Digital Innovations in Oil and Gas with Geoffrey Cann

AI can help us quickly when we need to make decisions. But when executives are making high-stakes decisions about pipelines, energy infrastructure, capital investments or geopolitical risk, a quick answer isn't necessarily a good answer. Insight into the decision is fragmented across organizations, external information is difficult to assess, and misinformation, competing interests and human bias all compl...

Digital innovations are creating huge value for oil and gas, but digital landscape is setting the industry up for problems down the track. 

Think of them as digital time bombs. Quantum computing will expose encrypted data that companies believe is safely protected. Legacy on-premise software is fast becoming difficult and costy to support as investment capita...

 Energy superpower is a fine marketing slogan. In fact, lots of countries have stated their ambition to become the next energy superpower, but oddly, no one spells out what that actually means.

Fortunately, there is a rigorous academic definition for energy superpowerhood, which ranks the EU, the U.S., and China as the world's true energy superpowers. All others are pretenders, Canada included, despite its obvious oil and gas resou...

Industrial AI is into a new phase. Agentic AI is software that can plan, reason, learn, and act with far greater independence than traditional automation. While the technology is advancing quickly, the oil and gas industry faces unique technical, regulatory, and operational challenges that make full autonomy far less straightforward. 

In this episode, I share what a...

It's sad to say but wars create opportunities to apply new technologies in novel ways as the combatants seek to gain advantage over each other. The US-Israeli War on Iran is a case in point. If you've been monitoring the public airwaves about the war, you'll have picked up hints about the role that digital innovations are playing in the crisis. These signals in and of themselves are almost always overshadowed by the big kinetic act...

Oil and gas companies are sitting on vast amounts of surplus inventory, often without realizing its true scale or value. Equipment purchased for major projects frequently ends up idle, and stored across warehouses and laydown yards, while tying up capital and incurring ongoing costs. While some of this surplus results from project changes or cancellations, much of it reflects a deeper systemic ...

EHS and AI are starting to transform safety and reliability in oil and gas. But most organizations are still managing safety as a compliance exercise, not an operational advantage.

That approach is under pressure. Operations are more complex, regulations keep shifting, and critical EHS data is scattered across systems, spreadsheets, and sites. When somethin...

Digital twin technology is evolving rapidly, and when combined with artificial intelligence, it is starting to reshape how oil and gas operations are run in real time.

For years, companies have relied on simulation tools to design and test assets, but these tools are slow and limited to planning use. In this episode, we explore how new approaches are closin...

Global energy markets are under acute pressure as geopolitical disruption tightens supply and drives volatility. Events like the conflict in the Middle East are no longer regional—they ripple through fuel supply chains everywhere. Companies are not short of data. They are overwhelmed by it. Yet despite this abundance, assembling a clear operational picture still ta...

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, ...

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 ...

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 plannin...

One thing I've learned from producing lots of videos 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' chicke...

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 tec...

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.

Read more