Money Under the Mattress
Digital Innovations in Oil and Gas with Geoffrey Cann
Oil and gas operators have always known that surplus equipment is part of doing business. Projects get cancelled. Long-lead items are over-ordered. Assets are parked in yards, warehouses, and sea cans “just in case.” Over time, those decisions quietly turn into idle capital sitting on balance sheets, often forgotten until space runs out or write-downs loom. What’s changed is the cost of ignoring it. Tight capital markets, tariffs, long lead times, and supply chain friction make surplus harder to justify. At the same time, operators face pressure to improve capital efficiency, demonstrate...
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AI Agents Are Starting To Reshape Upstream Operations
Digital Innovations in Oil and Gas with Geoffrey Cann
Upstream oil and gas companies continue to be very reliant on spreadsheets, legacy systems, and manual workflows to manage thousands of wells, compliance filings, and capital decisions. It’s labor-intensive, error-prone, and slow. In light of global energy transition moves, operators are now facing ongoing margin pressure, a supply glut, tighter emissions regulations, and a shrinking pool of skilled labor. Digital solutions to soften the impacts of these pressures too often end up in “pilot hell”, with limited results, stalled momentum, and no path to scale. Core systems like SCADA and...
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Why Bad Data Undermines AI, And How Good Governance Fixes It
Digital Innovations in Oil and Gas with Geoffrey Cann
The energy industry is rapidly adopting artificial intelligence. Its promises of improved productivity, safety, and operational insight are too good to ignore. But these tools are only as good as the data that feeds them. And therein lies the problem: data across the sector is often incomplete, inconsistent, and scattered. This historic lack of discipline around data now has consequences. Poor data quality when used in AI undermines any project leveraging AI, exposing companies to greater audit risk, slowing down decision-making, and derailing expensive digital programs. Worse, AI tools...
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Why Digital Sovereignty Matters
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 &...
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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...
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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...
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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,...
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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...
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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,...
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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...
info_outlineThe traditional model of hydrocarbon exploration has transitioned in much of North America, replaced by exploitation of known shale and tight resources. For shale players, exploration is seen as more risky, expensive, and slow than pursuing resource play.
Classic geochemical methods, reliant on sample collection and lab analysis, can’t keep up with the need for real-time decision-making. Helium—a light, inert, and upwardly mobile gas—offers potential as an indicator of subsurface resources, but its volatile nature makes it difficult to measure accurately and reliably using conventional approaches.
Helium, when measured digitally and interpreted with AI, can provide a new high quality and reliable signal for the presence of valuable subsurface resources, reducing costs, time, and risk.
In this episode, Denis Krysanov, founder of Heologic, explains how helium-based digital exploration can help identify oil, gas, lithium, geothermal energy, and even natural hydrogen deposits. By capturing helium anomalies in real-time, and layering them with AI and geoscience data, Heologic creates a digital twin of subsurface conditions. With field-proven success from Argentina to Malaysia, this technique has already delivered remarkable predictive power, improving hit rates and opening new plays.
👤 About the Guest
Denis Krysanov is the founder and CEO of Heologic, a geoscience innovation company pioneering helium-based exploration. With over two decades of experience at the intersection of automation, robotics, and energy systems, Denis combines technical depth with entrepreneurial leadership. His career began in offshore oil and gas technology in Finland, and has since expanded globally with breakthrough applications in digital geochemistry, particularly in helium sensing and AI integration. Heologic now operates across multiple continents and energy sectors, working with companies such as Petronas and YPF.
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⚠️ Disclaimer
The views expressed in this podcast are my own and do not constitute professional advice.