Digital Oil And Gas

Oil and gas managers often view every decision as high-stakes and irreversible, but in the digital world, not all choices carry that weight. Jeff Bezos’s concept of “Type One” (irreversible) and “Type Two” (reversible) decisions offers a powerful framework for rethinking decision-making in the energy sector. While some digital investments—like SCADA integrations or major cybersecurity upgrades—are genuine Type One decisions requiring caution, many can be structured to minimize risk. In this episode, I explore practical approaches like pilots, modular designs, and SaaS solutions that help reframe digital investments as low-risk, high-reward opportunities. By distinguishing between true Type One decisions and those that only seem that way, oil and gas companies can accelerate adoption cycles, manage risk effectively, and unlock value faster. Additional Tools & Resources:

With your company being acquired, what happens to the digital innovation you helped pioneer? Sadly, its days may be numbered. The unfortunate fate of digital innovations in the oil and gas industry following acquisitions is really depressing. Even groundbreaking technologies—despite their proven value—are often tossed to the curb by acquiring companies and their old-guard leaders. The structural and cultural barriers that stifle innovation in oil and gas can kill off winning ideas without remorse. That's the story in this episode--the rise and fall of a remarkable digital transformation program that unlocked huge value for a company on the brink, but was left behind after an acquisition by a more traditional player in the industry. Fortunately, I share the steps digital innovators must take to safeguard their work and survive in an acquisition. Sometimes the upside can be huge. Additional Tools & Resources:

Stitching a new energy trading and risk management (ETRM) system into a modern systems environment is a substantial and risky undertaking. ETRM as a business function is notably complicated and the challenges an integrator faces are legion. Energy trading is perhaps the most complicated of all of the various functional areas one encounters in the oil and gas industry. It is a high risk, high stakes, high cost, highly dynamic, complex function with strong ties into operations and finance, relatively few actual transactions, and carried out by a small number of people who have deep industrial insight. What could go wrong? The successful integrator will promote an open and collaborative environment for the multiple technology and business teams to address the many integration challenges. While the stakes are high, the benefits of a well-designed and executed integration are well worth the investment. Additional Tools & Resources:

Are you curious how the European Union’s Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) might impact the global oil and gas industry? It will indirectly, thankfully, but in a specific instance and for a specific fuel type, very directly.  The fuels industry is on a mad rush to decarbonize its fuel products, under pressure from regulators and customers both of whom are seeking fuels that produce far fewer damaging emissions. One way to decarbonize fuels is through the development and adoption of sustainable fuels that are produced by converting biomass (such as corn, sugar cane, soy, rapeseed, straw, wood chips) into ethanol, bio diesel, and sustainable aviation fuel. Bio fuels, the product of converting biomass to a fuel, is the fuels industry’s answer to the circular economy. Biomass is basically a vector to recycle atmospheric CO2, by first converting C02 into plants (Nature’s contribution), then turning the plants into bio fuel (a humankind speciality), and burning the biofuel as energy, releasing the CO2 back into the a

#private5G #smartfactory #energy #petrochemicals Market-leading companies with complex plant operations, such as oil refineries and petrochemical plants, are turning to private 5G network technology to gain an industrial edge. In the oil refining and petrochemical sectors, inadequate connectivity is a growing challenge that hampers further drives to improve operational efficiency, safety, and communication. Traditional solutions like Wi-Fi just won’t cut it in the uncarpeted world of industry, and wired networks can’t easily meet the needs of a dynamic, mobile workforce. The result is safety risks, frustrated workers, stranded data, and higher cost operations. In this podcast, Mehmet Yavuz, the founder and CTO of Celona discusses how Private 5G offers a powerful solution, providing robust, reliable wireless coverage tailored to the industrial enterprise, to support the unique demands of large-scale facilities, offering seamless connectivity across refinery and petrochemical plant sites. Referen

Suicide is a significant and overlooked issue in various industries. Among the sectors most affected are construction and trades, installation, maintenance and repairs, and agriculture, particularly for men. These fields face high stress, long hours, and job insecurity, which can contribute to mental health struggles. Within oil and gas, the reliance on construction and skilled trades to build infrastructure links this sector closely with some of the highest suicide rates. Many oil and gas workers hail from farming backgrounds.  In recent years, there has been a noticeable shift in workplace attitudes toward mental health, with younger leaders increasingly recognizing its connection to overall performance and safety. This change has led to a stronger demand for mental health initiatives, particularly in high-risk industries. By building basic suicide prevention skills across these sectors, workplaces can become more prepared and supportive. Offering employees and managers the tools to recognize warning signs

Successful change management in oil and gas is dependent on having the right mindset about the change. Many years ago, I was involved in implementing a new computer system for a remote field office. The managers assured us that all they needed to do to guarantee a successful implementation was to order the employees by memo to use the system. Change management? Tick. We dutifully couriered to the field office a laptop with the system installed, which was returned to us a couple of days later, crushed flat and with freshly laid-down tire marks visible on the cover. So much for management’s efforts to win over hearts and minds. Change management rarely considers the mindset of those driving change and those expected to embrace change, which inevitably brings conflict to the adoption process. How people show up matters. In this podcast I interview Jeff Perry, a leadership and career expert who helps individuals, teams, and organizations unlock their potential in all facets of life. Given his background in engine

It's never been easy for energy products to demonstrate they are sustainable because such products are not easily traceable through the supply chain. Commodity products such as energy, plastics, carbon, and fuels are fungible, voluminous, and blended with each other. The supply chains are not segregated, leading to possible cross contamination when a sustainable fuel passes through infrastructure that is shared with traditional fossil fuels. However, regulatory efforts are putting pressure on organizations to address this using new digital solutions, leveraging machine generated data, blockchain trusted ledgers, cloud computing, and analytics. Concepts like digital passports that accompany physical cargos allow supply chain participants to track the movements of cargos and trace their chain of custody from feedstock to the consumer, and back through the waste stream as they reenter the manufacturing loop. These ideas do not apply solely to fuels. Minerals such as lithium, which have very high value and are

    Managers in oil and gas rely on various rules of thumb to accelerate decision making, but at times these biases get in the way of making better decisions. Biases that were at one time helpful are now a kind of risk. Examples include the emphasis on production above all else, the preference for proven over novel solutions, and the preference for those innovations that originate in the industry. These lingering biases explain why the fortunes of oil and gas companies now dramatically lag the index leaders whose market values are now in the trillions.  Correcting for these biases is not hard, but it does take concerted effort, particularly using some change management tactics.   When times are stable, biases are perhaps a convenient way to facilitate decisions and gain unanimity at the management table. However, the industry is facing far greater complexity than in the past, and such biases are now a risk to be managed. Additional Tools & Resources:

Imagine that the year is 2034. How will the world of oil be digitally different from the way things are in 2024? Some things won't have changed much. Demand will still be strong. We will still be consuming a lot of oil. This is baked in. There is plenty of supply. Costs will have crept up but productivity will more than make up for that. Digital will have utterly transformed how we run the industry thanks to: the circular economy and full life cycle monitoring of our assets digital twin solutions for optimizing production and operations remote control, robots and automation that take out human workers cloud solutions that make everything online all the time mobile connectivity to all mobile people and gear voice interfaces whereever possible. The future is coming quicker than we think. Preparing for it costs no more than running a few trials of a small number of innovations. Additional Tools & Resources:

Digital entrepreneurs face many worrisome perils, and oil and gas poses its own unique set. In my view, the single greatest challenge facing technology companies when dealing with oil and gas is the lack of a clear pathway from the outset of the relationship to scaling up or gaining an enterprise commitment to adoption. The level of fragmentation of decision making inside oil and gas means that a lot of managers get to weigh in on technology that might impact their unit. But for the technology company, that fragmentation also translates into heroically long decision cycles, long waits between meetings, and time spent unproductively helping decision makers get to a decision. Slow cash payment cycles hurt the economics. Change management isn't seen as valuable. The industry shies away from any publicity, even the positive kind that helps digital innovators. It's all about the culture.  Additional Tools & Resources:

A brand new digital bludgeon whose nearly sole purpose is to beat up on the oil and gas industry, is about to be launched. As usual, this is both bad and good news. The global oil and gas industry is the single largest source of avoidable methane emissions, emitting 80 million tons per year through venting, flaring, and unintentional losses (fugitive emissions). These Scope 1 emissions represent the fastest pathway for the gas industry to meet pressing climate targets.  MethaneSat will be able to detect emissions at lower concentrations, from smaller sites, more frequently, and with greater accuracy than previous satellites. And here’s the kicker. The data collected by MethaneSAT will be made publicly available, unlike many other data from satellite sources. Companies have already developed the algorithms to sift through the petabytes of survey data that such satellites produce (and like many algorithms, some will be in the public domain), so that the analysis will be swiftly available. What could possibly g

The upcoming changes to mobility fuels are important enough that Boards should be paying close attention, and challenging management with keeping pace. For the first time in my life, there are now really big changes coming to the fuel industry. These changes will impact every single participant in the mobility fuel supply chain, from producers to consumers. The level of investment required in new mobility fuels to meet global demands are creating opportunities for wealth creation that have no parallel in history. Never before has mobility experienced such an upheaval. Fortunes will be made. Simplistic answers to the challenges of mobility fuel change are simply not good enough. This is a complex hard to solve problem in a huge, highly fragmented market with participants at dramatically different levels of readiness. If you’re serving on the Board of an energy company, your role is to see that management is taking the transition away from fossil fuels seriously. This podcast highlights the questions you might

Process industry professionals have long known about the risks of failure hidden in piping infrastructure, but robotic inspections are poised to solve this safety and risk problem. The pipes with the highest risk profile are undoubtably those used in the petroleum industry, and detecting and assessing their condition under layers of coatings and insulation is one of the most important challenges for the industry. Piping can fail for a variety of reasons, and inspections are expected to detect a broad range of conditions and potential failure points. Most of the more insidious piping weaknesses are not visible to the eye, which can mislead managers into thinking that pipe integrity is assured. Piping failure in a refinery context can be truly catastrophic. Hydrocarbons are toxic and explosive, carry enormous safety implications, and considerable financial risk. A failure of a non-redundant pipe can result in total plant collapse. Suffice to say, the scale of piping infrastructure, the complexity of the materia

There is a new career pathway now available, that of the digital engineer. This career pathway is open to any engineer who is curious how digital innovations intersect with the traditional engineer job, creating this new role of the digital engineer. Identifying and discovering these new roles is not hard, but for most engineers, it will take them out of their comfort zone to confront some uncertainty, some risk. In essence, it's about risk seeking rather than risk mitigation. In this podcast I interview Philip Black, a professional engineer, and oil and gas expert, because he has successfully transitioned his traditional chemical and processing background to become a digital expert. He pivoted his career without losing his momentum and crafted for himself a new career as a digital engineer. He was sought out by the most senior people in his company to learn more about digital innovations and how they impact the oil and gas industry. Phil has pivoted his career several times and has codified what he has learn

Upskilling of oil and gas professionals in the digital era is a topic everywhere, including the Caribbean island economies. Upskilling means the acquisition of new knowledge and skills, and in digital, this means topics such as cloud computing, artificial intelligence, app development, and sensor technology. It's tough enough to acquire new capabilities and stay current in big metropolitan centers. Imagine the challenges in smaller oil and gas producing economies, such as those found in the Caribbean. On-line and distance learning help, but that's not enough. The formal education sector has to play its role, as does industy. But how does this happen? In this podcast, I'm in conversation with Hamlyn Holder, a sessional lecturer with the University of the West Indies and an employee of the oil and gas industry, based in Trinidad and Tobago, one such oil production nation in the Caribbean. Hamlyn has over 20 years of both upstream and downstream engineering experience with nearly a decade of this time dedicated

It’s rare to hear directly from a business leader who has a broad range of oil and gas experience, coupled with a personal front-line role in leading digital adoption, but today’s podcast offers just that. Lewis Gillhespy is a former senior leader with Suncor, including roles as Global Chief Geologist, major asset developer, head of a major acquisition, R&D, and lastly, digital transformation leader for the subsurface areas. He describes how oil and gas companies are the children of the Industrial Age. They are reflective of the massive scale of operations that grew out of the enormous demands for energy. Their breadth and diversity of operations, international reach, technology diversity, and emphasis on innovation has created very complex organizations with customized ways of working that are in turn dependent on skilled managers with personal relationship skills to navigate. This business model has rendered them hugely profitable, but highly vulnerable to the digital revolution. Lewis highlights how th

Emissions management in energy is in drastic need of improvement. Carbon management is not carried out in an auditable and transparent way, is not standardized for the energy industry. As a result, carbon measures are subject to misinterpretation, claims reversal, misstatements, and greenwashing. Trust in the industry has eroded. A number of leading energy companies embarked on a journey to transform the practices of the industry by adopting new modern digital technologies. Forming a consortium called Blockchain for Energy, the companies set out to design and deploy common interoperable solutions that addressed the industry's more intractable problems. One of its first products is called B4E Carbon, and is a new cutting edge emissions management solution. The solution provides an end to end mechanism for measuring and reporting carbon emissions, for compliance, regulatory, and commercial needs. Data is captured at source, ingested, transformed and stored immutably in an accessible database. The leader of the

The world of consumer loyalty for fuel brands is undergoing tremendous change because of data. With the huge penetration rate of mobile phones, the rise of app stores, and always-on websites, fuel retailers have a new opportunity to create a tighter link to their customers for fuel and other services.  Even in the Middle East, where fuel prices are historically very low relative to other countries, consumers are becoming much more price sensitive. To attract them to a fuel pump means more than having the lowest price. It means crafting an ecosystem of in-demand services, and offering the consumer deals for those goods and services in exchange for loyalty points that can be redeemed for value.  Consumers are not just individuals but also fleet operators, such as Careem (an Uber-like service), taxis, and delivery services. Effective service programs for fleet operators drive a 90% penetration rate for loyalty programs. Better data allows for deeper segmentation of the consumer behaviour and drives more impactfu

Description Turnarounds, shutdowns and outages in heavy industry are key processes for keeping industrial infrastructure running at peak performance. Some plants, such as oil refineries, will plan and execute annual turnarounds, during which time accumulated work orders are tackled, substantial repairs or upgrades are executed, and regular maintenance activities are executed. LNG facilities, which are processing a much simpler and cleaner commodity (natural gas), might only experience a turnaround every few years.  Outages can be both planned and unplanned. A planned outage is carefully scheduled so that teams can carry out routine maintenance or equipment inspections. Unplanned outages, which can be caused by fires, equipment failure, or even intense storms, require a more urgent, unplanned and more costly response.  The execution of these key processes (shutdowns, turnarounds, and outages or STO) is very different from normal operations. The workforce for STO is often contingent. Work planning is more deman