Digital Innovations in Oil and Gas with Geoffrey Cann

For all the talk about energy transition, many aspects about transition remain unexplained.

I'm in the midst of a home renovation. The renovation should allow the house last another 20-30 years with minimal upkeep, and may well be our final home as we embrace the ideal to age-in-place. The renovations are extensive—walls are being opened up for the first time in 30 years, the flooring is being upgraded, and we've had to move out for the four months it will take to carry out.

What's remarkable is that it falls entirely to me to take the initiative on all new energy ideas for the house. I would have thought that the instant I surface at the local planning office to secure a building permit, someone with knowledge about the national agenda for energy transition would be chasing me to encourage me to do the right thing, and embrace these (and likely other) innovations.

Instead, it's been crickets.

In the meantime, I'm curious how many other aspects of modern life are going to cope with the transition. Here are four that puzzle me about how transition will work.

"I'm also a very strong advocate personally of a sort of an all in approach, meaning we aren't going to solve this with one magic silver bullet, right? If that doesn't exist, we need to develop these things over time."

This is part two of a two part podcast recording with Tom Sharp, the Director of Permitting Intelligence with Arbo, and Justin Carlson, founder and Chief Commercial Officer of East Daley Analytics on the issues and challenges facing  energy infrastructure projects, and some of the solutions. 

"Where we've arrived is a place where agencies are getting sued so much, that the process is getting dragged out and the cost of delays is used to halt projects, regardless of whether or not this is a project for traditional energy or renewables."

Tom Sharp is a thought leader on infrastructure permitting and an expert in environmental and energy law and policy. His unique perspective is informed by 12 years of federal experience, most recently as Director for Permitting Excellence at the Federal Permitting Improvement Steering Council (FPISC), and by positions at the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) including Deputy Director for NEPA, attorney in the Office of the General Council, and Senior Advisor for Infrastructure. Tom also worked for 9 years as an attorney at FERC specializing in natural gas pipeline certificates and hydropower licenses. He graduated with a Certificate in Environmental Law from the Tulane University Law School and enjoys teaching law classes focused on NEPA and permitting reform.

"If there's a transmission line that's being built from one state to another, crossing four different states, and those states in the middle aren't necessarily getting benefit from that, you're going to probably see increased opposition there."

Justin Carlson is the Co-Founder and Chief Commercial Officer of East Daley Analytics. With a passion for strategy and deep expertise in oil and gas market supply and demand, Justin co-founded East Daley Analytics to creatively transform data and information into market moving knowledge and wisdom to drive client success. He has also authored articles on the energy financial markets for Forbes, Oil and Gas Journal, and Seeking Alpha. Justin has a BS in Mechanical Engineering and an MS in Engineering Management from the Colorado School of Mines. 

"You've got all this data that you've actually got to normalize, bring together and that's what really slows the process down. It's not all unified. It is very independent and a bit disorganized and you're not always sure what to trust."

• LinkedIn profiles (personal, business): 

  • https://www.linkedin.com/in/justin-carlson-b8033b5/

  • https://www.linkedin.com/in/thomaslsharp/ 

  • https://www.linkedin.com/build-relation/newsletter-follow?entityUrn=7075561315259338752 

• Website:

  • http://www.goarbo.com/ 

  • https://www.eastdaley.com/ 

"There's a lot of different things that are plaguing infrastructure developers or have been for a long time, and they're all sort of coming to a head now."

This is part one of a two part podcast recording with  Tom Sharp, the Director of Permitting Intelligence with Arbo, and Justin Carlson, founder and Chief Commercial Officer of East Daley Analytics on the issues and challenges facing  energy infrastructure projects, and some of the solutions. 

"We don't build a road that no one's going to travel on. You build a pipeline, because somebody has supply and someone has demand."

Tom Sharp is a thought leader on infrastructure permitting and an expert in environmental and energy law and policy. His unique perspective is informed by 12 years of federal experience, most recently as Director for Permitting Excellence at the Federal Permitting Improvement Steering Council (FPISC), and by positions at the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) including Deputy Director for NEPA, attorney in the Office of the General Council, and Senior Advisor for Infrastructure. Tom also worked for 9 years as an attorney at FERC specializing in natural gas pipeline certificates and hydropower licenses. He graduated with a Certificate in Environmental Law from the Tulane University Law School and enjoys teaching law classes focused on NEPA and permitting reform.

"You really have two kinds of risk. You've got risk borne by the project developer, and then you've got policy risk."

Justin Carlson is the Co-Founder and Chief Commercial Officer of East Daley Analytics. With a passion for strategy and deep expertise in oil and gas market supply and demand, Justin co-founded East Daley Analytics to creatively transform data and information into market moving knowledge and wisdom to drive client success. He has also authored articles on the energy financial markets for Forbes, Oil and Gas Journal, and Seeking Alpha. Justin has a BS in Mechanical Engineering and an MS in Engineering Management from the Colorado School of Mines. 

"Midstream companies are out wanting to develop hydrogen projects, but we don't really know where the supply is. And we also don't know who wants it, so I don't know what to do."

• LinkedIn profiles (personal, business): 

  • https://www.linkedin.com/in/justin-carlson-b8033b5/

  • https://www.linkedin.com/in/thomaslsharp/ 

  • https://www.linkedin.com/build-relation/newsletter-follow?entityUrn=7075561315259338752 

• Website:

  • http://www.goarbo.com/ 

  • https://www.eastdaley.com/ 

"We're creating a significant drawdown on the reservoir so we're able to get every last molecule of what's unrecoverable today that sits in the reservoir."

In this episode, I'm in conversation with Herman Artinian who is the CEO of Upwing Energy, a company that has developed a compressor for downhole gas wells. One problem with gas wells is that they depressurize as they produce, which results in much of the gas (40% or more) being stranded in the well. 

"We are able to boost incremental production by anywhere from 150 to 250%, which is significant."

Upwing has taken a standard gas compressor, reversed it to pull gas out of a well, and packaged it to fit down hole where it is twelve feet long but only 5 inches in diameter. It took innovations from all kinds of places to manage this kind of repackaging. But the results are well worth the investment. 

"You imagine how much work and energy and employees and technology is going into commoditizing this valuable asset (oil and gas). People kind of forget how much work it is and how big the supply chain is for this."

President and Chief Executive Officer Herman Artinian has 30 years of experience in domestic and international business development and management, specializing in driving business growth by identifying and advancing disruptive energy technologies.

Before leading Upwing Energy, Herman increased the profitability of multiple start-ups. At Calnetix companies, he oversaw numerous global licensing deals for Access Energy and played a key role in the growth of Direct Drive Systems (DDS), prior to the acquisition by FMC Technologies.

Herman brings his passion for developing new energy technologies to Upwing Energy, driving his team to rapidly grow the natural gas service with industry- leading tools that increase production and recoverability in an economically and environmentally sustainable way.

He holds a B.S. in Aerospace Engineering from the University of California, Los Angeles.

• LinkedIn profiles:

• Business: https://www.linkedin.com/company/upwing-energy/

• Facebook pages:

• https://www.facebook.com/upwingenergy

• Website: 

•  https://www.upwingenergy.com/

• YouTube:

• https://www.youtube.com/@upwingenergy

• Instagram:

• https://www.instagram.com/upwingenergy/

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:

1. Producer extracts the resource (crude oil, raw gas, dirty coal) and transforms it into something useful (fuels, energy, petrochemicals).

2. 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."

• 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/

Russia's recent claims about hacking a Canadian gas pipeline must be taken with deadly seriousness, and not just by pipeline companies, but Canadians at large.

A document leak allegedly caused by a 21 year old cyber transport professional working inside the US security services contained a story that a shadowy Russian cyber team had successfully hacked into the operations of a Canadian gas pipeline system and with disruptive intent. 

The European nations with Arctic exposure have been investing with renewed emphasis in their northern Arctic flank now that the Russian threat has been exposed. The Nordic countries recognize that the security umbrella of NATO is but one element of a broader strategic defensive stance, and that stance must be bolstered with real assets and investments in the North. 

The conflict in Europe between Russia and Ukraine is but one of a number of global moves that threaten the rules-based order. China has been making the same, if more subtle, noises about invading Taiwan. North Korea is perfecting its intercontinental strike capability. Iran will soon be nuclear armed. We need to be prepared.

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.