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...
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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...
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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,...
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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,...
info_outlineHeavy industry runs on complex systems and distributed assets, but frontline workers are often still armed with paper manuals and radios. It works, but yields an unacceptably high level of inconsistencies, safety incidents, and productivity bottlenecks. And as experienced workers retire, critical knowledge about systems, assets, and good practice disappears.
The shift to digital work execution is now both viable and urgent. Smartphones are everywhere. AI is mainstream. And yet many organizations still struggle to digitize even basic workflows.
In this episode, Liam Scanlan, co-founder and managing director of HINDSITE, reveals how his technology is addressing this challenge head-on. HINDSITE equips frontline workers with just-in-time digital instructions, visual training, and live process documentation. Companies that leverage this technology report fewer errors, faster onboarding, improved safety, and lower costs. Whether it’s inline inspections, sensor maintenance, or tire bay procedures, HINDSITE brings consistency and governance to the last mile of industrial work.
👤 About the Guest:
Liam Scanlan is the co-founder and managing director of HINDSITE, a field operations platform built to support complex, safety-critical tasks in heavy industry.
Liam has worked in digital transformation projects around the world with BHP. He has worked across the Energy sector in work management solutions for over a decade and set out to solve the particular challenges of Industry around Work Management and Service Delivery.
He has degrees in Mining Engineering, Law, Finance and Economics.
🌐 www.hindsiteind.com
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The views expressed in this podcast are my own and do not constitute professional advice.