The oil and gas industry is sitting on a ticking environmental and financial liability. Around the world, millions of wells have been drilled to date, many more will be drilled, and all will eventually need to be plugged and abandoned. Today, the US alone has thousands of orphaned and marginal wells, many leaking methane, a greenhouse gas many times more potent than carbon dioxide. With underfunded asset retirement obligations and inconsistent plugging practices of the past, the sector faces mounting pressure to act—but struggles to finance solutions at scale.

There is a potential solution: the voluntary carbon credit market. In this episode, I interview David Stewart, President of Engineering and Environment at Sendero Services, who explains how new carbon methodologies are turning methane leaks into monetizable credits.

By quantifying emissions avoided through proper plugging, validating permanence with reserves analysis, and using blockchain for traceability, these credits offer a science-based, verifiable way to fund environmental remediation.

Methane credits tied to oil and gas wells are not only more reliable than many nature-based offsets, but also ripe for scale. Dave and I discuss the economics, digital technologies, and policy barriers shaping a new frontier in decarbonization finance.

David Stewart is President of Engineering and Environment at Sendero Services. He holds a Master’s degree in Environmental Policy and Management and brings over 30 years of experience in the oil and gas industry. His career spans emissions measurement in California to executive roles at Encana, Bonanza Creek, and Crestone, where he led environmental compliance, strategic partnerships, and M&A. At Sendero, David leads efforts to transform the challenge of orphaned wells into an opportunity through the application of voluntary carbon credits.

Connect with Dave Stewart:

🔗 Sendero Services Website

🔗 LinkedIn - Dave Stewart

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I speak regularly on these and related topics. Contact me here to book a discovery call for your next event.

The views expressed in this podcast are my own and do not constitute professional advice.

Despite covering over 70% of our planet, the oceans and seas remain largely unmapped and poorly understood. Collecting useable data about the oceans is hard and expensive--reliant on specialized costly vessels, old-school technologies, and plenty of labour.

The comparison to land mapping technologies (like Google Earth) is stark--we have near-total visibility of land-based infrastructure, continuously updated, and collected by satellite. Subsea infrastructure, like pipelines and cables, are managed with minimal, outdated, and isolated datasets.

This gap in oceanic intelligence is an increasing problem. We're constantly adding new subsea infrastructure—cables, pipelines, risers, platforms—to support oil and gas, power, telecoms, mining, and military operations. At the same time, owners and operators are sailing blind, relying on static years-old surveys.

And sea floors are pretty dynamic, subject to tides, currents, and human activity. You can really appreciate the mounting financial and operational risks—from infrastructure damage to safety concerns to project delays.

Enter Terradepth, a data-as-a-service company that is bringing Silicon Valley smarts to subsea intelligence. In this episode, I speak with COO Kris Rydberg on how they’re using autonomous vehicles and cloud infrastructure to drastically cut the cost of ocean data acquisition. The best part is how ocean data is now subscription-based, with high reusability across industries. This model reduces capital risk, improves predictive decision-making, and promotes multi-sector collaboration.

Kris Rydberg -- Chief Operating Officer, Terradepth

Kris Rydberg is a seasoned executive with three decades of leadership in tech-driven operational strategy. He’s helped scale startups, transform Fortune 500 divisions, and consult on industrial IoT, edge computing, and platform technologies. Kris brings a rare blend of deep tech fluency and cross-sector business acumen. He holds two U.S. patents and an MBA from Syracuse University.

🔗 Connect with Kris on LinkedIn

🔗 Connect with Terradepth on LinkedIn
📸 Instagram
🐦 X
▶️ YouTube

• 🎙️ Go backstage and check out my studio

• 🎓 Take my digital strategy training course for oil and gas

• 📚 Blog series

• 🔗 LinkedIn

• 📣 X (formerly Twitter)

I speak regularly on these and other topics. Click here to book a brief call about your upcoming event needs.

The views expressed in this podcast are my own and do not constitute professional advice.

Natural gas producers have long struggled to differentiate their product in a market that treats gas as a commodity. When it comes to carbon intensity (CI), the industry is reliant on emission factors and self-reported data, and lacks a credible, data-driven approach to proving their gas carries a lower CI.

With new regulations like the Inflation Reduction Act’s Waste Emission Charge and Europe’s carbon border tax, the opportunity to produce verifiable low-emission gas has grown dramatically. Enter “empirical gas”—natural gas measured in real time with actual data instead of estimates.

In this episode, I catch up with my buddy Mark Smith, CEO of Clean Connect, about how his company integrates AI, camera-based monitoring, and process simulation software to create real-time, third-party verifiable emissions data. This transformation not only reduces tax burdens but unlocks access to premium markets willing to pay for low-carbon gas. The implications are massive for producers, traders, and tech firms alike.

Mark Smith is the CEO of Clean Connect, a technology company based in Colorado. Clean Connect offers AI-powered camera systems, control room software, and blockchain-based trading platforms that enable real-time emissions monitoring, measurement, reporting, and verification. Their technology underpins the emerging market of empirical gas, empowering producers to offer provably low-emission natural gas certified by international standards like ISO 14067 and ISCC+.

Connect with Mark Smith:

🔗 Clean Connect Website

🔗 LinkedIn - Mark Smith

🎙 Go backstage: My Podcast Studio

🎓 Take the course: Digital Strategy for Oil and Gas

🌐 Resources

📝 Substack

🔗 LinkedIn

✖️ X (Twitter)

I speak regularly on these and other topics. Book a brief call about your event.

The views expressed in this podcast are my own and do not constitute professional advice.

The oil and gas industry has traditionally relied on financial instruments like futures and private equity—frameworks that have largely benefitted institutional investors while leaving little room for broader participation.

But as digital assets continue to reshape capital markets, tokenization presents a new way forward. With blockchain technology and regulatory frameworks maturing, real-world asset-backed tokens are gaining traction - even in sectors once considered too complex for digital finance.

In this episode, I speak with Dave Rademacher, Co-Founder of OilXCoin a security token backed by oil and gas reserves which also provides investors exposure to their “upstream” value chains. Dave explains how OilXCoin is bridging traditional oil and gas with digital asset markets by creating a compliant, growth-focused investment vehicle that opens the sector to new types of investors.

We discuss what sets OilXCoin apart from pure commodity-backed tokens, how it integrates production-based revenues, and why upstream oil and gas is ripe for tokenization.

👤 About the Guest

Dave Rademacher is the Co-Founder of OilXCoin, where he leads strategic growth and market expansion efforts. With a global leadership background at BMW Group across EMEA and APAC, Dave brings a strong track record in scaling businesses and navigating complex markets. At OilXCoin, he’s focused on bridging the gap between traditional oil and gas and digital finance by offering compliant, asset-backed investment opportunities through tokenization. His aim is to make the oil and gas industry accessible to both seasoned crypto investors and traditional market participants.

🔗 Connect with Dave

🌐 Website: OilXCoin

🔗 LinkedIn: Dave Rademacher

🛠️ Additional Tools & Resources

📄 Explore Geoffrey’s Substack articles

🎧 Listen to more episodes of Digital Innovations in Oil and Gas

📢 Visit GeoffreyCann.com for insights on digital transformation in oil and gas

🤝 Connect with Me

🔗 LinkedIn: Geoffrey Cann

🐦 X (Twitter): @geoffreycann

📩 Contact me for keynotes and lectures: GeoffreyCann.com/contact

⚠️ Disclaimer

The views expressed in this podcast are those of the guest and host and do not constitute financial or professional advice.

Twenty years ago, Big Oil companies like Shell and Exxon were the stars of the capital markets. Huge revenues, stellar profits, high share prices, robust price/earning ratios and reliable dividends placed these companies among the world’s best, magnets for top engineering talent and voices of influence in the halls of governments globally.

But no more. They lost the market leadership crown to the digital giants, including Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and Google. Oil and gas concerns are still market leaders as measured by revenue, but not by other measures of value. The gap now is so vast it’s hard to imagine how they might ever regain their market positioning.

And now the digital companies are stretching into energy for their data centers, but not yet clean liquid energy, which creates the opportunity.

In this podcast I set out several steps the industry can take to recapture its former glory.

⚒️ 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: https://digitaloilgas.substack.com/

💼 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. Book a brief call to discuss your upcoming event needs.

⚠️ Disclaimer

The views expressed in this podcast are my own and do not constitute professional advice.

Industrial operations have long depended on the OODA loop—Observe, Orient, Decide, Act—a military-inspired decision framework that works, but at great cost. It requires physical presence, human expertise, and often misses key variables hidden from view. This age-old method is embedded across energy infrastructure—from wells to refineries.

The digital age, however, is transforming our ability to observe. With billions of video-capable devices generating colossal amounts of data, and artificial intelligence now capable of interpreting this data in real time, there’s a game-changing opportunity at hand.

This episode explores the staggering scale and value of video data, and how AI’s emerging ability to interpret video feeds on the fly can augment, and in some cases replace, the human eye in the OODA loop. I outline some of the implications for quality inspections, site assembly checks, and future-proofing industrial operations.

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: 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. Book a brief call to discuss your upcoming event needs.

Disclaimer

The views expressed in this podcast are my own and do not constitute professional advice.

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