Opening Oil & Gas to the World: Tokenization and the Future of Investment
Digital Innovations in Oil and Gas with Geoffrey Cann
Release Date: 05/07/2025
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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_outlineThe 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 Dave Rademacher, Co-Founder of OilXCoin a security token backed by oil and gas reserves which also provides investors exposure to their “upstream” value chains. Dave explains how OilXCoin is bridging traditional oil and gas with digital asset markets by creating a compliant, growth-focused investment vehicle that opens the sector to new types of investors.
We discuss what sets OilXCoin apart from pure commodity-backed tokens, how it integrates production-based revenues, and why upstream oil and gas is ripe for tokenization.
👤 About the Guest
Dave Rademacher is the Co-Founder of OilXCoin, where he leads strategic growth and market expansion efforts. With a global leadership background at BMW Group across EMEA and APAC, Dave brings a strong track record in scaling businesses and navigating complex markets. At OilXCoin, he’s focused on bridging the gap between traditional oil and gas and digital finance by offering compliant, asset-backed investment opportunities through tokenization. His aim is to make the oil and gas industry accessible to both seasoned crypto investors and traditional market participants.
🔗 Connect with Dave
🌐 Website: OilXCoin
🔗 LinkedIn: Dave Rademacher
🛠️ Additional Tools & Resources
📄 Explore Geoffrey’s Substack articles
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📢 Visit GeoffreyCann.com for insights on digital transformation in oil and gas
🤝 Connect with Me
🔗 LinkedIn: Geoffrey Cann
🐦 X (Twitter): @geoffreycann
📩 Contact me for keynotes and lectures: GeoffreyCann.com/contact
⚠️ Disclaimer
The views expressed in this podcast are those of the guest and host and do not constitute financial or professional advice.