Digital Innovations in Oil and Gas with Geoffrey Cann

"There has been no device historically that can detect cannabis impairment in real time. Cannabis works very differently in the body than does alcohol. So you can measure the amount of alcohol in the body and derive the experienced impairment from that number. The same is not true of cannabis."

In this episode, I’m in conversation with Ken Fichtler, the founder and CEO of Gaize. Cannabis is now legal in many places where oil and gas is produced, refined and distributed. Cannabis is increasing in potency, people consume it more, and it lasts longer in body than alcohol, but with different impairment impacts. Without a better way to detect impairment, companies may simply not bother with any testing. Ken set out to find a digital solution to this problem, which is way harder than it sounds, but Gaize is now ready for prime time.

"Is there a way we can currently detect cannabis impairment? And the only thing that I could find were these drug recognition, expert eye tests."

Ken Fichtler is the founder and CEO of Gaize, a first of its kind real-time impairment detection platform. Gaize uses analyzes eye movement changes using artificial intelligence to discover impairment from cannabis and other drugs. He’s a prior founder, proven operator, angel investor, and most recently served as Director of Economic Development for the State of Montana under Governor Steve Bullock. There he was responsible for adding thousands of jobs paying radically more than the state’s average wages, recruited leading technology companies to the state, and managed the economic response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Ken lives in Missoula, Montana with his family where he enjoys a broad variety of outdoor activities and serves on several boards.

"Each class of drug has a unique bio signature that manifests in the eyes. And that basically just translates to a unique way in which the eye movement changes in response to that drug or to the impairment from that drug."

• LinkedIn profiles (personal, business):
• Personal: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kenfichtler/
• Business: https://www.linkedin.com/company/gaizesafety
• Twitter handles:
• @GaizeSafety
• @kenfichtler
• Facebook pages:
• https://www.facebook.com/gaizesafety
• Website:
• https://www.gaize.ai

"It is very similar to what we've been doing an oil gas for many years, in an exploration sense. The mindset is there’s risk. At the beginning... you look at data."

In this episode, I’m in conversation with Patrick Ng, the CEO and Founder of ShaleForce, a geothermal company, on generative AI and how it has been used by ShaleForce. If we drill deep enough, we will find geothermal resources, but not all are suitable. One application idea is to aim for geothermal resources where there are existing coal power plants. These plants will eventually be retired, but with a different kind of boiler, the plants could find renewed life. Geothermal energy is also applicable to many industrial processes currently supplied by hydrocarbons, including steel making, cement, food processing, pulp and paper, and many others.

"Early in the shale revolution before 2010, people will say, hey, there’s shale everywhere. I look at it like factory drilling. I look at so many acres, and look at how many wells I can place and go with it. Very quickly, they find out if that's the way you go, you're gonna blow a lot of capital. The reason is geology is not uniform or costs, right? It has the variabilities."

Patrick Ng is the founder and CEO of ShaleForce, a data analytics and energy intelligence company. Patrick started his career in R&D, and eventually moved into analytics, primarily software development, geophysical imaging and inversion applications / services for the oil & gas sector. His passion is helping communities thrive during energy transition by leveraging his background in technology application and petroleum geology to expand the energy supply and radically lower emission for industry, such as geothermal.

"If our target, our goal is to radically reduce carbon emission for industry, let's say not just electrons, not just electricity, there are a lot of industries with heavy use of energy, that can benefit from direct heat, or superheated water."

• LinkedIn profiles (personal, business):
• Personal: https://www.linkedin.com/in/patrick-ng-6421b5
• Website:
• https://www.shaleforce.com
• Reference paper:
• https://energy.utexas.edu/research/geothermal-texas

"There's a move towards digital transformation. And there's two aspects of that. There's digitisation and there's digitalization."

"If it's digitized, you're simply taking, like a hardcopy, and you're scanning it near attaching it to a record of some sort."

"By digitalizing, it, I'm actually putting it in a format that the computer can process. It's much more efficient..."

In this episode, I’m in conversation with Tony Ciliberti, who is the founder of Reliability Dynamics. Tony is an authority on digitalization of equipment operating data, which is near and dear to my heart. Without good data, you can’t really get the full benefits of digitalization. Worse, poor quality reliability data costs money, and carbon, as engineers have to drive to visit facilities when they don’t need to. Better quality reliability data pays back very quickly.

"[Reliability] means is being able to make equipment perform better by having the information necessary to make better decisions for the equipment."

Tony Ciliberti is the Founder and Principal of Reliability Dynamics. He is a chemical engineer with 30 years of experience in equipment reliability and risk management in the petrochemical and oil and gas industries. He is an authority on data digitalization and the application of ISO 14224 methods. He developed and patented engineering methods that resolve pervasive equipment performance data quality issues in EAM solutions. He chairs the CCPS Process Equipment Reliability Database (PERD) Project. He participates actively in ISO technical standards development as the ANSI-appointed US Expert in ISO/TC67/WG4/PG1 and is a contributing author of the ISO 14224:2016 standard. He teaches the ISO course on how to apply ISO 14224 in enterprise software.

"If I'm thinking that I'm gonna get information from the field, and I want to be able to validate it with a system, which I do, right, I've got to make sure that the data requirements aligned with the type of work."

• LinkedIn profiles (personal, business):
• • Personal: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tciliberti
  • Business: https://www.linkedin.com/company/reliability-dynamics-llc/
• Websites:
• • https://reliabilitydynamics.com/
  • https://pf-prod-sapit-partner-prod.cfapps.eu10.hana.ondemand.com/profile/0001223132
  • https://store.sap.com/dcp/en/product/display-0000060110_live_v1/industry-standard-solution-for-plant-maintenance
  • https://www.sap.com/dmc/exp/2013_09_adpd/enEN/#/partners?search=ispm&id=p:p10016
• Patent
• • System and Method for Enterprise Asset Management and Failure Reporting System and Method for Enterprise Asset Management and Failure Reporting, US 11,157,519 B2 · Issued Oct 26, 2021

"The kind of customer centric focus, despite the industries being so different, [means] that the customer has a need for an easy to use interface and fully supported software as a service that has no downtime, because the people have no downtime either."

In this episode, I’m in conversation with Kate Allen, who is the Product Manager, PetroChemical Division for TruSolutions. Kate’s team focuses on supporting both third party and owner/operator inspections of industrial equipment, which historically has been a pen and paper process, with lots of manual reports. But in the face of staffing shortages, new tech savvy employees, and the pending retirement of aging experts, companies are transforming their inspections practices and technologies, and gaining important strategic benefits alongside proven ROI.

"Third parties are being asked to provide the same number of inspections with a significant shortage in staffing who are qualified to do so. Both industries are facing this great changeover with all of their subject matter experts heading towards retirement age."

Kate Allen is the Product Manager, PetroChemical Division for Tru Solutions, a company that provides quality assurance software for industrial companies. Kate describes herself as ‘a wife, mother, and Petrochemical Product Manager from St. Louis, MO.’

"If you're not capturing your data digitally now, how do you think you're gonna throw it into this awesome 3d modeling of your entire refinery?"

Kate began her career in software over 20 years ago with a small, local start-up serving the third party recruiting market. Since then, she has worked in a variety of industries across various platforms helping clients standardize processes, improve efficiency, and leverage data for decision making. When she's not visiting the nation's finest refineries, you can find her screaming from the sidelines at a youth sports match, or perfecting her sourdough recipe.

"Compliance and safety are a byproduct of conducting your inspections correctly."

• LinkedIn profiles (personal, business):
• Personal: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kate-allen-57601061/
• Business: https://www.linkedin.com/company/tru-solutions-digital/mycompany/
• Website:
• https://trusolutions.com/solutions/api/

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:

🎬 Go backstage and check out my studio: 👉 https://geoffreycann.com/resources/ 🎓 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/training-digital-oil-gas/ 🤬 X: https://twitter.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.

Download the Transcript!

Want the actual script that this podcast is based on? You can download the transcript for this podcast here: 👉 https://digitaloilgas.substack.com/p/from-crude-to-computation