Digital Innovations in Oil and Gas with Geoffrey Cann

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  

This week concludes a series I started last week on the trends to watch in 2023.  As a reminder, at the start of every year, I take a step back from the daily news feeds about energy to dwell instead on the many longer-stride trends that are impacting oil and gas. There are many ways to frame such analysis, and the framework I’m using goes by the name STEEPLE. The letters form a mnemonic, which refers to Social, Technology, Economy, Environment, Politics, Legal, and Ethical. The mnemonic started life as PEST, then evolved into STEEP, PESTLE and STEEPLE by progressively adding additional categories. This episode will focus on the back half of STEEPLE: Environment, Politics, Legal, and Ethical.  The environmental trends are those that concern themselves with our natural world. At times, the energy industry seems to be driven by a singular environmental factor—rising levels of atmospheric carbon concentration. However, there are many other worrisome trends to keep front of mind. Political trends are almost by definition country specific, but there are a few biggish ones that factor into energy calculations. The first trend is aggressive energy geopolitics. Russia has demonstrated how an autocratic political regime over time can be tempted to use a carefully constructed energy market monopoly to bend market dependents to its will. Energy importers will be careful not to lock into such dependencies in the future, and the trend will clearly be to diversify energy supply or move to self sufficiency in energy. The legal environment for energy is not static, but it doesn’t change quickly either. Nevertheless, I keep an eye on a few important trends. Activists have been successful in weaponizing legal systems in western economies to tackle the energy industry. Approval cycles for energy developments (and even housing for veterans) in the western world continue to slow down and are now structurally out of step with both the rising demand for energy and the speed society demands to deal with climate effects. It has long been recognized that there is an ethical dilemma at the very heart of the industry—the production and consumption of petroleum delivers great benefits for society but at a serious environmental and social cost. Halting the industry will quickly starve us and continuing the industry will slowly cook us.

"It is very similar to what we've been doing an oil gas for many years, in an exploration sense. The mindset is there’s risk. At the beginning... you look at data." In this episode, I’m in conversation with Patrick Ng, the CEO and Founder of ShaleForce, a geothermal company, on generative AI and how it has been used by ShaleForce. If we drill deep enough, we will find geothermal resources, but not all are suitable. One application idea is to aim for geothermal resources where there are existing coal power plants. These plants will eventually be retired, but with a different kind of boiler, the plants could find renewed life. Geothermal energy is also applicable to many industrial processes currently supplied by hydrocarbons, including steel making, cement, food processing, pulp and paper, and many others.  "Early in the shale revolution before 2010, people will say, hey, there’s shale everywhere. I look at it like factory drilling. I look at so many acres, and look at how many wells I can place and go with it. Very quickly, they find out if that's the way you go, you're gonna blow a lot of capital. The reason is geology is not uniform or costs, right? It has the variabilities." Patrick Ng is the founder and CEO of ShaleForce, a data analytics and energy intelligence company. Patrick started his career in R&D, and eventually moved into analytics, primarily software development, geophysical imaging and inversion applications / services for the oil & gas sector. His passion is helping communities thrive during energy transition by leveraging his background in technology application and petroleum geology to expand the energy supply and radically lower emission for industry, such as geothermal. "If our target, our goal is to radically reduce carbon emission for industry, let's say not just electrons, not just electricity, there are a lot of industries with heavy use of energy, that can benefit from direct heat, or superheated water." USEFUL LINKS LinkedIn profiles (personal, business):  Personal: https://www.linkedin.com/in/patrick-ng-6421b5  Website:   https://www.shaleforce.com Reference paper:  https://energy.utexas.edu/research/geothermal-texas  

I admit it. I’m an energy industry junkie. My news feeds are chock full of energy stories, I chase down obscure items that interest me, and I scrutinize energy industry changes to understand their hidden meanings and bigger implications. It’s for this reason that every year around this time, I step back from the task of satisfying my daily energy news fix and focus instead on the many bigger swinging trends that are buffeting the world. In this episode I’m using a framework called STEEPLE, which refers to Social, Technology, Economy, Environment, Politics, Legal, and Ethical. It’s a way to categorize ideas into manageable buckets. The category of social trends includes topics like demographics, shifts in settlements, human migrations, and cultural changes. I like to consider the social trends with the biggest impacts on the energy industry which tend to be those that drive demand and supply. Tech trends cover more ground than just digital, and include science advancements, materials, new energy, health care, and many others, but I’m mostly focused on digital for this article. The pace of digital innovation is not abating, and is likely accelerating as investments in select foundational capabilities come to fruition. Economic trends covers such topics as markets, commodities, interest rates, employment, and much besides. Looking beyond commodity price reveals a host of important trends in the global economy.

"There's a move towards digital transformation. And there's two aspects of that. There's digitisation and there's digitalization." "If it's digitized, you're simply taking, like a hardcopy, and you're scanning it near attaching it to a record of some sort." "By digitalizing, it, I'm actually putting it in a format that the computer can process. It's much more efficient..." In this episode, I’m in conversation with Tony Ciliberti, who is the founder of Reliability Dynamics. Tony is an authority on digitalization of equipment operating data, which is near and dear to my heart. Without good data, you can’t really get the full benefits of digitalization. Worse, poor quality reliability data costs money, and carbon, as engineers have to drive to visit facilities when they don’t need to. Better quality reliability data pays back very quickly.  "[Reliability] means is being able to make equipment perform better by having the information necessary to make better decisions for the equipment." Tony Ciliberti is the Founder and Principal of Reliability Dynamics. He is a chemical engineer with 30 years of experience in equipment reliability and risk management in the petrochemical and oil and gas industries. He is an authority on data digitalization and the application of ISO 14224 methods. He developed and patented engineering methods that resolve pervasive equipment performance data quality issues in EAM solutions. He chairs the CCPS Process Equipment Reliability Database (PERD) Project. He participates actively in ISO technical standards development as the ANSI-appointed US Expert in ISO/TC67/WG4/PG1 and is a contributing author of the ISO 14224:2016 standard. He teaches the ISO course on how to apply ISO 14224 in enterprise software. "If I'm thinking that I'm gonna get information from the field, and I want to be able to validate it with a system, which I do, right, I've got to make sure that the data requirements aligned with the type of work." USEFUL LINKS LinkedIn profiles (personal, business):  Personal: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tciliberti Business: https://www.linkedin.com/company/reliability-dynamics-llc/ Websites:   https://reliabilitydynamics.com/ https://pf-prod-sapit-partner-prod.cfapps.eu10.hana.ondemand.com/profile/0001223132 https://store.sap.com/dcp/en/product/display-0000060110_live_v1/industry-standard-solution-for-plant-maintenance https://www.sap.com/dmc/exp/2013_09_adpd/enEN/#/partners?search=ispm&id=p:p10016 Patent System and Method for Enterprise Asset Management and Failure Reporting System and Method for Enterprise Asset Management and Failure Reporting, US 11,157,519 B2 · Issued Oct 26, 2021