/ Website:   https://www.lgxenergycorp.com/  

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 memories of workers. Oil and gas companies cannot reliably use ChatGPT, as it was trained on the whole of the internet, and is a mix of fact and fiction, science and religion, truth and lies, and faulty logic. However, training a private version of ChatGPT unlocks a huge use case that was proven many years ago.

"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 the Alberta and National Research Councils following leadership positions in real estate, engineering consulting, manufacturing, oil and gas and technology businesses.  He is a former Chair of APEGA and Engineers Canada, the Edmonton Chamber of Commerce, and many other social and not-for-profit organizations.  "Rather than waiting for them to evolve on a hit or miss basis, with the tools that exist today, we can actually explicitly design them and make them." He has been an appointed member on numerous agencies and advisory committees related to trade, education, innovation, engineering, economic development and employment at the local, provincial, federal and international level.  The recipient of numerous awards and recognitions, he continues to support the community with his time and resources in education, voluntary and not-for profit agencies, advisory and philanthropic roles. "If you really want to make a difference in greenhouse gases, if you're not looking at things that are a billion tons a year or more, you're not going to make a difference." USEFUL LINKS LinkedIn profiles (personal, business):  Personal: https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-mcdougall-049280124 Business: https://www.linkedin.com/company/synbioblox Website:   https://www.synbioblox.com/