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When Water Bites Back: How Oil and Gas Learned to Respect Its Most Overlooked Resource

Digital Innovations in Oil and Gas with Geoffrey Cann

Release Date: 09/24/2025

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,...

Smart Metal In Oil and Gas

Digital Innovations in Oil and Gas with Geoffrey Cann

Oil and gas operations rely on heavy machinery and equipment that perform critical tasks, yet most of this equipment remains disconnected from the digital landscape of cloud computing, analytics, and autonomy. This lack of connectivity leaves operators with higher costs, inefficient maintenance, and limited visibility into how their assets are really performing. The traditional approach to equipment design is no longer enough. Operators face pressure to improve efficiency, reduce emissions, and cut costs, but without better data and smarter tools, these goals remain out of reach. The industry...

Smarter Scheduling in Oil and Gas

Digital Innovations in Oil and Gas with Geoffrey Cann

Scheduling in oil and gas has long been a weak link. Wells, rigs, frack crews, contractors, and regulators must all line up in precise sequence, but too often the “system” is stitched together with Excel spreadsheets, siloed tools, and a lot of human memory. The result is inefficiencies, costly delays, and endless arguments in daily meetings. That model is no longer good enough. The complexity of modern operations, coupled with volatile markets and new constraints (from labor shortages to tariffs to water management) is making traditional scheduling tools obsolete. Operators that rely on...

Harnessing Energy’s Data Deluge

Digital Innovations in Oil and Gas with Geoffrey Cann

The oil and gas industry generates extraordinary amounts of data from millions of sensors, yet only a tiny fraction, at most 8%, is actually used to inform decisions on complex and valuable assets. Decades of building analytics and machine learning solutions have helped, but they’ve also left companies with a patchwork of siloed systems and “industrial gridlock.” The arrival of foundation models in late 2022 introduced the possibility of moving beyond one-off solutions. But generic internet-trained models are not suitable for high-risk industrial environments, where accuracy,...

When Water Bites Back: How Oil and Gas Learned to Respect Its Most Overlooked Resource

Digital Innovations in Oil and Gas with Geoffrey Cann

Water is the unsung workhorse of the oil and gas industry. It's instrumental for generating steam, driving b, lubricating drill bits, flooding reservoirs, and separating oil from oil sands. Historically it’s been cheap, plentiful, and overlooked. As climate pressures mount and scarcity becomes real, water is now emerging as one of the industry’s most critical resources. Water isn’t just another utility, like power. It's a highly interconnected system. A quick fix in one unit can cause downstream failures, regulatory breaches, or environmental harm. Unlike power, water can be reused....

More Episodes

Water is the unsung workhorse of the oil and gas industry. It's instrumental for generating steam, driving b, lubricating drill bits, flooding reservoirs, and separating oil from oil sands. Historically it’s been cheap, plentiful, and overlooked. As climate pressures mount and scarcity becomes real, water is now emerging as one of the industry’s most critical resources.

Water isn’t just another utility, like power. It's a highly interconnected system. A quick fix in one unit can cause downstream failures, regulatory breaches, or environmental harm. Unlike power, water can be reused. Companies are now wise to the fact that traditional, siloed approaches to water management no longer work.

One solution lies in building holistic, site-wide digital twins of water systems. These models bring together flows, chemistry, capacity, compliance, and infrastructure data into one view, enabling operators to troubleshoot more effectively, run “what if” scenarios, and align operations with ESG commitments.

In this episode, I speak with Gil Maron, a project engineer with FTD Solutions, about his journey from refinery process engineer to water management specialist, why water is local and unique to every site, and how digital twins are helping oil and gas companies cut costs, meet sustainability goals, and avoid costly mistakes.

👤 About the Guest

Gil Maron is a Project Engineer at FTD Solutions, where he focuses on industrial water management, treatment, and analytics. With a background in refinery operations and pharmaceuticals, Gil brings deep expertise in troubleshooting complex process systems. At FTD, he works with oil and gas, semiconductors, and other industries to help clients adopt holistic, data-driven approaches to water use and sustainability.

🔗 Connect with Gil on LinkedIn

🔗 Learn more at FTD Solutions