"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/  

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 the President and CEO of Astraea Energy, an advisory firm founded in 2014 to provide consulting and advisory service to oil and energy projects in Northern Alberta. Wendy provides safety training and performance improvement consulting services. "If we're onboarding a contractor, we need to remember to off board every single part of that contractor when they're completed." USEFUL LINKS LinkedIn profiles (personal, business):  Personal: https://www.linkedin.com/in/wendyhamelin Business: https://www.linkedin.com/company/astraea-energy-inc/ Facebook pages: https://www.facebook.com/astraeaenergy Website:   http://www.astraeaenergy.com/  

"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 people with an anaerobic digestion background specific to biogas here yet." USEFUL LINKS LinkedIn profiles (personal, business):  Personal: https://www.linkedin.com/in/corinna-frye-5b577858/ Business: https://www.linkedin.com/company/lviassociates/ Twitter handles: @PhaidonIntl @lviassociates Website:   https://www.lviassociates.com/  

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 floods from his country. My fellow panelists hailed from Calgary, Houston, and Saudi Arabia. I have a collection of business cards from Tema (Ghana), St. John’s, Midland (Texas), Bogotá (Colombia), Pittsburgh, Berlin, Washington, and Uruguay. Under the broad theme ‘path to net zero’, the range of topics under discussion were in equal parts bracing and confronting, taking in supply and demand, energy transition, decarbonization, industry growth and/or decline, financing strategies, infrastructure challenges, energy security, hydrogen developments, carbon capture and storage, net zero pathways, indigenous engagement, and talent issues. It is impossible for one person to summarize the conference because there are multiple parallel tracks, a full poster and paper show, and dozens of talks and panel discussions. You simply can’t take it all in. Then again, you can always form a point of view based on the dialogue you did take in, so here’s mine.

Markets are starting to show interest in commodity products that are produced more responsibly, notably natural gas. The key is to be able to prove it, and that requires some changes. Customers and markets are starting to demand evidence that energy products such as natural gas are making a positive contribution to buyers’ emission reduction goals. Responsibly sourced gas will experience demand growth, rewarding gas producers for their efforts at reducing emissions in the industry. Digital innovations have unlocked many businesses’ ability to offer variations of tracking and tracing services. Tracking is by far the easier of the two, and Apple, as one example, has created its AirTag product to exploit this opportunity. AirTags connect up with passing iPhones and relay their coordinates via the cloud to the AirTag owner, pinpointing the tag’s location.  Tracing is decidedly more difficult as it requires a date, time, and location log of the events, changes of state, and changes in ownership of the item that is being traced. There are few examples of full item tracing in industry for this reason. Tracing is doubly hard for commodities that are fungible (how dto you tell one organic tomato from another), or blended with other similar products (such as green energy). Tracing of energy is coming to the commodity industry as market participants express greater interest in energy provenance.

Companies working in the energy sector are now prosecuting their own self-defined pathways to achieve carbon zero or carbon neutral business profiles. Digital innovations play a key role. As part of the World Petroleum Congress, September 17-21, 2023 in Calgary, I was on a panel discussion to discuss digital transformation on the route to Net Zero. By now, hopefully, all energy companies will have defined their own pathways to zero carbon (either absolute or net). Our goal on the panel discussion is to peel this problem apart, layer by layer. It’s great that digital innovation is a topic at this event, a once-in-three years affair. The panel agreed that there is some consensus on the need to address climate change at an industrial level, and that the question is no longer “should we”, but “how should we”. The panel discussed the following: The drivers of change that provide the shape and contours of the net zero journey. The various pathways to net zero that could be pursued by the various players in the oil and gas value chain. The digital building blocks that the petroleum industry will leverage to achieve net zero. The panel hopes to reveal the outlines of how digital enables transparent, auditable and cost-effective carbon emission reduction strategies for petroleum companies. This will not be easy.

The energy worker of the future will require a different set of personal attributes than those normally selected for today. Energy companies may well find these attributes in short supply. One of my more interesting roles is the occasional advisory work for educational institutions on the skills requirements for the energy worker of the future. Since I research and write about energy topics, including energy futures, I do have an opinion on the likely skills, particularly those in the digital area. Now energy systems are entering a phase of high uncertainty. Major questions abound on the eventual scale of various energy products, such as the various shades of hydrogen, nuclear energy, battery and energy storage technologies, fusion, fossil fuels, the renewables, geothermal, tidal, and many others. Loyalty seems rather a quaint notion in an aggressive merger and acquisition world. Most schools lack the capacity to place risky bets on possible energy futures that might not play out, and so seek lots of input before making commitments to new educational directions. Digital innovations are evolving even faster. Recently I participated in a working session at SAIT on these questions, and this episode sets out some of the findings.

"Emissions combine all of the activities a company has. It's the tailpipe of the company, but it entails all of the activities that company undertakes." In this episode, I’m in conversation with Oleksiy Golovchenko who is a Senior specialist, EHS Data and Analytics with Ovintiv, a large North American oil and gas producer. Oleksiy has been part of a team delivering a real time emissions inventory management system at a highly granular level of detail across the full measure of the company. This is a hard problem to solve, and a lot of companies will want to simply buy such a solution. But Oleksiy discusses why there are no out of the box solutions in this field, that it requires a committed team and organization, and coding skills (not computer scientists) are needed. "There's no such thing as an out of the box Emission Inventory Management System. And the reason for that is that it needs to be configured to company individual requirements, business processes that you have." Oleksiy Golovchenko is a Senior specialist, Environment Health & Safety Data and Analytics with Ovintiv. He began his career working in environmental labs where he performed a range of chemical analyses for various media, including air, water, and soil. From there, he joined NOVA Chemicals, working variously in Catalysts, Polymers, and  Petrochemicals, earning co-authorship on several patents. At Ovintiv, he deploys automation to minimize regulatory compliance, sustainability, ESG and safety risks, turning data into actionable insights and creating disruptive innovation.  Oleksiy holds a Bachelor of Science in Chemistry from Simon Fraser University (SFU), a Master of Science in Sustainable Energy Development (SEDV) from the University of Calgary (U of C), and an MBA from the Jack Welch Management Institute. "Excel doesn't have the capabilities to handle the sheer amount of data, let alone have the functionality to do things you need to do. And let alone think about doing it all in real time, from a variety of data sources." USEFUL LINKS LinkedIn profiles (personal, business):  Personal: https://www.linkedin.com/in/oleksiygolovchenko/ Business: https://www.linkedin.com/company/ovintiv/  Website: https://www.ovintiv.com/https://www.ovintiv.com/https://www.ovintiv.com/