“It's extremely frustrating to have to make decisions on our multibillion dollar assets, with only a piece of paper in your hand, and a radio on the other side of your hip.” In this episode, I’m in conversation with Andrea Hine, who is a Product Owner within the Connected Worker Program at Suncor Energy. Working with Otterbox, Andrea and her team have developed the world’s first iPhone UL safety case, which means workers on industrial sites can now have a consumer-grade phone with them. This is absolutely ground breaking. The connected front line worker has been the hardest problem to solve in industry, but Andrea and team have done it. “We're making really big decisions about worker safety and in keeping our assets running with a piece of paper that may have out of date information. You don't have subject matter experts available to you. it's incredibly frustrating.” Andrea Hine is as a Product Owner within Suncor’s Digital Innovation and Development team.  Andrea leverages her extensive front-line experience and creative mindset to drive technology initiatives. With a decade of field expertise and a fervent dedication to empowering workers, Andrea plays a pivotal role by delivering tools that enhance safety and efficiency. “If you make workers lives easier for them by giving them software and interfaces, and a piece of hardware that's easy to use, and really intuitive, workers will be on board” USEFUL LINKS LinkedIn profiles (personal, business):  Personal: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrea-hine-45884928/ Business: https://www.linkedin.com/company/suncor Twitter handles: @suncor Facebook pages: https://www.facebook.com/suncorenergy/ Website:   https://www.otterboxbusiness.com/ccrz__CCPage?pagekey=Industrial https://www.suncor.com  

As we work through energy transition, market forces are poised to create asset discontinuities. They are already wreaking havoc with the oil supply chain. Today’s news from the shipping industry brings energy transition into sharp relief.  An industry monitor noted a collapse in the order books for very large crude carriers (VLCCs, ships that carry two million barrels or more of crude oil). You might not think this is a big deal, but if your first name is Greta, you probably think it’s great news. Which gets us to the following problem: if the capacity to move tidal crude oil to market declines by more than the demand for tidal crude oil declines, then we will eventually have a shortage of crude oil carriers. Prices for moving tidal crude to market will have to rise. In addition to the shortfall in capacity from a lack of orders, a number of ships have gone over to the grey market, carrying sanctioned Russian oil products, effectively being withdrawn from general service. Extend this kind of industrial thinking to all the assets in the oil industry value chain and a number of eventualities become quite real.

A banking collapse was not likely on the long list of worries that plague the digital entrepreneur. What are the kinds of risks that digital startups face in oil and gas? March 15 stands in infamy as the day that Julius Caesar was stabbed to death at a meeting of the Roman Senate. The conspirators, led by Brutus and Cassius, were ratted out by a seer, who ominously warned Caesar that harm would come to him that day, advice that Caesar pointedly ignored because: he was arrogant, popular and successful—precisely why the Senators chose to off him, and the seer was not unhelpful in clarifying exactly when the harm would come, where in Rome, and what form the harm might take. With hindsight, ‘Beware the Ides’ was sound advice from the seer, who apparently derived his insights by consulting the entrails of recently deceased animals. I too have ‘gut instincts’, but generally I’m more data driven and not in the business of conducting colonoscopies of goats and sheep for clues about the future. The Ides did not disappoint this year, as it turns out. The big event of the week was the failure of the Silicon Valley Bank, who stands accused of ignoring an iron-clad law of financing—they were inadequately hedged against rising interest rates, and lost a bundle when forced to sell a bond investment at a huge loss.

The biggest new supply of energy after renewables will not come from a new oil and gas field, but from virtualized energy. A few years ago, we bought a mobile battery booster pack (itself includes a lead acid battery) for just such emergencies, but we had never plugged in it, it too was dead, and worst of all, beyond recovery. We called around only to discover that there’s no publicly accessible mobile battery boosting service in our little town. And now both that little vehicle lead acid battery and gasoline tank are about to give way to a much larger lithium ion battery in an electric vehicle. A vehicle battery will store enough power to run much of your household needs (short of heat) for 10 days or longer. No more visits to the gas station. Instead, all those vehicle batteries will have to plug into the power grid to get power (or to the home solar panel system if you have that kind of money) called ‘grid to vehicle’ or G2V. Power utilities have conveniently strung copper wires to virtually to every street corner. Through that same plug, power can be dispatched back to the grid, or ‘vehicle to grid’, aka V2G. Plug in all these vehicles to draw power at the same time and we’ll bring the grid to its knees. On the other hand, plug in enough vehicles with some software smarts at the same time, and an enormous amount of that battery power can be simultaneously dispatched back to the grid. The biggest oil discovery of my generation was in Detroit in the form of a technology shift. The adoption of battery electric vehicles is unlocking the largest new supply of power in the form of virtual power plants, and at the same time, hammering gasoline demand, natural gas investment and power generation.

New sophisticated artificial intelligence tools are coming to oil and gas. There’s plenty of upside, but lots of worries too. Language processing has been one of those things that humans have claimed to be uniquely of our species. Sure, other creatures are known to communicate with each other using sound—whales sing, dolphins chirp, and dogs bark—but only humans have created symbols to abstractly represent language, to allow language to be taught, to codify its usage, and to reduce the potential for misinterpretation. Imagine a bot with unlimited patience, unlimited but flawed technical depth on a range of topics, continuously learning, fluent in multiple languages, globally consistent, universally available, supremely self confident, frequently wrong, and massively parallel. Imagine if that bot relied instead on much internal corporate resources, and not exclusively on the flawed information sources of the wild internet. How might such a content machine impact the oil and gas sector?

"You've got huge amounts of data, and siloed, across many different teams and many deep technical disciplines. And that makes it really hard to get the full picture. And without the full picture, it's really hard to optimize something." In this episode, I’m in conversation with Riley O’Donnell, who is the CEO and co-founder of Endla. The potential to optimize a gigantic industry of unimaginably value with almost unlimited number of variables in the face of constantly improving technology is unbounded. "Maybe it's a $100 million dollar problem that you have to have before you can really justify pulling a room of 10 engineers together for a day or two. But when you've got information assets that can help you solve that, all of a sudden, you can be tackling 20 $10 million problems across that same period of time." It’s so hard to tackle the $100m problems that there’s no capacity to go after the $20m problems. But with better tools that break down the information silos across technical disciplines, these problems become solveable much more quickly.  "Because it's quite complex, and there's many different dials and knobs you can turn when approaching a problem, means the solution space is very, very large." Riley O’Donnell is the co-founder and CEO of Endla. Endla began through Riley's experience in industry as a process engineer, where he built internal software to help his team do its job at both ExxonMobil and Santos. He saw the benefit of the software first hand, however, but also saw that these organisations were unable to maintain it long term. At Endla, Riley is combining engineering and software skills to provide the next generation of software to engineers working with physical assets. "The reason we're focused on unconventionals is because it's a bit of a factory operation. It's really how efficiently and cost effectively can you put these wells in the ground." USEFUL LINKS LinkedIn profiles (personal, business):  Personal: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rileyodonnell-1/ Business: https://www.linkedin.com/company/endla/ Website:  Https://Endla.com 

With payments technology innovating at a rapid clip, are energy companies ready to overhaul their snail-like order to cash processes? In the digital world, payments technology is evolving very rapidly. Micro payments, automated payments, direct deposits, touchless payments, 100% cashless businesses, crypto exchange, non-bank banks, novel debit and credit payment solutions, loyalty points for goods and services, payment through apps… the list goes on. But what about the energy industry? Of course, the energy sector has some unique features that make it harder to adopt these new payment mechanisms, but several innovations could transform one of the sector’s biggest headaches. There is a huge prize to be captured here, amounting to fully 10% of the cost of large energy enterprises, once carrying costs for all purchase activity is factored in. And with interest rates on the rise, financing that float is about to get a lot more expensive for everyone. Fortunately we have all the digital tools at hand to turn that snail into a proper performance vehicle. 

"Many people think of information as being data. But information is not necessarily data that they then can be analyzed and turned into analytics." In this episode, I’m in conversation with Chip Moldenhauer who is the Founder and CEO of Arbo, an energy data analytics firm. Compliance with energy regulations is a minimum requirement for any new energy investment. However, the regulations are not codified and structured as you’d find in an ERP system. It’s unstructured text, which means it’s time-consuming to find all the relevant regulations and figure out how they apply in a specific instance. Add in the urgency to hit climate targets and the huge wave of government funding heading into clean energy, and suddenly regulatory data analytics becomes highly valuable.  "The big problem that the industry was trying to solve as, as at least the United States, and most of the world was trying to do that shift from coal to gas, that was how long is it going to take to build transportation necessary to move that product that was going to help decarbonize the world and bring power to many more people." Chip is the founder and CEO of Arbo, an energy data analytics firm that transforms energy regulatory data into business intelligence and insights that drive infrastructure permitting and commercial decisions. Chip founded Arbo to help improve the strategic decision making needed to sustain America’s critical infrastructure, achieve energy independence and support the energy evolution. "Knowing the timing of the permitting process is directly related to how much a project is going to cost." Prior to founding Arbo, Chip practiced energy regulatory law at Morgan, Lewis & Bockius, LLP and advised clients’ senior leaders on strategic solutions to high stakes regulatory, policy and litigation issues. Chip served with distinction as a naval surface warfare officer responsible for leading large engineering divisions on ships deployed overseas in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom. He is a graduate of the United States Naval Academy and The Catholic University of America School of Law.  "And I think most research shows that we need to build that grid out at a rate of four to five times what we've built before." USEFUL LINKS LinkedIn profiles (personal, business):  Personal: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chip-moldenhauer/ Business: https://www.linkedin.com/company/goarbo Twitter handles: @go_arbo Website:   www.goarbo.com  

For the first time in your life, the relationships you have with your energy suppliers are contestable. But why are fossil fuel companies not in the contest?  Businesses are in continuous contests for the consumer wallet. I’m presently scheming on a house renovation program and I’ve invited four renovation contractors to the contest. My relationship with a renovation contractor is contestable at the moment but once I select someone to work with, the contest is over. How does contestability work in the context of the energy industry? As consumers, we’re conditioned to have an ambivalent unemotional relationship with our energy. It’s just there, lurking behind the light switch, or sloshing around in the gas tank, or springing into hot action when the house temperature falls too low in winter. Many people have no idea who even supplies their energy or how it gets to their homes. As a result, our relationship as energy consumers with energy suppliers is not particularly contestable. Once you sign up with a local gas or power supplier, you don’t easily or often change. It’s fire and forget. Even payments are automatic. It’s been this way for my entire life, 60+ years. And it’s all about to change.

"There has been no device historically that can detect cannabis impairment in real time. Cannabis works very differently in the body than does alcohol. So you can measure the amount of alcohol in the body and derive the experienced impairment from that number. The same is not true of cannabis." In this episode, I’m in conversation with Ken Fichtler, the founder and CEO of Gaize. Cannabis is now legal in many places where oil and gas is produced, refined and distributed. Cannabis is increasing in  potency, people consume it more, and it lasts longer in body than alcohol, but with different impairment impacts. Without a better way to detect impairment, companies may simply not bother with any testing. Ken set out to find a digital solution to this problem, which is way harder than it sounds, but Gaize is now ready for prime time.  "Is there a way we can currently detect cannabis impairment? And the only thing that I could find were these drug recognition, expert eye tests." Ken Fichtler is the founder and CEO of Gaize, a first of its kind real-time impairment detection platform. Gaize uses analyzes eye movement changes using artificial intelligence to discover impairment from cannabis and other drugs. He’s a prior founder, proven operator, angel investor, and most recently served as Director of Economic Development for the State of Montana under Governor Steve Bullock. There he was responsible for adding thousands of jobs paying radically more than the state’s average wages, recruited leading technology companies to the state, and managed the economic response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Ken lives in Missoula, Montana with his family where he enjoys a broad variety of outdoor activities and serves on several boards. "Each class of drug has a unique bio signature that manifests in the eyes. And that basically just translates to a unique way in which the eye movement changes in response to that drug or to the impairment from that drug." USEFUL LINKS LinkedIn profiles (personal, business):  Personal: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kenfichtler/ Business: https://www.linkedin.com/company/gaizesafety Twitter handles: @GaizeSafety @kenfichtler Facebook pages: https://www.facebook.com/gaizesafety Website:   https://www.gaize.ai