In this episode of the Pipeline Technology Podcast, sponsored by Pipeline & Gas Journal, host Russel Treat interviews Andy McDowell, President of Gulf Energy Information, about the 2023 Gulf Energy Excellence Awards. The awards celebrate excellence in the oil, gas, and energy industry, and they recently combined their midstream, upstream, and downstream events into one. Andy explains the reasons for this change and how it created a more enjoyable event for attendees.

Andy discusses various award categories and some of the notable winners, and the episode highlights the significance of technology and innovation in the energy industry as well as the importance of storytelling in award nominations. They also touch on the plans for the 2024 Gulf Energy Excellence Awards event.

2023 Gulf Energy Excellence Awards Show Notes, Links, and Insider Terms:

• Andy McDowell is the President at Gulf Energy Information and publisher of Pipeline & Gas Journal. Connect with Andy on LinkedIn.
• Pipeline & Gas Journal is the essential resource for technology, industry information, and analytical trends in the midstream oil and gas industry. For more information on how to become a subscriber, visit pgjonline.com/subscribe.
  • Gulf Energy Excellence Awards: An event recognizing excellence in technology and individuals in the oil, gas, and energy industry.
• Midstream: The segment of the energy industry that involves the transportation, storage, and wholesale marketing of petroleum products and natural gas.
• Upstream: The segment of the energy industry that involves exploration, drilling, and production of oil and natural gas.
• Downstream: The process involved in converting oil and gas into the finished product, including refining crude oil into gasoline, natural gas liquids, diesel, and a variety of other energy sources. The closer an oil and gas company is to the process of providing consumers with petroleum products, the further downstream the company is said to be.
• Pipeline Integrity: Ensuring the safe and reliable operation of pipelines through inspections, maintenance, and monitoring.
• Leak Detection: The process of identifying and locating leaks in pipelines to prevent environmental and safety hazards.
• Emissions Recovery System: A system designed to capture and recover emissions, such as methane, to reduce environmental impact.
• Carbon Capture and Sequestration: Technologies and methods for capturing carbon dioxide emissions and storing them underground to mitigate climate change.
• Artificial Intelligence (AI): The use of computer algorithms to perform tasks that typically require human intelligence, such as pattern recognition and decision-making.
• ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) refers to the sustainability movement in oil and gas to continue operating safely, in compliance, and in a responsible manner to do no harm while achieving business objectives.

2023 Energy Excellence Awards Full Episode Transcript:

[music]

Announcer: The “Pipeline Technology Podcast,” brought to you by “Pipeline & Gas Journal,” the decision-making resource for pipeline and midstream professionals. And now, your host, Russel Treat.

Russel Treat: Welcome to the Pipeline Technology Podcast, Episode 39. On this episode, our guest is Andy McDowell, President of Gulf Energy Information. We’re going to talk to Andy about the recent Gulf Energy Excellence Awards and the midstream winners. Andy, welcome back to the Pipeline Technology Podcast.

Andy McDowell: Awesome, Russel. Thanks for having me. Appreciate being here today. Looking forward to the conversation.

Russel:

We just finished up a really cool event. You guys knocked it out of the park once more with your energy awards. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about the energy awards?

Last year, you had three events, midstream, upstream, and downstream. This year, you put them together. Maybe talk to us about the event and then what drove you to the decision to put all that together as one event.

Andy:

As you mentioned, we had, actually, four awards ceremonies in the past years, upstream, midstream, downstream. Then our business intelligence group, Petroleum Economist, had their own awards. When we looked at it all in 2022, we were going through very similar processes. It was very demanding on the staff and team.

We always referred to these as the individual Oscars of the oil, gas, and energy industry. We just said, “How can we elevate it?” We were sold out in some capacity. We’re looking to have to change venues 20-plus years on the upstream side.

We just said, “We’re going to roll the dice, bring them all together, and rebrand this thing as the Gulf Energy Information Excellence Awards,” focusing in on the excellence in technology and the excellence on individuals, and just making it a fun evening for everybody that attended. I think we accomplished that, especially in a year-one event.

Russel:

It was definitely a good time. I certainly enjoyed myself. The last two years, I was privileged to be able to MC the pipeline awards. This year, I just got to attend and sit at a table…

[crosstalk]

Andy: Get to have a little more fun, huh? [laughs]

Russel: Yeah, it was good. I had more time to relax, and network, and talk to people. It was good. I really did enjoy myself. It was awesome.

Andy: That was another thing too. When we looked at bringing all these together, we had so many different categories and stuff. How are we going to work with our MCs and structures in the past? We ended up having to change that approach a little bit. All in all, working through the different categories, I think it ended up playing out very well.

Russel: Definitely. I was just sitting here, looking at the website that lists all the winners. It’s a long list.

Andy: It is.

Russel: I was going to try and count it, but I can’t count that quick.

Andy: It is. It’s 43 categories. Plus we had multiple winners in several categories across upstream, midstream, or downstream just because the technologies can differ, of course, when they’re being nominated for that. I think it was 49 or 50 maybe, all together, trophies being handed out.

Russel: That sounds about right. You guys did a great job of getting through all that quickly.

Andy: Hour and [inaudible 03:23] minutes, I think?

Russel:

The logistics of all that were…Yeah, it was impressive. I spoke to the MC afterwards and shook his hand and said, “How did you like all that hour and a half of word soup you got to say?”

[laughter]

Andy: Lee Nichols is our VP of Content. He stepped up big in that role, was able to keep it going. Minimal, if any, errors the whole time. Kept his voice strong. Kept the crowd entertained. I was sitting with his wife at dinner while he was going on and laughing that he was probably going to be a little bit quieter the next day just because voice might be a little bit tired that evening.

Russel: He was quiet that night. I managed to talk to him afterwards. He was already quiet.

Andy: He was typing all of his responses the next day, for sure.

Russel: As this is the Pipeline Technology Podcast, we’ll only visit a little bit about the midstream winners of the Energy Excellence Awards. Was there anything that, in your perspective, you thought was particularly interesting or noteworthy?

Andy:

Yeah, sure. Like we talked about earlier, we brought together all the different categories. I think there were 43 categories in all, over 400 nominations. We wanted to make sure that we felt upstream, midstream, and downstream were equally represented in that.

With these being, historically, technology-focused awards, we wanted to make sure to bring in some very technically specific awards, Best Controls, Instrumentation, Automation in the midstream sector. We had Best Digital Transformation. We had Best Pipeline Integrity award. We recognized individuals in that category.

It was a holistic approach to that. I was very pleasantly surprised with the number of midstream attendees, midstream companies that showed up and participated in the event, and the eventual winners that were recognized as well. I think it came together very smoothly.

Russel: I did as well. It’s interesting. I will share with you — I said it at the table — one of the folks at our table won the Best Energy Law Firm award, which I thought was interesting. You’ll get a kick out of this. I took a picture of myself with their award. Then I put a post out, basically saying, “We got nominated. We didn’t win, but we did take a picture with our tablemate’s award.”

Andy: [laughs] That’s good.

Russel:

That thing blew up. It absolutely blew up.

[crosstalk]

Andy: Oh, really?

Russel: Yeah, like 10, 15 times what I normally get in a post.

Andy: Wow.

Russel:

That was pretty cool.

[crosstalk]

Russel: It’s probably the cowboy hat.

Andy: There you go. The cowboy hat was definitely a standout in the crowd, for sure. You’ve always got to represent the black felt when you can. What do you think of the new award? It was a new design this year. You got to hold one?

Russel: It was classy. It would have been better if I got to take one home.

Andy: Fair enough. We’ll work on it, hopefully, next year.

Russel: I keep trying. I’m going to keep trying.

Andy: Continue to nominate, is all I can say.

Russel:

Exactly. I thought the award was very nice. It was interesting. We had an interesting group of people at our table. Had a lot of very interesting conversation. The lady sitting next to me was a geophysicist. They had some technology related to carbon capture and sequestration. Had a couple of different nominations.

There was a couple of other companies. They were all very, very hyper, very geeky, very technical, very focused. It’s interesting when you get technical people, engineers and technologists, with cocktails and tuxedos. It’s interesting. [laughs] I’ll just say that.

Andy:

That example right there, Russel, is exactly what we were trying to achieve with this. The biggest risk with bringing all of these together was, is the upstream sector going to be bored with the downstream awards, or the midstream with the upstream? We felt that, as a whole, yes, it’s oil and gas and energy-focused, but it’s majority about the technology.

When we bring together technical folks, whether it’s your bailiwick or not, at the end of the day, you can find good conversations to have. You find interest in the technology that’s being presented, even though it may not be 100 percent applicable to your day-to-day company or responsibilities.

That was definitely a risk. When we stepped back and looked at our roots of being technical in nature, having a technically focused audience, we wanted to make sure that we were bringing like minds together that would enjoy an evening, like you said, of drinks, festivities, get to dust off the old tux every now and then.

Russel: And bring out your inner geek.

Andy: There we go.

Russel: That’s another part of it too.

Andy:

We also noticed too we’re 21-plus, 22 years actually, from the start of the World Oil Awards, and then 2 years, I guess this was the 3rd year, of what would have been the Pipeline & Gas Journal Awards.

Those companies on the upstream side that have been with us a while whooped and hollered a little bit more when their nominees were read. I think we’ll start to continue to elevate the excitement in the room, from, call it, maybe our midstream newbies working their selves into the overall program a little bit more. Everybody seemed to have a good time. It was a good group of people.

Russel:

Absolutely. I did want to talk about some of the winners. Just in full disclosure for Andy and myself, we’re not experts in any of these technologies we’re getting ready to talk about. I know enough to pronounce some of the words.

I do think it’s interesting because it does illustrate just how much is going on and how diverse what is going on around technology and midstream. There’s a lot happening.

Andy: There really is.

Russel:

There was a lot of focus on emissions capture, methane tracking, carbon capture, carbon sequestration, so all those topics that are getting a lot of play. There was a lot of people that had really interesting technologies.

One of them was a company called WeldFit. They won for their ReCAP emissions recovery system. Really interesting, what they’re doing. I’ve had some people come on and talk about this on the podcast.

It’s interesting, with the focus on capturing emissions, particularly methane emissions, that people are capturing and reutilizing natural gas where before they were not. They’re talking about recovery rates up to 99.99 percent…

Andy: I saw that. It’s unreal.

Russel: …when they’re using this kind of stuff. It’s fascinating. When you’re depressurizing a pipe — it’s counterintuitive — but you can, to some degree, get that done quicker if you recapture that gas than if you just vent it because you’re actually pumping the gas out. You can get to atmosphere quicker.

Andy:

It was a fascinating technology. I know that the editors and the additional advisory board members that looked over that particular award category, it was heavily saturated with some really, really good tech. At the end of the day, the ReCAP Emissions Recovery System ended up taking home the award.

Ironically, that was our very first Gulf Energy Information Excellence Award given. I believe it was topic number one. Kudos to that team for taking home the first and hopefully not the last one.

Russel: If you go to their website and look for the ReCAP stuff, you can see some pretty cool photographs of that being done in practice in the field. It’s interesting.

Andy: Their website’s really, really good. Definitely would love to read up a little bit more about it and fully understand the tech, honestly. I can see why they were winners in that particular category.

Russel: That raises an interesting question. I’ve often wondered how the committees go about doing their analysis about the technology. What do they use for resources? I know there’s the package that people submit, but how much of their decision-making is based on what’s available off of company websites and that sort of thing?

Andy:

At the end of the day, it’s up to their determination how far they want to reach if they have certain questions on things. I would say the extreme majority of the decision is driven by the nomination and that overall process itself.

Companies are allowed to submit not only abstracts, but if there are some backup details, case histories and studies they’d like to try and explain a little bit more. Every year — it’s already happening in this year as well — I get some emails and messages from people asking, “Hey, my tech didn’t win. What can I do better next time, in your opinion?”

I tell everybody the same thing. Think of it as you’re positioning an article, a technical case history or something like that, to the editorial team for consideration for publishing. You want to make sure that you’re explaining the tech in a non-commercial way.

You want to make sure that you’re showing its purpose in the marketplace. If you can quote operator or end user information or details about how it’s helping them, real-time or onsite, whatever that particular project may be, that’s always going to help back that up.

Finally, most important, especially with this category from WeldFit too, what is it doing for the overall situation that it’s in? Is it helping out on the ESG side? Is it increasing flow rates? Is it increasing capacity?

Whatever that may be, but it has to have some sort of purpose out there in the marketplace. The better those companies and our nominees can tell that story, that’s ultimately what helps elevate them to eventual winner status.

Russel: That’s interesting. What you’re pointing out is it’s not just about the technology. It’s not just about the impact the technology’s having. It’s about how well you can tell your story. It’s that package that you submit that is used by the judges to make their determination as to who’s going to be the winner.

Andy:

Of course, we have a on-staff team of technical experts and our editorial and content teams that are only involved in that initial process and helping, not exclusively, but helping narrow down to our finalists. Then the eventual winners selected from the finalist pool, all done by a third-party team of operators, end users, technical consultants, things like that.

I think we may have even touched on it last year or the year before when we started up this podcast, was, “How do y’all pick them? What do they do?” We’ve had so many people try to approach us in the past and try and take these guys or gals out for lunch or dinner and try and pitch the tech to them in person.

It’s anonymous. [laughs] I can tell you that it’s a trusted source and pool of individuals, more than qualified to be able to answer these types of decisions and make these ultimate calls. We do keep them anonymous because we do have — earlier, we were talking about the World Oil Awards — a 20-year-plus experience of lessons learned, let’s say, throughout the process.

[laughter]

Russel: You know a lot about how not to do an awards program.

Andy: I know a lot about how not to do them, yes. With this new nominations process that we launched, I think it was two or three years ago, probably, where it’s all done digitally. Everything is organized much cleaner on the back end, it gets passed over digitally to the team. 10 years ago, we used to have companies showing up with bankers boxes full of briefs, and demos…

Russel: Oh, my gosh.

Andy:

…and all this kind of stuff. This past year, they closed on a Saturday. Typically, they close on Friday at midnight. Everybody knows, especially the folks on our events team, that that Friday afternoon, somebody’s going to be there late because somewhere in our waiting room is going to be boxes of stuff, usually.

It doesn’t happen as much anymore. It’s all done digitally. We definitely try and respect that the best that we can. Used to be quite an entertaining event, that last few days leading up to the final nominations deadline.

Russel: [laughs] That’s funny actually. It’s funny. One of the other things that I thought was interesting was IntelliView. What did they win for? I need to go back and look at the page here again.

Andy: I think it was the Best Digitization Award for midstream, if I remember correctly.

Russel: Yes, they’re the ones that beat out our Muddy Boots product. Congratulations to them.

Andy: There you go. Close to the heart there. [laughs]

Russel:

Exactly. I thought it was interesting. There is a leak detection camera that applies some artificial intelligence to make that leak detection more effective and more valuable. Again, it’s interesting what people are doing with tech.

A lot of times, the innovation is not necessarily creating a new instrument so much as it’s taking different technologies that have not been used together and pushing them together to create a new solution.

Andy:

AI, artificial intelligence, however you want to refer to it, is one of the hottest buzzword, buzzphrases, out there in the marketplace right now. It’s affecting everybody’s business in one way or the other. It’s going to continue to do that for a long time.

Any ways you can find to apply your tech and utilize that source of additional outside technology through AI is going to only help you. It’s funny, I pulled up IntelliView’s website as well just to look. Right there at the top of the page, “IntelliView wins Best Health, Safety, and Environmental Contribution — Midstream award at the Gulf Energy Information Excellence Awards.”

People take these things seriously. Like we said earlier, Oscars of oil, gas, and energy. We make sure all the winners have the opportunity to do a little bit of bragging out there in the marketplace as well.

Russel: I also want to point out a couple of the other awards. One of the awards is Most Promising Young Engineer. Kshama Roy, who I believe is with DNV, won that award.

Andy: Yes. That’s correct.

Russel: That is an excellent program because it acknowledges the younger engineers for the work they’re doing.

Andy: That’s absolutely right.

Russel: It’s so easy sometimes for the work we do to become a grind, but there are people that value that work in particular. It’s great to see that kind of thing recognized.

Andy:

Any time we can highlight a individual’s career, whether it be young engineer or a lifetime achievement, it’s a huge opportunity to be able just to talk about how impactful that person has been in the marketplace. In our space, not only is it all about technology and engineering, but it’s that next generation of engineers that’s going to continue to keep this going along.

I’d also point out too, Kshama Roy was our midstream winner, but our upstream and downstream winners were both female this year, which is fantastic as well. I don’t believe they nominated themselves, although you can do that, but it was cool to see some of these folks stand up, get their awards.

They had no idea. Their teams are just super-excited. They’ve got the phones and cameras ready when they had no idea about it at all. They’re there, of course, because they’re a finalist. There’s a chance they could win, but they also know that they’re up against a whole lot of very qualified individuals. It’s not always an easy process.

Kshama does a phenomenal job at DNV. Was obviously well-represented through the nominations process. He definitely will be a very promising engineer moving forward in his career…

[crosstalk]

Russel: You expect to see contributions from somebody like that in the future, right?

Andy: Yes, absolutely so.

Russel:

Then there was the Lifetime Achievement award. You did that in upstream, midstream, and downstream. The midstream winner was Thomas — I’m going to say the name — Bubenik? Am I saying that correct?

[crosstalk]

Russel: Also with DNV?

Andy:

Yeah, DNV also had a sweep in the midstream individual people awards this year. They did great. Didn’t have a chance to meet Thomas directly. I don’t recall if he was there or not. We had a couple of people that weren’t able to make it.

Once again, 40-plus years experience, highly dedicated to his field, to his company. It looks like he’s been there almost 20 years itself at DNV. Very happy and pleased, and pleasure to be able to honor such a fine gentleman for the Lifetime Achievement.

I always like to quote my friend, Rustom Mody, a former VP of tech over at Baker Hughes. He won the Lifetime Achievement award, I think at the World Oil Awards, in ’18 or ’19. He came up to shake my hand. He goes, “God, thank you so much, but I’m disappointed.” I said, “Why? This is a great achievement.” He goes, “Well, now I have to retire. I’m the lifetime achievement guy. I’m done.”

Russel: [laughs]

Andy: Russel…Rustom’s been able to — sorry, you are Russel, he is Rustom — has been able to carry on a great career with another company now as well. I just always got a kick out of that whenever…

Russel: That’s funny.

Andy: …Lifetime Achievement folks come up and accept their awards.

Russel: So being retired is not a requirement to be able to submit for the lifetime achievement award.

Andy:

It is not a requirement, no. It is not…

[crosstalk]

Russel: That’s good to know. I’ll file that handy fact for future reference.

Andy: [laughs] Exactly.

Russel: Oh my goodness. That’s good. Then, of course, the Midstream Operator of the Year was Enbridge. They’re an interesting company, particularly with what they’re doing on the gas side. They’re really, really busy.

Andy:

Very busy. They also picked up another award earlier in the evening for Pipeline Integrity award, I believe, for that particular technology, SmartPipe. They had a couple of nominations in there. Were able to be recognized as the Operator of the Year too.

They are very busy. They’re very active in the marketplace. We were glad to be able to honor them with that Operator of the Year award towards the end of the evening.

Russel: We were making a sidebar comment, I can’t remember who it was but I was talking to a couple of people. I said, I was poking fun but it’s kind of a truism, and it applies to a lot of these large pipeline operators, “It’s easier to win technology awards when you have a crew of PhD engineers and a budget for R&D.” [laughs]

Andy: That’s right. When you’ve got a team of people that do nothing but love to write technical content, it does put you in a little bit of a higher advantage there, I would say, when you’ve got numbers in your favor, for sure.

Russel:

It’s important to note too that the SmartPipe project was a…I don’t want to put words into Enbridge’s mouth. I’m interpreting a press release that was from back in 2022. Enbridge made a significant investment in SmartPipe to try and move that technology forward and get it commercialized.

It’s that kind of effort and that kind of focused spending that does make a difference and helps move the entire industry forward. Kudos to Enbridge for doing that sort of thing.

Andy: I think that was their second or third time to invest in that company. I think they’d done it earlier, back in 2012 or ’13 as well, made a pretty significant investment in that technology. It was clearly a continued, invested effort for them. Like you said, kudos to Enbridge for bringing along that tech and being able to showcase it across the awards platform.

Russel: What are the plans for 2024?

Andy:

Great question. We are still divesting everything and looking back at everything that just happened last week, on the 11th of October, for our inaugural event.

We’re definitely going to be keeping these awards together as the Gulf Energy Information Excellence Awards. They will continue to recognize technology and business intelligence and achievements across the entire oil, gas, and energy space.

The 2024 event will be held October 9th, back at The Post Oak Hotel, which is a beautiful hotel in Houston, Texas, in the Galleria area, a fantastic ballroom. We had over 400 people here this year. I anticipate it growing definitely another 15, 20 percent next year as well as we continue to get more interest in this.

The nominations will open up, I believe it’s the 8th or 9th of March, but just to be safe, I’d say mid-March, and will close mid-July again. Every year, we evaluate the categories just to make sure that we have the best categories out there in the marketplace representing the latest technologies. I would anticipate something in that 40-ish range, for sure. Overall, that process went very smoothly.

Keep an eye out for that. It’s no cost to nominate any type of technology or individual. There are, of course, some stipulations and methodologies in there that need to be followed, so pay attention to those when you go through the process. Submit as many as you can that you think are going to have a chance to become a finalist and win. More the merrier in that standpoint.

Russel: I would say go ahead and mark your calendar for October 9th next year. Polish up your tux. I need to do one or two things. I either need to get a stretch tux, or I need to drop some weight. For some reason, when my tuxedos hang in the closet, they seem to get tighter every year.

Andy:

You don’t get the chance to gradually stretch them out throughout the year. It’s a once or twice a year and done. Honestly, by the time you figure it out, myself included, it’s too tight, it’s too late.

[crosstalk]

Andy: “The event is tonight, so we’re going with it.”

Russel: “It’s the dry cleaner. It’s their fault. That’s what’s wrong.”

Andy:

There you go. Put on the cowboy hat again. You’ll stand out from the crowd that way either way…

[crosstalk]

Russel: We’ll see next year if anybody else is bold enough to wear a cowboy hat.

Andy: There we go.

Russel: Just for the record, for the listeners, I was the only person there wearing a cowboy hat. I felt like, in Houston, Texas, going to the Energy Awards, and driving a pickup to the event, that I needed to wear a cowboy hat and boots. Andy had on boots. I’ll give him cred for that, but he did not break his hat out.

Andy:

Did not break the hat out, but we welcome any sort of formal attire from any culture, country, or whatever you may be coming from. We’ve got folks there in kilts. We’ve got folks there in cowboy hats. Any type of formal dress attire, whatever fits your passion or your cultural desire there, we are more than welcome to have in…

From our global perspective, it’s not just a Houston event. We are a global company. I think there were over 18 or 19 countries that were submitted this year. We welcome anybody…

[crosstalk]

Russel: There were people that flew in from overseas to come to this event.

Andy: We had several people in from Saudi Arabia. We had several people in from, I believe, Malaysia or somewhere in Southeast Asia as well. Then a variety of different folks flew in from the States, Europe, of course. It’s become a popular and prestigious event to be at. We’re glad everybody was able to make it.

Russel:

Andy, thanks for coming on and talking about the event, talking about some of the technologies.

[background music]

Russel: For all the listeners, again, seriously, mark your calendar for October 9th next year. Mark your calendar for mid-March. Get your entries in. Enter early and often.

Andy: “Enter early and often,” I like that. Appreciate it, Russel. Always happy to be here. Thank you.

Russel:

I hope you enjoyed this month’s episode of the Pipeline Technology Podcast and our conversation with Andy. If you’d like to support the podcast, please leave us a review on Apple Podcast, Google Play, or wherever you happen to listen. You can find instructions at pipelinepodcastnetwork.com.

If there is a Pipeline & Gas Journal article where you’d like to hear from the author, please let me know on the Contact Us page at pipelinepodcastnetwork.com, or reach out to me on LinkedIn. Thanks for listening. I’ll talk to you next month.

[music]