Navigating Green Compliance
Digital Innovations in Oil and Gas with Geoffrey Cann
Release Date: 11/22/2024
Methane Matters
Digital Innovations in Oil and Gas with Geoffrey Cann
The oil and gas industry is sitting on a ticking environmental and financial liability. Around the world, millions of wells have been drilled to date, many more will be drilled, and all will eventually need to be plugged and abandoned. Today, the US alone has thousands of orphaned and marginal wells, many leaking methane, a greenhouse gas many times more potent than carbon dioxide. With underfunded asset retirement obligations and inconsistent plugging practices of the past, the sector faces mounting pressure to act—but struggles to finance solutions at scale. There is a potential...
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700 Ways to Boost Cash Flow in Oil and Gas
Digital Innovations in Oil and Gas with Geoffrey Cann
The oil market is once again bracing for change, with OPEC signaling their interest in unlocking supply that has been withheld. For producers, this looming oversupply translates into a fresh imperative: cut costs. The oil and gas sector, long accustomed to volatility, must now sharpen its cost control strategies in the face of intensifying pressure on margins. Matthew Hatami, a professional engineer, entrepreneur, and author, joins me on this episode to discuss the tools and tactics operators can use to improve free cash flow. With experience spanning Halliburton, Hess,...
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Fracking Reinvented
Digital Innovations in Oil and Gas with Geoffrey Cann
For decades, hydraulic fracturing—or fracking—has relied heavily on water and sand to crack underground rock and release oil and gas. Fracking is safe, proven, and reliable, and in collaboration with horizontal drilling, has resulted in the huge growth in hydro carbon production in the US and Canada. But fresh water is a scarce resource particularly in arid settings, and in many places under stress because of climate change. Disposal of used water is a technical challenge and costly. The sand resource, or proppant, is both costly to mine and heavy to ship. The mechanical...
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Mapping The Wet Frontier
Digital Innovations in Oil and Gas with Geoffrey Cann
Despite covering over 70% of our planet, the oceans and seas remain largely unmapped and poorly understood. Collecting useable data about the oceans is hard and expensive--reliant on specialized costly vessels, old-school technologies, and plenty of labour. The comparison to land mapping technologies (like Google Earth) is stark--we have near-total visibility of land-based infrastructure, continuously updated, and collected by satellite. Subsea infrastructure, like pipelines and cables, are managed with minimal, outdated, and isolated datasets. This gap in oceanic intelligence is an...
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Empirical Gas
Digital Innovations in Oil and Gas with Geoffrey Cann
Natural gas producers have long struggled to differentiate their product in a market that treats gas as a commodity. When it comes to carbon intensity (CI), the industry is reliant on emission factors and self-reported data, and lacks a credible, data-driven approach to proving their gas carries a lower CI. With new regulations like the Inflation Reduction Act’s Waste Emission Charge and Europe’s carbon border tax, the opportunity to produce verifiable low-emission gas has grown dramatically. Enter “empirical gas”—natural gas measured in real time with actual data instead of...
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Opening Oil & Gas to the World: Tokenization and the Future of Investment
Digital Innovations in Oil and Gas with Geoffrey Cann
The oil and gas industry has traditionally relied on financial instruments like futures and private equity—frameworks that have largely benefitted institutional investors while leaving little room for broader participation. But as digital assets continue to reshape capital markets, tokenization presents a new way forward. With blockchain technology and regulatory frameworks maturing, real-world asset-backed tokens are gaining traction - even in sectors once considered too complex for digital finance. In this episode, I speak with , Co-Founder of a security...
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How Big Oil Fell Behind In The Digital Race
Digital Innovations in Oil and Gas with Geoffrey Cann
Twenty years ago, Big Oil companies like Shell and Exxon were the stars of the capital markets. Huge revenues, stellar profits, high share prices, robust price/earning ratios and reliable dividends placed these companies among the world’s best, magnets for top engineering talent and voices of influence in the halls of governments globally. But no more. They lost the market leadership crown to the digital giants, including Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and Google. Oil and gas concerns are still market...
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Beyond the Lens
Digital Innovations in Oil and Gas with Geoffrey Cann
Industrial operations have long depended on the OODA loop—Observe, Orient, Decide, Act—a military-inspired decision framework that works, but at great cost. It requires physical presence, human expertise, and often misses key variables hidden from view. This age-old method is embedded across energy infrastructure—from wells to refineries. The digital age, however, is transforming our ability to observe. With billions of video-capable devices generating colossal amounts of data, and artificial intelligence now capable of interpreting this data in real time, there’s a game-changing...
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The Future of Offshore Connectivity
Digital Innovations in Oil and Gas with Geoffrey Cann
Offshore oil and gas operations are among the most complex and remote in the world. From harsh weather to limited physical access, these environments demand reliable, high-speed communications to enable modern digital workflows and keep operations running safely and efficiently. As offshore operations become more autonomous and data-driven, the traditional telecom models fall short. Legacy systems struggle to meet rising demands for bandwidth, low latency, and mobility—especially when platforms are unmanned or vessels are constantly on the move. is addressing this head-on by delivering...
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Corrosion Under Insulation
Digital Innovations in Oil and Gas with Geoffrey Cann
Pipes are the silent workhorses of the process industries—hidden in plain sight yet essential for daily operations. But what happens when these unassuming assets begin to fail? A recent catastrophic water main rupture in Calgary serves as a stark reminder that even the most robust infrastructure is vulnerable, especially when degradation hides under insulation. The challenge of inspecting and maintaining piping is immense. Facilities house millions of miles of pipe, much of it exposed to harsh climates, inaccessible locations, and made from materials with complex corrosion profiles. Layer on...
info_outlineAre you curious how the European Union’s Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) might impact the global oil and gas industry? It will indirectly, thankfully, but in a specific instance and for a specific fuel type, very directly.
The fuels industry is on a mad rush to decarbonize its fuel products, under pressure from regulators and customers both of whom are seeking fuels that produce far fewer damaging emissions. One way to decarbonize fuels is through the development and adoption of sustainable fuels that are produced by converting biomass (such as corn, sugar cane, soy, rapeseed, straw, wood chips) into ethanol, bio diesel, and sustainable aviation fuel.
Bio fuels, the product of converting biomass to a fuel, is the fuels industry’s answer to the circular economy. Biomass is basically a vector to recycle atmospheric CO2, by first converting C02 into plants (Nature’s contribution), then turning the plants into bio fuel (a humankind speciality), and burning the biofuel as energy, releasing the CO2 back into the atmosphere where it then is converted back into a plant.
Bio fuels, depending on their origins, fall into the category of derivative products for the purposes of the EUDR.
A clever way to track and trace the provenance of a specific fuel product, including one that is blended, traded, and stored, is to accompany the product with a digital passport or record of the life of the bio fuel.
Additional Tools & Resources:
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Disclaimer:
The views expressed in this podcast are my own and do not constitute professional advice.
Download the Transcript!
Want the actual script that this podcast is based on? You can download the transcript for this podcast here:
👉 https://digitaloilgas.substack.com/p/navigating-green-compliance