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Empirical Gas

Digital Innovations in Oil and Gas with Geoffrey Cann

Release Date: 05/14/2025

Digital Innovations in Oil and Gas with Geoffrey Cann

Have you ever given thought to the possibility that the suppliers of your core business technology, brands like Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP, might simply turn you off with no warning? It sounds fanciful, absurd, a black swan event so far beyond any reasonable risk matrix as to be unworthy of consideration. Yet it happened this year, 2025, to a major oil company in the world’s most populous country. What was once unimaginable is now here, and with it, lessons for every oil and gas organization, indeed every company, about the new risks in the digital landscape. ⚒️ Additional Tools &...

From Brownfield to Greenfield to Bluefield

Digital Innovations in Oil and Gas with Geoffrey Cann

Most large enterprises rely on a handful of expansive technology platform solutions to run their business, and the most prominent and widely deployed in oil and gas is SAP. As I’ve outlined in my books, enterprise solutions such as SAP are also migrating to digital technologies, which triggers a major question: what is the optimal upgrade path for an SAP customer, or any enterprise technology, to adopt? Broadly speaking, there are two strategies to this vexxing question: a brownfield migration or “lift and shift” and a greenfield re-implementation or “start afresh”. The problem is...

Can You Test A Plant Before It's Built?

Digital Innovations in Oil and Gas with Geoffrey Cann

Motors are the quiet workhorses of industry. They drive pumps, fans, compressors, and heaters, and they consume more than sixty percent of the power in most industrial operations. When operators need to control motor speed, they historically relied on mechanical adjustments or trial-and-error testing to keep processes stable and safe. As motors get larger and drive trains more complex, traditional testing approaches no longer work. Bringing every component together for a full string test adds months of delay and millions of dollars in logistics. The industry is conservative and reference...

Breaking the Paper Habit

Digital Innovations in Oil and Gas with Geoffrey Cann

Canada’s energy sector has long struggled with low productivity on the front line, as indeed the entire Canadian economy. Despite heroic efforts by tradespeople, their effectiveness is hamstrung by badly dated processes, old disconnected systems, and paper-based workflows. The problem isn’t the workers. It’s that they’re too often sent out with the wrong drawings, the wrong tools, the wrong permits, or even to the wrong location. Multiply that by a hundreds of thousands of jobs, and you’ve got a national productivity drag. One company, , set out to build a completely paperless,...

Taming the Owner Communications Chaos

Digital Innovations in Oil and Gas with Geoffrey Cann

Oil and gas companies are finally confronting the huge communications and stakeholder challenge they face with their asset owners and stakeholders. Production assets such as oil and gas wells almost always have many part owners (land owners, JV partners, interest-holders, trusts, first nations tribes). Managing these hundreds or thousands of parties across tens of thousands of wells is really demanding. These relationships are complex, sensitive and often layered with legacy ownership structures, royalty flows, regulatory demands and reputational risk. This is much more than an operational...

Unlocking Capital for Latin America’s Energy Transformation

Digital Innovations in Oil and Gas with Geoffrey Cann

Latin America is entering a period of rapid economic growth, urbanization, and industrial expansion. Unlike North America and Europe, where primary energy demand has been flat for more than a decade, the region’s energy consumption is rising sharply. A young, increasingly urban population is pushing electricity and fuel demand higher, placing new pressure on infrastructure and supply. This demand surge is colliding with a second global shift: the explosive rise of AI and hyperscaler data centers. These digital megaprojects require enormous volumes of power, often sourced from natural gas,...

Power Without Surprises

Digital Innovations in Oil and Gas with Geoffrey Cann

Electricity powers nearly everything in oil and gas, from pumps and motors, to compressors and digital systems. But while production engineers obsess over volumes and temperatures, the quality of the electricity driving their systems is often overlooked. Most teams only discover power issues after equipment fails, leading to unplanned downtime and costly repairs. Unfortunately, traditional power quality meters and relay monitors don’t catch the early warning signs. They lack resolution, require manual data pulls, and don’t provide actionable insights. Worse still, the frontline...

Navigating The Maze of Global Energy Regulation

Digital Innovations in Oil and Gas with Geoffrey Cann

In all my years of experience in energy, I rarely worked in pure regulatory areas, but regulations loomed large over everything I touched. The energy sector is very highly regulated, and for very good reasons. From environmental standards to carbon pricing, energy companies are held to a high standard and must demonstrate that compliance to operate locally, regionally, and globally. The regulatory landscape is highly dynamic and under constant change. New regulatory frameworks emerging from Europe and the United States will reshape how energy companies, particularly in North America, do...

The Safety Copilot

Digital Innovations in Oil and Gas with Geoffrey Cann

In the UK oil and gas sector, the record on major accidents looks encouraging. Serious incidents are very rare, and the industry appears to be operating safely. Beneath the surface, the data tell a different story. One-third of safety inspections fall below the legal standard, and more than half of process-safety professionals are expected to retire within the next decade. At the same time, ageing assets, shrinking budgets, and weaker regulatory oversight are straining existing safety systems. Operators must sustain high safety performance when experience is walking out the door,...

How To Misspend $100 Billion Using Excel

Digital Innovations in Oil and Gas with Geoffrey Cann

Unconventional oil and gas is massive. Every year, over $100 billion is poured into steel, sand, and water just in Canada and the US. Yet, most of the planning behind these extraordinary investments still runs on Excel spreadsheets. Spreadsheets were fine in the 90s, but today they struggle to handle the complex interdependencies and real-world constraints of modern tight plays. The hidden cost to the industry is huge. Expensive inefficiencies, wasted capital, and missed opportunities to improve well design and execution. Other industries abandoned spreadsheets long ago when margins got thin,...

More Episodes

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 estimates.

In this episode, I catch up with my buddy Mark Smith, CEO of Clean Connect, about how his company integrates AI, camera-based monitoring, and process simulation software to create real-time, third-party verifiable emissions data. This transformation not only reduces tax burdens but unlocks access to premium markets willing to pay for low-carbon gas. The implications are massive for producers, traders, and tech firms alike.

👤 About the Guest

Mark Smith is the CEO of Clean Connect, a technology company based in Colorado. Clean Connect offers AI-powered camera systems, control room software, and blockchain-based trading platforms that enable real-time emissions monitoring, measurement, reporting, and verification. Their technology underpins the emerging market of empirical gas, empowering producers to offer provably low-emission natural gas certified by international standards like ISO 14067 and ISCC+.

Connect with Mark Smith:

🔗 Clean Connect Website

🔗 LinkedIn - Mark Smith