From Brownfield to Greenfield to Bluefield
Digital Innovations in Oil and Gas with Geoffrey Cann
Release Date: 12/10/2025
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...
info_outline
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,...
info_outline
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...
info_outline
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...
info_outline
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...
info_outline
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...
info_outline
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...
info_outline
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...
info_outline
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...
info_outline
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...
info_outlineMost 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 that brownfield upgrades rarely deliver any ROI while greenfield is seen as too risky, costly, or complex to execut, especially at the global scale one encounters among the oil and gas majors.
Is there a third path, where organizations can preserve their historical data, stay compliant, and still deliver tangible business outcomes?
In this episode I speak with Don Mahoney, Global Head of Products and Innovation at SNP Group about a new approach, coined ‘bluefield’. Bluefield lets companies dial in just the right amount of transformation, one that preserves key data, avoids excessive risk, and achieves a positive ROI. I’m very interested in how Bluefield works, how it supports AI training strategies, when to use it, and why it’s becoming an attractive model for SAP S/4HANA transitions, and indeed all major platform solution transformations.
👤 About the Guest
Don Mahoney is the Global Head of Products and Innovation at SNP Group, where he leads strategy for the company’s transformative deployment technologies, including its flagship Bluefield methodology. Don brings over 30 years of experience across process industries, enterprise software, and solution management. He previously held senior roles at SAP, overseeing strategic accounts like ExxonMobil and leading SAP’s global chemical industry business unit.
⚒️ Additional Tools & Resources:
🎬 Go backstage and check out my studio:
👉 https://geoffreycann.com/mystudio/
🎓 Take my one day digital strategy training course for oil and gas:
👉 https://www.udemy.com/course/digital-oil-and-gas/?referralCode=0161D4D49AB75735A185
🔗 Connect with Me:
🖥️ Blog series: https://digitaloilgas.substack.com/
🎧 Podcast: https://geoffreycann.com/broadcast/
📇 Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/advocate-digital-innovation-for-energy/
🤬 X: https://x.com/geoffreycann
🎤 Contact for Lectures and Keynotes:
I speak regularly on these and other topics. Contact me to book a brief call about your upcoming event needs. Click here 👉 https://geoffreycann.com/contact/
⚠️ Disclaimer:
The views expressed in this podcast are my own and do not constitute professional advice.