Digital Innovations in Oil and Gas with Geoffrey Cann

If there is one industry that evolves very slowly, it would have to be the liquefied natural gas industry, and yet, digital is even making an impact here. As a digital nerd, I was alert to any digital developments at LNG 2023, but I was also curious what I had written back in 2016. At the time my weekly article series was called Fuel Up LNG, and chronicled Australia’s staggering rise from a gas exporting bit player to global LNG giant. I regret to inform you that not much has changed, really. It takes seven years to move an LNG project from conception to reality, if not longer. There’s not much iterative technology development happening, because the capital project life cycle is so long—a project is effectively just one iteration. Perhaps an expansion project can adopt some innovations, but there will be pressure on the project to stick with the status quo to capture scale economies. However, there were still a few pearls to share. Here are four key takeaways about the impacts that digital is having on the LNG sector.

My first exposure to the circular economy did not inspire confidence. My Mom, my brother and I were in the attic of my uncle’s home rummaging through an old trunk overloaded with castoff clothing that my cousins had outgrown. I didn’t appreciate it at the time, but we were clearly poor, and with 6 kids, there simply wasn’t enough money to buy new clothes. One of our most hideous family photos has us kids kitted out in fabrics I am certain were recycled from bedroom curtains. Necessity, or in my situation a mild case of poverty, teaches you to value your stuff, make your stuff last longer, use your stuff minimally to reduce wear and tear, and to repurpose your stuff at end of life. The hydrocarbon industry has never been particularly hip with circular thinking. In fact, the business model for the industry has been pretty much linear for my entire lifetime: Producer extracts the resource (crude oil, raw gas, dirty coal) and transforms it into something useful (fuels, energy, petrochemicals). The consumer uses it (burns it, wears it, builds with it, and lots of other uses), and disposes of it (carbon emissions into the atmosphere, construction materials into landfill, single use plastics everywhere) as waste. There’s no evidence of a circle. There are now a handful of good examples in the industry of the circular economy finally coming to life.

With Apple’s new Vision Pro hitting the news, and changing the perception of computing to include a spatial dimension, it’s worth reflecting on where and how this clever new technology could be used in oil and gas. Apple’s latest product, spatial computing, is long on nifty and clever, but short on a must have new feature worth paying the price of a high end Mac Studio with a two hour battery life. Watch a movie in surround vision? Ok. Use your hands to manipulate apps instead of a mouse? Fine. Thrown an app into space and open it? Sure. Do a video call? Um. During the launch, there was no obvious killer app for the masses, and nothing that compelling for business, and in particular the energy industry. The energy world is not really about people. In fact, we spend enormous amounts of treasure trying to keep people from coming into contact with our products (fuels, electricity). For consumers, energy is just there, in the background, behind a light switch, or in response to a quarter turn of a key in an ignition. For energy suppliers, our world features many more machines, with complex interfaces, more regulations, more safety. But our house is definitely spatial.

"You better better know how to go with the flow." In this episode, I’m in conversation with Rodrigo Liang, the co-founder and CEO of SambaNova Systems. Generative AI solutions have taken the world by storm and will speed up industry by 10x. "What’s necessary for us to train these models, we need very, very large data sets. And well guess what? These cloud services and these large hyper scalars have been able to accumulate so much data, that now you have large enough datasets that are allowing us to train these models really well." The problem is that enterprises want to have their own enterprise AI model that uses their proprietary company data, not a generic dataset scraped from the Internet. SambaNova helps companies build these specific enterprise AI models.  "The main reason people don't use the largest model is the training cost is significantly higher than the smaller models..." Rodrigo Liang is co-founder and CEO of SambaNova Systems, a leader in enterprise-scale artificial intelligence solutions. With deep roots in Stanford University, he and his co-founders designed a new full-stack hardware and software platform optimized for AI workflows and set the company on a mission to enable the future of artificial intelligence for the enterprise.  Rodrigo says that we are witnessing the fastest industrial revolution in history – and it's happening right in front of our eyes. The way artificial intelligence has unfolded in the past few months is just the tip of the iceberg, and it's going to transform the world as we know it.   "Text is still the number one format of your data, regardless of what you say about imaging and videos and things like that. Most of your data at rest exists as text." USEFUL LINKS LinkedIn profiles (personal, business):  Personal: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rodrigo-liang Business: https://www.linkedin.com/company/sambanova Twitter handles: @SambaNovaAI YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/SambaNovaSystems/featured Website:  https://sambanova.ai/  

A 21 year old cyber transport professional working inside the US security services leaked a document alleging that a Russian cyber team successfully hacked a Canadian gas pipeline. The podcast explores the serious nature of this claim, examines the implications for national security, discusses Canada's vulnerabilities, and emphasizes the urgent need for defense against cyber attacks.

The energy industry is very accustomed to seeking permission to do things. It is the norm in industrialized societies to set out the acceptable parameters for investment actions that can impact others, and to have project proponents follow a set of established regulatory processes. These processes take time, but they could be trusted to yield a predictable outcome for project investors and proponents.  Until recently. Deploying energy infrastructure is an increasingly fraught endeavour in many parts of the world.  There is now a frenetic race underway to secure the best projects with the best market positions, for the long term, in the face of a permitting timeline that exceeds the time available to avert the worst of climate effects. For proponents, chasing projects with high regulatory risk wastes both time and money in a race with little tolerance for error. Delayed in-service dates for projects reduce the value of their future revenue streams, exacerbated by the current higher interest rate environment. Such delays can result in promising projects falling in value and being canceled.  However, one technology company HAS brought together the special combination of deep multi-faceted energy industry insight, permitting process, regulatory and legal knowhow, and technology capability to help infrastructure developers, operators, and investors crack the code on this problem.  Arbo is a specialist technology-and-advisory business that has delivered the new technologies, advanced analytics and algorithms to improve the ability of project developers to execute in this environment. 

Russian cyber hackers claimed to have penetrated the operations of a Canadian gas pipeline and caused some disruption. For those of us living some distance from the equator, mostly northerners, but also a few hardy souls in the south, interruptions in energy supply are rare, short lived, weather related, and almost always about electrical power. My friends in Houston, energy capital of the US, tell me that they frequently experience minor power interruptions, which we never hear about, because, frankly, it’s not news. But when oil or gas infrastructure is involved, it’s newsworthy because it is a rare occurrence, the product is hazardous and hard to contain once it’s loose in the wild, and we generally have little direct experience about dealing with a protracted interruption in supply. In my 60 odd years (and lately they’ve been pretty odd), I have no memories at all about coping with fuel supply disruption. And that includes years living abroad, and lots of international travel. But there are a number of reasons why I’m skeptical about this story.

“Wow!”, exclaimed Kelly, the site supervisor at the large petrochemical plant. “Are you telling me that I can take my iPhone onto the site? It’s safe now? What can I do with it?" Yes, Kelly, you can, IF you have the right phone AND the right case. As they are in our personal lives, smart phones are indispensable Swiss Army Knives of digital utility, and they will be highly welcome on oil and gas sites, petrochemical plants, and many other industrial sites besides. As Kelly well knows, today’s intrinsically unsafe device holds the record for the longest running streak as the number one controllable site safety risk for the past ten years because it induces inattentiveness for the user, enables unauthorized site surveillance, and triggers (maybe) the next front page news refinery explosion. But tomorrow, your smart phone will be viewed as the single most important safety enabler on the site, beating out hand rails on stairs, emergency wash stations, light bulbs, and lids on coffee cups. I bet you won’t be allowed on site without on. Here are a handful of the ways that such a phone and case could benefit the front line worker.  

"The people that design software, are unfortunately often a long ways away from the people that are out in the field using it." In this episode, I’m in conversation with Shaun Syvertsen, the CEO of ConvergentIS. He has built a company around the opportunity to make a widely used technology (SAP) super easy to use–so easy in fact that users don’t need training, or very little. It all stems from the need to improve adoption rates, and it turns out that ease of use, reduction in fear of technology, and empathy, are keys to successful adoption. There’s much scope in the SAP landscape for such an idea because enterprise technology needs to appeal to a very large, multi-industry market, leaving very niche areas underserved.  "When you make it so easy that you have a group of people that can just go and follow the steps, and they know they're going to get it right, and you're guiding them to get it right, then nobody's scared to go do it." Shaun Syvertsen is the  Managing Partner and CEO of ConvergentIS. He has more than 20 years of experience leading, advising, and delivering successful programs, projects, and initiatives for various companies in the oil and gas, financial, public sector, transportation/logistics, automotive, manufacturing, and IT industries in Canada, the US, and Germany. "Our target state is you actually can't tell the difference between our solution and what SAP built. You install it inside SAP, you don't have to figure out how to integrate it." USEFUL LINKS LinkedIn profiles (personal, business):  Personal: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shaunsyv/ Business: https://www.linkedin.com/company/convergentis/ Website:   https://www.convergentis.com/  

As far back as 2004, I explored the possibility of deploying cellular phones within an oil refining complex. The idea of persistent and safe communications with supervisors and lead hands by phone or text message during the work day was intuitively attractive, and we imagineered many a positive use case. This was in the era of the BlackBerry mobile phone, long before Apple created the smart phone category. However, we ultimately abandoned the concept. A decade later in 2014, I was reminded how far consumer technology has progressed when I was contacted by a young Australian field engineer with a creative mobile worker solution. The young engineer’s solution had cost all of $500.  He had taken a risk by using a consumer-grade tablet, but the gas assets were all outdoors, and the risk of a conflagration minimal. He also took a lot of grief back in the home office for disrupting the normal work routine, and was told to cease and desist his innovation. Fast forward yet another decade, to 2023, and Suncor has rolled out the new cases and handsets to thousands of front line workers, and the use cases that I had imagined 20 years ago are finally being realized.