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.

Heavy industry has long known that intoxication and some kinds of work simply don’t mix. Digital technologies are helping overcome the risk of hard-to-detect intoxicants on the job site. Worker safety is a VERY BIG DEAL in oil and gas. Moving equipment, pressurized vessels, high voltage, dangerous gases, hot surfaces, sharp objects, dark and wet conditions, drops from height, slippery surfaces, falling objects… the risks in the industrial workplace are manifestly greater. Employees need to have their wits about them at all times. Relative to other substance challenges, alcohol is easier for employers to manage. Other impairing substances, such as cannabis, are much more difficult to pick up. Cannabis doesn’t behave like alcohol in the body. It binds to fat cells, and is detectable for weeks, well after the intoxication effect has vanished, whereas alcohol washes out of your system relatively quickly. Unlike alcohol, the amount of cannabis you consume, and the resulting level of THC in your body, is not correlated to your level of impairment. What if we were able to supplement the industry standard law enforcement eye exam, normally administrated by a highly trained professional, but using digital technologies such as a camera, to capture eye behaviour in response to stimuli, and an algorithm that interprets the eye behaviour?

A quick trial of ChatGPT reveals its considerable strengths and its worrisome weaknesses in generating energy talking points. One of my many contacts asked me a rather simple question earlier this week: Why does Greenpeace not like LNG? My contact is from Germany, and presumably has lots of family members and friends there who have been living through Germany’s recent natural gas energy angst. As a thought experiment I wondered how a modern digital solution like ChatGPT might answer the same question, so I asked it the same question. ChatGPT did not disappoint, but neither did it impress. I would be cautious relying on ChatGPT to help with understanding the complex world of energy security. This little episode is a fine illustration of the perils of this kind of technology at this early stage of its life: ChatGPT’s grasp of the technical facts around LNG, a 60 year old technology, is weak. That does not bode well for its understanding of more modern and complicated technologies. ChatGPT’s responses are quickly generated, which is value, but we need to be very sure we are asking the right questions, and we take the time to quiz the responses to see if interesting and relevant contradictory information is being unintentionally withheld. Many in society lack the patience, the skepticism, and the inquiry skills to push back on the narratives produced by generative AI. Fortunately, that’s not the oil and gas industry. We’re a skeptical bunch.  

"Hydraulic fracture is not just about breaking new rock, it's about fundamentally rejuvenating the existing natural fractures and bedding planes that are in the rock fabric itself." In this episode, I’m in conversation with Andrew McMurray, the CEO and Co-Founder of ShearFrac. Andrew and his team are using cloud capabilities from AWS to deliver complex calculations to frack teams that improve the performance of frack jobs (lowering the cost of fracturing operations and improving the yields). Interestingly, by giving frack teams a new actionable KPI that is geared to outputs (yield) and not solely inputs (water and sand pumped), performance improves.  "Anything that you can do in real time to respond in real time is going to add more value than if you make a bunch of decisions, look back at them and realize they were the wrong decisions." Andrew is a Mechanical Engineer with a passion for responsible hydrocarbon recovery and technology development. Throughout his career, Andrew has been successful in developing and executing disruptive completion technologies in the industry as an operator with Shell or as part of a service company, STEP. Before Co-Founding Shear FRAC Group, LLC, Andrew was the General Manager of Canada for Darcy Partners, focused on identifying, developing, and accelerating innovative technology across multiple petroleum verticals. "I'm so proud to be a Canadian engineer, because on a global basis, we're very respected for our understanding of the subsurface and our ability to do things environmentally friendly and responsibly." USEFUL LINKS LinkedIn profiles (personal, business):  Personal: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-mcmurray-78b4521b/ Business: https://www.linkedin.com/company/28831831 YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@shearfrac2019 Website:   https://shearfrac.com/  

I’ve written hundreds of articles and podcast episodes about the liquefied natural gas (LNG) industry, and I’m still learning stuff I didn’t know. At an LNG conference recently, I heard speakers share perspectives on a range of topics that warranted a reminder of the nuances of this fascinating industry. LNG is a wondrous fuel with loads of potential for humanity, but it does have its quirks. The next time you hear some magical story about how LNG will save the world, or some equally gloomy review of its potential to destroy the planet, dust off this podcast for a sense check. Here’s eight things about LNG that you probably didn’t know.