Libsyn Directory

Breaking the Paper Habit

Digital Innovations in Oil and Gas with Geoffrey Cann

Release Date: 11/26/2025

Reinventing Turnarounds with AI: Link Planning Directly to Execution

Digital Innovations in Oil and Gas with Geoffrey Cann

Turnarounds are one of the most critical and expensive activities in oil and gas, yet many are still managed using spreadsheets, manual coordination, and tribal knowledge. Despite years of investment in digital systems, there remains a persistent gap between turnaround planning and execution in the field. This gap creates real consequences. Turnarounds often run into the hundreds of millions of dollars, and delays of even a single day can result in millions in lost production. At the same time, safety compliance is frequently based on self-declared reporting rather than verified outcomes, and...

Tokenizing the Barrel: Rewiring Oil Markets from Molecule to Money

Digital Innovations in Oil and Gas with Geoffrey Cann

The global oil market still runs on a horribly fragmented system where physical barrels, paper contracts, and financial settlement operate in parallel but disconnected layers. Transactions are dependent on manual processes, emails, PDFs, and handshake relationships built over decades. For a trillion dollar industry, the core trading infrastructure remains slow, opaque, and largely inaccessible for all but the largest players. This creates real operational and financial constraints. Settlement delays can stretch to 90 days, tying up working capital and exposing companies to liquidity...

How to Reduce Waste in Capital Projects: Using Execution Intelligence To Fix Broken Coordination

Digital Innovations in Oil and Gas with Geoffrey Cann

Large-scale capital projects sit at the heart of the oil and gas industry, and across all infrastructure sectors (power, petrochemicals, rail, water, telecoms). These projects require tight coordination of people, equipment, and timelines, often under pressure to deliver quickly and safely. Despite heavy investment in planning tools and scheduling systems, the day-to-day reality remains fragmented, with teams working across disconnected systems and making decisions in isolation. The issue is not a shortage of data, but a lack of connected context. Teams make decisions that work locally,...

The Carbon Credibility Crisis: We Need Trustworthy Carbon Data

Digital Innovations in Oil and Gas with Geoffrey Cann

One thing I’ve learned from producing is that you can’t really trust with your own eyes what you see presented to you anymore. Green screens, video editing, and AI are so good now, and so inexpensive, that anyone can create compellingvideo content of scenes that didn’t happen in real life. As a result, I’m now very skeptical of claims that companies make that they don’t offer to back up. Consider the ‘organic’ chicken at the butcher shop. How do you really know that the chicken has led an exemplary life free from chemicals, pesticides, and growth hormones? Carbon emissions fall...

How to Spot Cyber Attacks on Physical Assets

Digital Innovations in Oil and Gas with Geoffrey Cann

Industrial operations have spent decades optimizing for safety, reliability, and uptime. Control systems, sensors, and field equipment were designed to be stable and predictable, often isolated from the outside world. Cybersecurity, by contrast, evolved largely in IT environments, on a separate track, with different tools, assumptions, and incentives. That separation is no longer holding. Operational technology is becoming more connected, more digital, and more automated. Sensors stream data to the cloud, vendors require remote access, and AI-driven tools increasingly influence operational...

Data Quality Is Your Bottleneck: Fix The Foundation Before Scaling AI

Digital Innovations in Oil and Gas with Geoffrey Cann

Oil and gas companies generate enormous volumes of operational, geological, and production data. Despite this abundance, much of that data remains fragmented, inconsistent, and difficult to trust. Teams often spend a significant portion of their time preparing datasets rather than analyzing them. The result is delayed decision-making, inflated costs, and reduced operational agility. The core complication lies in data quality, data governance, and data readiness. Duplicate records, null values, drift, and structural inconsistencies make it difficult to move quickly from raw data to actionable...

Stranded Gas Has A Job Now: Why Pad Electrification With Gas Wins

Digital Innovations in Oil and Gas with Geoffrey Cann

Diesel generators have long been the default answer for powering upstream and midstream oil and gas sites. They are familiar, mobile, and deeply embedded in operating practice. Even in regions with abundant natural gas, operators often rely on fleets of diesel gens to run pumps, wireline units, and auxiliary equipment, treating gas as either waste or something to move to market while importing fuel to keep operations running. That status quo is becoming harder to defend. Diesel is expensive, noisy, logistically complex, and increasingly misaligned with emissions rules, carbon pricing, and...

Why Data Centers Need One View Across Power, Facilities, and IT

Digital Innovations in Oil and Gas with Geoffrey Cann

Data centers have shifted from supporting enterprise IT to running large parts of the digital economy. They now host AI model training, AI inference, and many critical digital services. As this shift accelerates, data centers are placing greater demands on power systems and operations teams. Managing energy use, uptime, and physical infrastructure has become central to how these facilities operate. The challenge is that data center growth is moving faster than the tools used to manage it. Many operators still depend on legacy monitoring systems and spreadsheets to understand complex...

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...

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...

More Episodes

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, MSCP Heat Management Solutions, set out to build a completely paperless, digitally connected operation, starting at the job site. By linking trades, materials, safety workflows, and quality processes into a seamless digital flow, MSCP has achieved something few believe is possible: cutting required manpower by 40% to 45% on major jobs.

In this episode, I speak with Chris Maki, MSCP’s founder and CEO, on lessons he took from Fort McMurray’s distant job sites and turned them into a blueprint for frontline innovation, cross-trade productivity, and system-level change. We talk technology, training, and trust, and why it’s not about buying a platform, but building a mindset.

👤 About the Guest

Chris Maki is the President and CEO of MSCP Heat Management Solutions, based in Sherwood Park, Alberta. A former frontline tradesman with deep experience in Fort McMurray turnarounds and major projects, Chris launched MSCP in 2011 with a simple belief: there has to be a better way. Today, MSCP operates as a fully digital contractor, combining electrical, insulation, rope access, material handling, and fabrication into a unified and highly productive system of work. Chris is a vocal advocate for trades-focused innovation, continuous improvement, and the future of work in energy.

🔗 Website: http://www.mscpltd.ca/

🛠 Additional Tools & Resources

🎥 Go backstage and check out my studio:

https://geoffreycann.com/mystudio/

📚 Take my one-day digital strategy training course:

https://www.udemy.com/course/digital-oil-and-gas/?referralCode=0161D4D49AB75735A185

🌐 Connect with Me

📝 Blog series: Digital Oil and Gas

🎙 Podcast

🔗 LinkedIn

🐦 X (Twitter)

🎤 Contact for Lectures and Keynotes