Digital Innovations in Oil and Gas with Geoffrey Cann

As the world moves to electrify its transportation services, it will slightly turn away from oil, and dramatically towards an alternate range of commodities, leading to new and different supply risks and opportunities.

Electric power plants, motors and generators are well proven technologies, and the techniques for manufacturing electric systems are well understood. Not much novelty there. R&D in batteries continues apace. The problem is that the raw materials for a wholesale shift to battery electric transportation may not be in sufficient supply to meet the potential demand. And it's not just lithium that may be a problem.

Theres also copper, nickel, cobalt, and other rare Earth metals. 

Resource producing countries face unique opportunities to capture the high value commodities of the future. Or they can face a series of helium-like moments. It's not too late to chose.

"So you come in with something innovative, right? You come in with with a digital solution. And one of the very first things we hear when you're deploying something digital, again, is, hey, look at it sounds great once you get the data in there, but I'm wearing all this PPE, I'm wearing gloves or oil spray, and all over the place. It's hot."

In this episode, I'm in conversation with Rudy de Anda, who is head of Strategic Alliances with Stratus Technologies. The industrial internet of things coupled with edge computing is set to transform legacy oil and gas environments that have been to date resistant to much improvement. Digital technologies that have matured for applications in areas such as finance are now ready for deployment in sectors requiring high availability and high reliability. Rudy goes over a case example in the offshore that shows the power of newer digital infrastructure.

"Where does the innovation fit in with the workflow processes that exist today? I s this really going to help my operators? Or is this just going to be something else that they have to maintain, work around to get their job done?"

Rudy de Anda is the Head of Strategic Alliances for Stratus focused on driving new alliance relationships in the Industrial Automation and Edge markets. Rudy is responsible for driving strategy, go to market plans, and the development of new alliance relationships. Rudy has deep industry expertise in industrial automation, technical sales and business development. He is a graduate of the University of Central Arkansas where he earned a Bachelor's degree of Business Administration in Economics with a focus on International Business.

"And if the input is digital, from one end of it is digital, but the output is physical, then you're at the edge. Typically, if it's digital in digital out, you've got some more leeway for failures, leeway for decision making time, latency. But really, when you're looking at the edge, and you've got a digital input, and being processed, and then a physical output, the physical world doesn't stop, it doesn't stop working, a pump doesn't stop turning."

Links:

• LinkedIn profiles:
  • Personal: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rudy-de-anda-378b7412/
• Twitter handles:
  • @StratusAlwaysOn
• Website:
  • https://www.stratus.com/industry/oil-gas/midstream/
  • https://www.stratus.com/industry/oil-gas/upstream/
  • https://resource.stratus.com/case-study/enginuity-global/ 

With carbon increasingly on the corporate agenda, how can CFOs turn what looks like a huge liability into a fantastic opportunity.

This is the conclusion to a two-part series on the impact that society's new emphasis on carbon emissions will have on the corporate Chief Financial Officer (CFO).

In Part 1 of this series, I highlighted the many ways that carbon-related issues will have in disrupting the usual nighttime slumber of the oil and gas CFO. Suffice to say, it's one hot mess. There's not one aspect of the job of the CFO that is untouched by carbon, which isn't really a surprise when a new and costly commodity suddenly shows up at the party.

CFOs are being asked to do something they never planned to do, their organizations don't have the skills to handle the problem, and they're being asked to deal with it everywhere and immediately. Of course, one company's problem is often another company's treasure. How can the CFO turn this huge liability and risk into a growth opportunity?

There is a gap in the energy market for companies to carve out for themselves a carbon-as-positive positioning that is counter to the predominant market narrative of carbon-as-negative. Rather than being scared shirtless, CFOs should view carbon as a transformation catalyst.

Duration: 13m 09s

"The network people are worried about data being stolen. The engineers are worried about a process being affected. This is where our big difference lies."

In this episode, I'm in conversation with Joe Weiss, who is the Managing Partner, of Applied Control Solutions, and Managing Director of ISA99. The ISA99 committee establishes standards and practices for defining procedures for implementing electronically secure manufacturing and control systems and security practices and assessing electronic security performance. A mouthful, but a cyber expert. We discuss the impacts that cyber problems are having on the oil and gas industry.

"[Cyber is] electronic communication between systems where people and systems that affects confidentiality, integrity, or availability. The point being nowhere in that definition, is the word malicious ever used."

"Cyber became an IT issue, which is what we're dealing with, to this day."

Joe Weiss is an expert on control system cyber security. He has published over 80 papers on instrumentation and control systems, control system cyber security, book chapters on cyber security for electric substations, water/wastewater, data centers, and cyber policy, and authored Protecting Industrial Control Systems from Electronic Threats. He is an ISA Fellow, Managing Director of ISA99, a Ponemon Institute Fellow, and an IEEE Senior Member. He was featured in Richard Clarke's book- Warning – Finding Cassandras to Stop Catastrophes. He has patents on instrumentation, control systems, and OT networks, is a registered professional engineer and has CISM and CRISC certifications.

"Y2K. Because they knew exactly when it was going to end and what it was, there was a law that basically made all officers and directors personally liable. And because of that, a personal silos came down personally liable for what exactly? Anything that would occur from Y2K."

Links:

• LinkedIn profiles (personal, business):
  • Personal: https://https://www.linkedin.com/in/joew1
• Website:
  • http://www.controlglobal.com/unfettered
• Book
  • http://www.momentumpress.net/books/protecting-industrial-control-systems-electronic-threats

Carbon pressures are mounting and it's the Chief Financial Officer who is the most alarmed about carbon impacts on the business. And they're right to be concerned.

Global interest in all things carbon is keeping CFOs up at night. No, that's not quite correct—it's terrifying them beyond reason. And it has to. Every year the price of carbon keeps rising, companies are struggling to hit their carbon targets, and the curve keeps getting steeper and steeper. Miss your 4% target this year and next year it rises to 5%. Just consider some of the implications on the captains of money trying to come to grips with a gas that you can't see, and you'll start to feel for them.

Part 1 of 2

"I felt the industry needed a more advanced methods of determining outcomes before millions of dollars were spent..."

In this episode, I'm in conversation with Jon Ludwig who is the President and co-founder of Novi Labs,  a data platform for the upstream oil and gas industry. Jon is a serial entrepreneur with a background in finance and oil and gas, who was struck by the challenge facing on-shore oil and gas producers when they allocate capital to well programs. Legacy ways of forecasting well performance and optimal well delivery, based on one or two wells at a time, simply don't work when operators are aiming for 500 well manufacturing programs. Using new tools and methods to aggregate data and machine learning algorithms to crunch the numbers, NoviLabs helps improve capital allocation and economic performance of the industry. 

"Secure energy independence is really important. It's fundamental. Everyone likes to know that when they flip the light switch, the lights are gonna go on. But for some of us that live in Texas, there is a period where the lights didn't go on for a whole week in 2021. We had no lights, no power, no water. And suddenly people knew what it was like to not have energy independence right or not have a reliable infrastructure."

Jon Ludwig is the President and co-founder of Novi Labs, a software company that develops a machine learning driven software platform that drives improvement in economic outcomes for upstream oil & gas companies and investors.

Prior to Novi, Mr. Ludwig was a Director at Hess Corporation where he founded the company's data analytics program, which gave rise to a move of critical business systems to the AWS Cloud, and unlocking the concept of a  next generation platform for upstream oil & gas predictive analytics.

Jon has also worked at Cap Gemini as a Principal leading the Enterprise Portal and Search practice, as a Partner for iPath Solutions in Houston, and as Founder and CEO of eLinear, a publicly traded software company based in Boulder CO.

"Our products act, and our data acts as an advisor that informs the design of the drilling program? Meaning, how far apart? How many wells? Do you stack horizontally? How do you stagger them? Or how do you complete the wells?"

• LinkedIn profiles (personal, business): 
• Personal: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonvludwig/
• Business: https://www.linkedin.com/company/novilabs/
• Website: 
•  Https://novilabs.com

"We saw this as an opportunity where we could use our experience and marry the engineering talent of Calgary with the fast frugal software ecosystem of Bangalore and build a global company."

In this episode, I'm in conversation with Amardeep Sibia is the founder & CEO of Drishya AI Labs. Drishya started in 2019 to develop a foundational solution to a specific energy transition problem. There is a huge installed base of oil and gas infrastructure that predates the digital era and the data about those assets is held largely in near-paper format (JPGs and PDFs of engineering diagrams). Drishya has developed a clever AI-assisted cloud solution that converts those diagrams into actionable data. 

"Net Zero plans, decarbonisation, whatever you want to call it, is demanding an extremely fast and extremely vast level of mechanization across the industry. So in order to make changes you need to know what's out there. That's the basic problem."

Amardeep Sibia is the founder & CEO of Drishya AI Labs, an award-winning Deep Tech company in the business of AI for Digital Oil & Gas based in Calgary, Canada with a subsidiary in Bangalore. Drishya enables companies to meet their decarbonization goals by using AI to build digital twins of brownfield industrial plants. Drishya also embeds intelligence and makes new-age equipment intelligent from the ground up, enabling faster and scalable adoption of equipment essential for meeting net-zero targets.

Previously, Amardeep was CEO SatSure, CTO at Earth2Orbit and a Vice President at Goldman Sachs, where he served for 17 years across US, UK and India.

He led SatSure to become the leading large area analytics startup for agriculture. SatSure leverages advancements in satellites, machine learning and big data analytics to generate business-critical insights across the agriculture value chain. 

Amardeep is an alumnus of the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore (IIMB) and holds a Bachelor of Technology with Honours from Thapar University, Patiala.

He is also a Mentor for TechStars Bangalore, a member of CII's National Committee for IT and a guest faculty at IIM, Bangalore where he teaches analytics.

"One single customer, a super major said because we don't have the structural data, this high quality structural data, we are leaving about 100 to $150 billion on the table over a five year period, because we can't really optimize and the inefficiencies."

• LinkedIn profiles (personal, business): 
• Personal: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amardeep-sibia
• Business: https://www.linkedin.com/company/drishya-ai/
• Twitter handles:
• @DrishyaAI
• @amardeep_sibia
• Website: 
•  Https://drishya.ai

"When machine learning algorithms that come from the digital world meet the physical world, there's a lot of challenges that are unresolved."

Today's episode is a chat with Christopher Nguyen, CEO of AItomatic. 

"When we became part of Panasonic, we essentially operated out of the global CTO office. And so we became this oracle desk. People come and say, Can you sprinkle a little AI on my product and transform the revenue flow or something?"

AITomatic is a technology company that is addressing a huge shortcoming in industrial digital areas. Machine learning models and artificial intelligence solutions in industry need to incorporate domain expertise from real human experts, or the results from the solutions are often worse than having no insight at all. The process of capturing and using human domain knowledge isn't scalable,  and is fraught with social and cultural problems. AITomatic is developing new methods and tools to capture and incorporate deep domain expertise into industrial digital solutions.

"We learned that most machine learning based predictive maintenance approaches out there are actually worse than nothing."

With a career spanning four decades, Christopher Nguyen's tech bona fides are second to none. Since fleeing Vietnam in 1978, this multiple-time tech founder has played key roles in everything from building the first flash memory transistors at Intel to spearheading the development of Google Apps as its first Engineering Director. Today, he's become an outspoken proponent of the emerging field of "AI Engineering" and a thought leader in the space of ethical, human-centric AI. With his latest company, Aitomatic, he's hoping to redefine how companies approach AI in the context of life-critical, industrial applications.

"We stopped making things in North America in the last few years.. And now we're saying, let's bring it all back. And there's a generational gap between the software generation and the people who make things."

• LinkedIn profiles
  • Personal: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ctnguyen/
  • Business: https://www.linkedin.com/company/aitomatic/
• Twitter handles:
  • @pentagoniac
  • @aitomatic
• Facebook pages:
  • Https://facebook.com/

Website: https://aitomatic.com

Today's episode is a chat with Jeff Krimmel, the Chief Strategy Officer of Pinnacle. Pinnacle focuses on helping energy, wastewater, mining, and other heavy industries leverage their data for better reliability. This results in increased productivity, lower maintenance costs, and improved safety and environmental performance. Today we discuss the above, along with Pinnacle's strategy within the market, and what the "reliability" marketplace looks like. 

Linkedin: 

https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffkrimmel/

https://www.linkedin.com/company/pinnaclereliability/

https://pinnaclereliability.com/

"Our industry, because of its complexity, it needs technology. And technology is a very good tool to reduce risk, because it allows you to have this digital model of your reservoir or your facilities, and it gives you a degree, to reduce risk, and that's valuable."

In this episode, I'm in conversation with Mario del Pino who is a petroleum engineer and entrepreneur. Mario represents the next generation of oil industry professionals and his perspectives on the industry are helpful to understand how to improve the attractiveness of the industry to talent. 

Mario has spent several years gaining deep education in petroleum engineering, and is a self-professed nerd on technology. He has worked a major gas play in Peru for several years, and during the pandemic, helped deploy innovative solutions to bridge the challenges of social distancing in operations. He has left oil and gas to help companies with their various transition challenges. 

"Digital technology in the industry has been so heavily dominated by major players that innovation has been lagging a lot. You have this kind of oligopolies, where you have certain very well established companies that they have their software, there's not that much incentive to develop new tools."

Mario del Pino is not only an academically stubborn Petroleum Engineer, having a Bachelor and two Master degrees in the subject, but also a fierce advocate of the role of our industry as a catalyst for economical development. With only 30 years, he has experience in drilling operations, surface facilities construction, production and transport operations, and project engineering. Over the last years he has embraced the world of data, having worked with most of the state of the art technologies that are disrupting our industry, including digital twins, machine learning models, smart wearables, drone-driven surveyors, and more. He is also an active member of the Society of Petroleum Engineering, being the Young Professionals Chairperson of the SPE Lima Section, and has recently been selected to be part of the SPE International Young Members Engagement Committee

"A bunch of brilliant, really young people eventually left the industry, and that's a huge loss for the industry, because we have people that right now are working at Google or Facebook. We've lost that massive potential..."

http://www.linkedin.com/in/mariodelpino