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Can You Test A Plant Before It's Built?

Digital Innovations in Oil and Gas with Geoffrey Cann

Release Date: 12/03/2025

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

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 driven, which makes it hard for operators to trust new configurations without seeing them proven first.

This is where simulations shine.

In this episode, I speak with Anand Jha, Vice President of Global Sales for ABB System Drive – Process Industries, about simulation twins that let operators model the entire system before it’s built. These “virtual plants” replicate the grid, the drives, the motors, and the compressor.

With software-in-loop and hardware-in-loop tools, operators can validate performance, tune configurations, and eliminate expensive string tests. The result is faster execution, lower cost, deeper system insight, better training, and continuous improvement across the plant lifecycle.

👤 About the Guest

Anand Jha is the Vice President of Global Sales for ABB System Drive – Process Industries. With over 20 years of experience in the Oil & Gas and other Process industries, Anand has held various roles from commissioning engineer to sales leader. He is also an accomplished author, having written two books. Anand holds an MBA from the University of Alberta in Canada and a B.Tech in Electronics and Instrumentation.

🌐 ABB Drives | ABB

🔗 Anand Jha on LinkedIn

📧 anand.jha@us.abb.com