Ok, I absolutely love podcasting and talking with people from around the world about energy and humanity. But buckle up for today’s episode because today is a fun one!! Sean Donegan, CEO at Satelytics, stopped by, and we had a blast! I have never been on a podcast that could have been as much fun as a “Pub Crawl.”
There are some critical points in our world, and the ability to prove or disprove whether you are polluting or not can mean the difference between staying in business or closing up shop.
Satelytics is a cloud-based geospatial analytics software suite built to analyze terabytes of imagery to produce actionable insights. We specifically focus on providing timely, actionable alerts to our industrial customers in the oil & gas, power, mining, and water/wastewater sectors. Satelytics ingests multispectral or hyperspectral imagery gathered from satellites, aerial platforms, or fixed cameras, then processes these large data sets with algorithms designed to hunt for specific spectral signatures that indicate a problem. Satelytics is capable of delivering alerts on hydrocarbon leaks, saltwater leaks, methane leaks, encroachment threats, land movement, remediation progress, vegetation growth/health/speciation, water quality/chemistry, chemical constituents on land, and thermal changes.
It is clear that Sean and I were brothers separated at birth, and are on the same mission. He just was the smarter and better-looking brother. Satelytics has customers like BP and Duke Energy and across different markets like mining, oil and gas, E&P, and midstream, and can make a difference in any size company.
Sean, I can not wait for our Pub Crawl and other interviews! Thank you for the way cool swag. The had is wonderful, and the thermus is getting great use! – Talk soon – Stu
Please follow Sean on his LinkedIn HERE: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sean-donegan-2249971/
Check out Satelytics website HERE: https://www.satelytics.com/
Highlights for the Podcast
02:37 – About Satelytics
04:06 – Goal as a company
07:29 – Partner with companies across the world
08:35 – Purpose and Clients
11:20 – Detecting invasive grass species
13:07 – About oil and gas
16:33 – The UI(User Interface)
19:35 – First project
21:28 – The pipelines
24:14 – Satellites
31:29 – The big one for us is hydrogen
32:53 – About PFAS
35:59 – The specific constituents
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Automated Transcript – I will disavow any mistakes unless they make Sean and I look or sound smarter
Stuart Turley [00:00:08] Hello, everybody. Welcome to the Energy News Beat podcast. My name Stu Turley, president CEO of the Sandstone Group. I’ve got a fantastic guest today. I’ll tell you what. Buckle up. Sit back and enjoy being put your tray table up, because we are going all over the place now in order to find out what’s going on in Big oil and big energy. There are regulatory issues coming around the corner. You have to be ready for as a CEO of a big company, you need to be able to have data on emissions, methane emissions, and you have to be able to support or you’re going to be paying carbon tax, or you’re going to be paying methane, or you’re going to be paying all these things, and you’re investors are not going to be happy and happy with you. We have Sean Donegan here, and he is the president and CEO at Satelytics. Thank you, Sean, for stopping by the podcast.
Sean Donegan [00:01:07] Well, Stu, it’s a great honor, sir. And, I’ve heard so much about your podcast. It’s legendary. And it is a complete privilege and honor to be on.
Stuart Turley [00:01:17] Well, you know what? I’ll pay you later. And you know, I’ll be a sponsor of Satelytics here and, sponsor your outfit. How’s that sound?
Sean Donegan [00:01:26] Well, that’d be great. As long as we can have the matching underwear. That’ll be fantastic.
Stuart Turley [00:01:30] All right. I knew I liked you from about the first 30s that we started talking. Now, you and I were laughing about our, language barrier that we had here. I’m half Texas, half Oklahoman, and my wife does not understand me. Either that. But I love your sense of humor. Both of us could have been game show host. That would have been a heck of a game show.
Sean Donegan [00:01:55] Well, my mother said I should have been on the stage. Yeah, one with a trapdoor and a noose around my neck.
Stuart Turley [00:02:03] Look, there’s so many regulations and and everything about methane coming around the corner. And I think there’s a crippling effect in the energy industry in the big oil. And, yes, we’ve got to take care of the environment. Yes, we got to deliver the lowest cost kilowatt per hour. But boy, you got there is no ESG for the final reportings. As you and I, we’re kind of talking about without data or without accountability. Tell us what you guys do.
Sean Donegan [00:02:35] Yeah, well, so, I started Satelytics some ten years ago. It’s a play on the word satellite and analytics. Okay. We’re based in Perrysburg, Ohio. Or, as we like to call it, the 751st most visited city in the nation. And we we. If you could visit Stu, we’re trying to get to 747 so that we can be confused with the greatest airline that ever flew above the Earth’s surface, the jumbo jet. So Satelytics was designed, to be a software company that used a very unique set of algorithms. And without getting into the technical aspects of what we do. One of the 48 different algorithms we have measures methane. And the objective is pretty straightforward as a company. We only work for the industry. We don’t work for NGOs, the regulator, the governments. We never want our customers to have to sleep with one eye open, wondering where this data’s going. So we I made that commitment. I’d have to be dead before we do any work for the others. But our goal is how early can we detect an event? And of course, methane is one of a basket or a series of challenges people face. But methane, in my opinion, has been sort of escalated to the top of the list. And, you know, as you know, around the press, you’ve got people that want to see oil and gas shut down. I think that’s a very foolish position. My goal as a company is how early can we detect an event, and how quickly can we get you, the operational folks at the, oil and gas company or the big energy company? Information about where it is, what it is, and how bad is it to then remediate. And there’s three consequences that you minimize. One, if you’re leaking methane, you’re not selling it. That’s a loss of revenue. Number two, any time you have an event, those costs to remediate escalate dramatically and quickly. And number three, if you can minimize everything, then you don’t get into the ire of some of the third party NGOs, regulators or, God forbid, Bloomberg News. So as a company, what we want to do is to be able to give very high degree of accuracy where you have an event. So instead of today’s practice of having people walk a series of infrastructure or, you know, looking for the leak, we are actually sending them where the leak is with a high degree of confidence that they need their expertise there to remediate. Now to your point about ESG. ESG is a roll up. Maybe looking once a quarter. Maybe looking once a month. Whatever. Whatever that choice is, right? How effective are your capital improvements, operational processes? Operational aspects? How clever have they been in reducing your net emissions, particularly fugitive emissions? And that is a goal that’s got the boardrooms, stirred. I think is the right word. Frightened in many cases because they’re not quite sure when they will be accused of A or B. And that will be broadcast in the press. So I mean, without getting into too much detail, that’s sort of, sort of my idea of where we are as a company, we develop 3 or 4 new algorithms every year on the next one to be released as CO2. Wow. Another measurement that people are very keen to understand in their operations.
Stuart Turley [00:06:22] The regulatory and and carbon tax that is out of the part. Sean. Huge. Because when you start taking a look at the carbon tax, production, coal fired plants would be a huge, I mean, you start taking a look at, the regulatory issues. Are you in the UK and EU? Are you solely US based?
Sean Donegan [00:06:51] So we actually we’re we’re a US based company. As I said, the 751st most visited innovation. Perrysburg. Case you’d forgotten. But we we have customers across the globe. Sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you there.
Stuart Turley [00:07:08] Or choke me up.
Sean Donegan [00:07:10] You’ll keep going so that we can go through this. I mean, you know, you get over me in the end.
Stuart Turley [00:07:16] I got a I got a price here for defibrillators. Clear.
Sean Donegan [00:07:19] Yeah, yeah, yeah. The paddle. So we have, we have representatives of the company in the, in Europe, but we also partner with companies across the, the world. So, for parties. So, for example, let me give you an example of that. And that is that, let’s say we’re doing some work with an electrical utility and we’re looking at forestry services. We’re not expert arborist. So we work with arborist companies because we can delineate tree health, tree height tree species. 38% of all power outages are caused by trees falling on the line. So companies like ECR services, experts in that field, been in the business 80 years. They help us understand the nuances so that we can offer a really good answer to the electrical utility utilities. That sort of makes sense. So across the globe, sir. And it’s, you know, it’s been an exciting ride. We’re growing at about 300% a year as a company. It’s been unbelievable.
Stuart Turley [00:08:24] How fun is that? Like the big, companies like Duke Energy and, the big oil companies have got to be your sweet spot in some of those areas.
Sean Donegan [00:08:35] And so Duke Energy is our biggest client in the gas arena. And, they are. You couldn’t ask for a better client, number one, you know, you know, they were very patient with us as we developed our we use generative AI and AI at the heart, or what’s called a convolutional neural network at the heart of our technology. And they were very forgiving and helping us get. So we train the models. That was very accurate. And from the very senior positions, the CEO there, Sasha Weintraub, is outstanding all the way through to the ground, the folks on the ground who without their cooperation, we wouldn’t be where we were today. So Duke is a fantastic client. BP was one of the early adopters of athletics and four years ago became a shareholder in Satelytics. And then, our most frequent customer, multiple times a week is Hess over there back in North Dakota operations. So, you know, when you’ve got customers like that, pushing you, just a delight to work with. Very forgiving, very understanding that, you know, we were in our early stages as they adopted our new disruptive technology. It just makes life so much easier.
Stuart Turley [00:09:52] You know? That’s so cool. Now, you mentioned the Permian. I love the folks at Duke. I’ve always had great, super company. The, good numbers. Good management means good numbers. Yeah. And I have all the respect in the world for Duke Energy because they’re trying they want to do a balanced diet of energy. They want to do it all. They want to have low cost, just great managers. But you mentioned Permian. You mentioned the MP operators. Are what site do you mind? I mean, do you go down into the small, smaller oil companies as well as clients?
Sean Donegan [00:10:30] Yeah. I mean, there’s there’s no limit to the size of who we’d like to help. I mean, we have customers in the Permian today. One of again, another excellent customer is pioneer standard that we have in the Permian Basin. And again, a treasure to work with, you know, very full, forward looking thought leaders. I mean, those are really the types of customers you get blessed with. And we have the same thing in the electrical utility, too, and also in, actually, here’s a funny story. You’re we’re seeing Yellowstone.
Stuart Turley [00:11:05] Yes.
Sean Donegan [00:11:06] Okay. So the ranch, Yellowstone in the four sixes. You know, I always want to be rich. You know, I never get the part, but, take people to the train station. You know, I love that. But, the the we detect invasive grass species because cattle, they don’t get fat quick enough if they eat this cheatgrass, which came from Asia. So we literally for those ranches detect where this invasive species are. And then our partner who who is again experts in the field, they apply chemicals to restore the native grasses. And that’s a company called N view out of North Carolina. Yeah. Yeah. Now the here’s the interesting thing. Remember when we were first met? I said, we’re a little star Trekkie. All of this data comes from satellite. So we task, which means we point satellites over the target area, normally a set of infrastructure. And in this case we use the infrared near infrared and shortwave infrared. And we’re looking at the patterns that are created in light. So when light hits methane it creates a different pattern than when it hits propane. Yeah. When light hits a healthy oak tree, it creates a different pattern than an unhealthy oak tree. And our software is able to determine not just the, that it’s methane, but also the gas plume. So the fugitive plume that’s created. We measure that every 12ft by 12ft. And we measure it in a volume m times m, and then we also measure the flow rate, which is the source of the leak and how much is flowing out of it. So with our friends at Duke, we’re literally measuring down to less than one kilogram an hour.
Stuart Turley [00:13:01] Wow. You know,
Sean Donegan [00:13:02] For our oil and gas people in the field. Because when you think about oil and gas, you’ve got a bigger open space. And what you have to account for at the precise location are things like wind direction, wind velocity, relative humidity. So we stream in those factors. So when we give you a number like eight kilograms an hour or nine kilograms an hour, you can rest assured that those numbers can vary between plus or -10%, but they are right on the money.
Stuart Turley [00:13:34] Okay. Couple things on my talk because this okay, I get excited about this one because there’s so much here. Now your end user, screens have got to have a good UI and user interface.
Sean Donegan [00:13:49] Yep.
Stuart Turley [00:13:49] So and these are updated now I’m going to ask technical on your satellite. Not.
Sean Donegan [00:13:55] Yeah Sure.
Stuart Turley [00:13:57] Are you using Elon? In order to get your stuff up there or.
Sean Donegan [00:14:01] Well, I’m sure we don’t own the satellite, so let’s just make that clear. We contract with the satellite company, so we’re using companies like Airbus. Okay, Macs are Planet Labs now. They I I’m sure, or certainly Planet Labs, I know for sure is using Elon Musk as a ride into space.
Stuart Turley [00:14:21] Right? Good. I got we got to support him. He is?
Sean Donegan [00:14:25] Yeah. He’s a genius. I mean, beyond genius.
Stuart Turley [00:14:28] I love him now, so. Yeah, the UI. I’d love to get some screenshots.
Sean Donegan [00:14:33] Although, sir, if we’re speaking with. If we’re speaking with oil and gas, remember, they prefer not to drive electric cars. Perhaps.
Stuart Turley [00:14:40] No. I tell you what.
Sean Donegan [00:14:41] Just a thought. Just a thought, sir.
Stuart Turley [00:14:44] I am, I am a, agnostic.
Sean Donegan [00:14:48] Oh, I see.
Stuart Turley [00:14:49] Hang on. I am a humanitarian first.
Sean Donegan [00:14:53] Got it.
Stuart Turley [00:14:53] Energy agnostic. It’s got to be the lowest kilowatt per hour delivered to the end users with the least amount of impact on the environment. Then the electric cars mostly out. Because the batteries we have child abuse in in coming in and these kind of things, I believe that Elon will figure this out. Yeah. And there will be a certain market. And I think he will be a survivor as he gets all this figured out. Now I’m supporting him because he supported Twitter and and his rocket ships and and everything else. I believe the man is absolutely a godsend for the United States world now. The insurance companies are going to take the, the EVs out. I think we need to use, if we if we were going to use it. Let’s, you know, Sean, whether or not, carbon is a actual pollutant or is it a feedstock for plants? You know, that is a whole nother animal I’m not.
Sean Donegan [00:16:00] Right, Certain
Stuart Turley [00:16:01] to get into.
Sean Donegan [00:16:02] Right.
Stuart Turley [00:16:03] So, I think that EVs are terrible. You’re going to start seeing, from the standpoint of the roads. The parking garages are now having stuff. We’re talking trillions upon trillions of dollars around the world to try to even get to this. And nobody’s talking about that second order of magnitude EVs. So now. Anyway, so you and I can have more fun on all these other kind of topics, but, as you talk
Sean Donegan [00:16:33] You’re asking me about UI and our user interface.
Stuart Turley [00:16:35] Yeah. And then I got sidetracked. Squirrel. And and so we, the, the UI interface. So if I am Duke Energy and you have your folks here on the, on the UI, I’m sure that you don’t have to be a rocket scientist for Elon in order to use it.
Sean Donegan [00:16:53] Right. So excuse me. So. All of our data is published within 3 to 4 hours of collecting the data.
Stuart Turley [00:17:03] No way.
Sean Donegan [00:17:04] Yes. So we’re using AI at its finest, and we’re using the cloud either AWS, which is Amazon or Microsoft Azure. And literally with that computing power, you as the customer, you can determine that you want to set what we call alerts and alarms. Oh yeah. You set the sensitivity. You set the norm in cloture, the language, the symbol, the colors. Right. And you could be a recipient of text or email alerts if you wish. Number one. Number two, you could log on. Of course. High security. And you get to see the Duke Energy portion of the world that’s only yours. And you can then visually look at the alerts and they are very easily presented. Remember we tell you where it is, we tell you what it is and we tell you how bad it is. Measurement for want of a better word. Now we don’t just think about the people sat in a nice, comfortable office. What about the people that do the hard work that are out there going to remediate and fix? You bet. So we allow them to use their smartphone or tablet without any cell or without any internet connection. We call it satellite OTG on the go. Right. And they can get the access to the same data in the field without any connectivity. They can then remediate, take investigative photographs, record other data. That’s essential. Perhaps. And then when they get back to a connected world in their office, in the hotel, back at home, it will synchronize it all back up as one record for the convenience of the company.
Stuart Turley [00:18:41] Holy smokes, Batman, this is cool. Let me ask it.
Sean Donegan [00:18:45] Because we’re not too far from Toledo, Stu, because you can use that now reference to Batman. I could say Holy Toledo. Right?
Stuart Turley [00:18:55] Because, when I was, I put in all these intelligent, well pads, thousands of intelligent, well pads. Yeah. And we put in the thermal cameras aimed at things. And so we would set it up, we’d have the alerts and everything else or the breezes as they would, come through. But this is even more midstream. This is even more, I mean, this could be anything. Because you’re not having, pads different or a, well, site is different. You can be just everywhere looking at this.
Sean Donegan [00:19:32] So let me give you a broader spectrum. Okay. Our first project was looking at Lake Erie and toxic algae blooms. You can’t say that anymore. It’s not politically correct to call them harmful algae blooms, but. And that was phosphorus, Ficus, Diana and Chlorophyl, where we measure every 30 centimeter, one foot by one foot in parts per billion for those chemicals. Then, then BP asked us to look at 26,000 bodies of water on the north slope of Alaska for arsenic, barium, iron, manganese, and copper. So the application of the science of what we do really has little bearing. As long as there is a spectral signature, the the pattern in light.
Stuart Turley [00:20:19] Right.
Sean Donegan [00:20:19] We could tell you the tree speciation. So our friends at BP said, okay, we may be in a carbon offset world. Right. Can you now tell us this part of the forest that we own? And can you give us all the health, the tree height and the tree speciation? And then we can feed that into our calculation of carbon offset. So you can see the use of this technology. Yeah. We’ve got 48 algorithms. We serve nine different market segments. But to your very astute point. The imagination is the only endless limit to what this could eventually be applied for. And the beauty of satellite data is that you don’t need permission to look. Nobody needs to know you’re looking, and the scale of which you can accumulate data is just extraordinary.
Stuart Turley [00:21:15] Okay, on the methane leaks, carbon leaks and everything else as you’re doing this, how often are the satellites rolling over? Because.
Sean Donegan [00:21:25] Good question.
Stuart Turley [00:21:26] You mentioned that, the pipelines. I work for a pipeline company a bazillion years ago. Moses.
Sean Donegan [00:21:34] Who was that Stu who was it.
Stuart Turley [00:21:36] Trans oak pipeline? Okay. Oklahoma. And they’ve been bought several times. I think they were bought by Williams companies. Yeah. And I used to have to work the pipelines and. Yeah. And I mean, I wish I was a pipeline or I would walk and we’d get to the big points where we were pegging them. But you had to walk every pipeline every year in order to do it. Then you then they got to the point where they were flying them. How often did the satellites come over? Because if you have a leak in the Permian, are they coming over every hour or are they coming over every. Because, you know, back then when I found the leak, it was months, days in between those that came down to an air airplane and they were flying, that you still didn’t. You could have flown over. Right. And now with the cameras and those kind of things, it got down to the hours. Right. If your satellite is only coming over every day or something, you could be 12 hours before a response.
Sean Donegan [00:22:42] Right. So you’ve got a lot of great questions packed in there. Let me see if I can pull them out and give you sort of soundbites. That would be really helpful. So still today the regulation says you have to walk the line. You know, the reason that pipelines and this I wasn’t around the time but this is my best understanding. The original reason behind flying pipelines was there was a lot of World War Two pilots that came back from World War Two, and they used to fly the lines. Now, today, when you think about the human detecting anything, there’s a great fallibility. It’s very easy to make a mistake. Yep. So walking the line and I’ll take you to Duke Energy. Their goal in using advance leak detection, that’s what it’s referred to as or new technologies, is that they will eliminate the need to walk the line and only send resources where they need to go to remediate. Okay. So that’s a very here’s the here’s the corollary benefit to that. Number one, you’re not sending people from a health and safety perspective into challenging areas. You’re reducing windshield time. You’re reducing insurance risks okay. Because of accidents that happen. Yep. And the beauty of it for the public is that you are now sending somebody to remediate, in this case, a methane leak, making it a very high degree that they need their services and their skill sets there. And very quickly eliminating that emission, making the world a safer place. Right? I mean, let let’s just lay it on the line now, satellites today you can revisit almost anywhere. A daily. There are a couple of satellites that offer multiple times a day a satellite. Stu overpasses the local area between 11 a.m. and 3 p.m. local time. Generally speaking. I mean, there may be some variances to that. Now, today, our most frequent customer is multiple times a week. Up to four times a week. There is so much money being spent above the Earth’s surface by either new satellite companies or existing satellite companies. Companies like Airbus, Planet Labs. The the the shortly into 2026, 2028, you’ll be able to revisit anywhere in the world multiple times an hour. That’s the type of investment that’s that’s being piloted right now with one of our customers. We’re even doing some nighttime satellite work, looking at street lamps that are not working at nighttime.
Stuart Turley [00:25:21] Way.
Sean Donegan [00:25:22] Because there’s a lot of money being spent in the utilities where you street lights are not efficiently working. And therefore we can pinpoint where they are for them.
Stuart Turley [00:25:31] That’s also a second order effect of safety.
Sean Donegan [00:25:34] Yeah, of course. Of course it is. So into let’s say let’s be sort of a little more generous into 2030 and beyond. Right. I think the ubiquitous way that we consume data will be from satellite. Whether you’re listening to satellite radio, which is obviously all perfected, or Elon is bringing cheap internet access with his Starlink constellation or your using, with all due respect to the others, a little more sophisticated stuff like we are where we’re using the near infrared, we’re using the shortwave, infrared and the next generation of satellites, which are hyperspectral, which means they’ve got more bands, which means you can see more things from more bands, generally speaking.
Stuart Turley [00:26:19] Well, you know.
Sean Donegan [00:26:21] My vision, you know, if I was sort of to pontificate a little bit. Yeah. I see the day into the future where instead of us taking the raw data that comes from the satellite and processing it. Yeah. I actually would like to see a day where we have the virtual black box on the back of the satellite, and the only thing that comes to Earth is the alert, the result, so that we could literally get down to, sub our for delivering results of alerts and alarms so that you can act on them.
Stuart Turley [00:26:56] It’s interesting. I am sitting here thinking about 15 different technical things in order to solve that for you.
Sean Donegan [00:27:02] So that would be great. I just it’s a bit of a vision, but you know, as a company we’ve always been known as disruptive. And, you know, there are days when that’s the leading edge and there are days when that’s the bleeding edge, as you can imagine.
Stuart Turley [00:27:15] Oh, yeah. And I if we were in school together, we would be disruptive. I think the high school teachers would want to throw us out.
Sean Donegan [00:27:23] Well, funnily enough, as you should say, I always thought D was a great, great.
Stuart Turley [00:27:30] Because it was, good.
Sean Donegan [00:27:31] Yeah, exactly. Oh, and then, of course, my mum said, well, your last names don’t donigan. So I wasn’t so upset that it wasn’t, you know, Abraham, Billy Bob or Charlie
Stuart Turley [00:27:42] Way, leave that Billy Bob out of there, man, because Bob was my name. One of the things, though, on safety for the pipelines. Yeah, I was walking a pipeline one time, and I had my head down, and we had to carry paint so that we would paint the holes as I climbed over that, and I’m doping along, and I ended up in a Brahma bull farm, and I’m sitting there looking like a dope around. And all these Brahma bulls did not like me in their field. Right? I guarantee you I can outrun a Brahma bull, but I had to dive over a barbed wire fence and ended up getting tangled in it, and the team thought it was the funniest thing they’ve ever seen. Yeah, a plane or a satellite any day. Yeah.
Sean Donegan [00:28:24] Yeah, yeah. Well, you obviously weren’t wearing Old Spice, which the Bulls don’t like.
Stuart Turley [00:28:30] You and I are. It’d be a dangerous outfit.
Sean Donegan [00:28:38] Yeah, we could be a great comedy. I have to tell you, Stu, my. I came to the United States in 1989. Right? And, my first ever business trip was to the Alabama Electric Cooperative in Andalusia, Alabama.
Stuart Turley [00:28:51] Nice.
Sean Donegan [00:28:52] And I’ll keep the chaps name, but I met this very lovely chap, and I’m fresh off the boat and, so to speak. And, you know, when we had a business meeting many years later, we laugh that we both needed a translator because I didn’t have a clue what he was saying. Yeah, and he didn’t have a clue what I was saying. But somehow we got through it. And, you know, to this day, my favorite city is Birmingham, Alabama, to visit anywhere in the United States.
Stuart Turley [00:29:21] Well, I was working with a bunch of folks in, Louisiana. Yeah. And, I was I don’t wanna tell you all is actually, a supercomputer with, x number gigabit of computing power. I couldn’t understand he almost sounded Biden like, I don’t know, right. But, you know, having a Texas Okie and a Louisiana and. Sounds like your meeting that you just had.
Sean Donegan [00:29:48] Right, right, right.
Stuart Turley [00:29:50] And there’s no way I understand, the beloved people in Louisiana. I do not understand that one.
Sean Donegan [00:29:56] I, I used to visit I had a lot of customers in in Utah, Salt Lake City. Yeah. Before 911. So, you know, everybody was allowed down the concourse in the good old days when we were all normal. Right. And, my first instinct was, you know, I was brought up Catholic, my dad’s Irish, my mom’s English. We won’t get into that because my grandmother on my mother’s side didn’t like my father, who was a drunken Irishman, but.
Stuart Turley [00:30:19] Oh.
Sean Donegan [00:30:20] He was a pretty good father for many, many, many, many, many years. And a devoted husband. But, so when I went through this to, to Salt Lake City, home of the LDS Church of Latter day Saints, and I couldn’t believe that nobody was at the gate greeting me with balloons and, sign saying, Welcome to Utah. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen that, but the whole extended family, when these young people come back from mission, they’re all there to greet them. And, you know, I was looking for the same greeting. Never happened. Story of my life. A few French fries short of a happy meal.
Stuart Turley [00:30:55] Well, I worked for Novell for years.
Sean Donegan [00:30:58] Oh, yeah. Utah. Provo, Utah. Right?
Stuart Turley [00:31:01] You bet. And loved, all my bosses were, in the LDS church, I love them. Yeah, yeah. Nasdaq bosses. Yeah. And, so I love Utah. Love skiing there. Now, where are you going in the next? What’s coming around the corner for you, Sean?
Sean Donegan [00:31:20] So, outside, of course. As you know, I told you, we have 48 different algorithms. We had 3 or 4 new ones a year for the oil and gas industry. The big one for us is hydrogen. In October of last year, we released in AG pack at Abu Dhabi. At one of the large shows, we released an ability to monitor NOx Sox an H2S again in the gases. Yep. Hydrogen is quick off the the the, is in the laboratory being developed now. But our goal is that we will be able to, you know, hydrogen will be added to the, to the gang, so to speak. Right. And then one that we’ve added to the gang recently, we’ve done the ground trim thing. So in order for us to get into measurements, ju just a little bit of a sidetrack, right? We actually go to the extent of ground. Truthing. So when it comes to methane companies like BP, Anadarko, they did metered controlled releases across and in BP’s case across the world and even over water, because we are one of the only companies that can detect and measure methane over water. So offshore platforms are onshore. And, in that process of what we call ground truthing, it allows us to get to a measurement. And that’s really critical for our customers. Yeah. So the to come back to what I said one and watch this space PFAS capital P capital f capital a capital s PFAS is a and how we detect it is a lot of a there’s a firefighting foam called a triple F aqueous film forming foam. And it was developed by some of the well known chemical companies in the United States. But sadly, it has a carcinogenic in it. And it was used whether you had a real fire or you had a, you know, a drill. It was used across the world widely. And about six years ago, I saw a very interesting conversation by a woman of the DoD. And I said, look, to my chief scientist, we’ve got to look at this. And. About two years later, BP approached me and said, what do you know about PFAS? And, we had already started. It’s one of these detections on land and water. It penetrates the aquifer. Now you’re going to see not only oil and gas, but people like airports, fire departments, the DoD. And you’re going to see water and wastewater industry looking for these tracks of these chemicals because they do cause, it’s testicular cancer, I think is the, the negative outcome of these chemicals. So, that’s going to be another huge area for us to detect, monitor and show. But I mean, we keep marching on, in the oil and gas arena looking at both upstream midstream and downstream and something offshore and helping the customers around those industries reduce and achieve their net zero goals and beyond. But beyond that, they want to have operational efficiency. I’ve never seen an executive ever that says I’m okay with emissions. They all want to leave the planet in a better place than when they came for their children and grandchildren.
Stuart Turley [00:34:40] That’s one of the most and understood issues in the oil and gas space. I got about 16 more things here real quick. Yeah. And so I keep thinking I’ve got a attention deficit disorder because I always think about 15 questions okay.
Sean Donegan [00:34:55] That’s okay.
Stuart Turley [00:34:56] So hydrogen in the, natural gas pipelines. And I’m as I’m going to make this assumption on your product right now that you’re good enough that you can separate out, any of the methane molecules from the hydrogen molecules if they put the new turbines on the pipeline, because the, hydrogen leaks out at a different rate, than does the natural gas, and with the methane emissions. So I’m assuming that that would be one of the things that they would be able to really focus in, on, on, on hydrogen, the EU putting in a gigantic hydrogen corridor.
Sean Donegan [00:35:38] Yeah. So the checkpoint I mean, obviously we’re in development of it today. But obviously the goal would be, as we do with many other gas speciation differentiations, is it would have a different pattern in light. So our our goals are our algorithms are targeted at identifying the specific constituents. And that’s the general term we use. Okay. You know for looking at methane or gas. Actually where I thought you were going to go is we actually also look at the composition of methane. So anything greater with a percentage of 25% methane we will detect.
Stuart Turley [00:36:15] Nice.
Sean Donegan [00:36:16] So, you know.
Stuart Turley [00:36:17] That’s where I was going because that’s a better question. So I was thinking that. But you are.
Sean Donegan [00:36:23] Right. You’re too nice. The other thing of course, is when you look at infrastructure, it’s critical as the client shared with you infrastructure, spatial resolution is very important. And what that means is right. What does the dot on the computer screen represent geographically on the ground stack? Linux? Above all the others, we only use the very highest spatial resolution. Why? It lets us pinpoint the source. So, you know, you’ve got these people on Bloomberg News, telling you’re a super emitter. But what they’re really capturing is the wastewater treatment plant down the road because they don’t have the granularity or the, you know, not corporate because they don’t have the sensitivity to go that low. But if you’ve got a cornfield one side of your pipeline, you want to admit and not send resources that are valuable to go in, you know, look at cow.
Stuart Turley [00:37:13] Right? That’s a whole different animal. Yeah.
Sean Donegan [00:37:16] So to speak.
Stuart Turley [00:37:17] Yeah. You and I would make a great game show hosting
Sean Donegan [00:37:24] Wells. Not sure you. I’ve got a face for radio. My mother said.
Stuart Turley [00:37:27] Well, I have to shave my back because I have a cape that comes out behind my seat.
Sean Donegan [00:37:31] Got it, got it, got it.
Stuart Turley [00:37:32] And I’ll tell you what, you know, either I’m going to, sponsor you guys, or you need to sponsor us in order to help get you into the entire oil and gas and energy market. So we gotta work on a way to help spread the word of your company, because you’ve got answers for some of the biggest problems around. And financially, it’s going to be probably the biggest financial problems all of these big and small companies are about to face. Yes. Yes. I couldn’t be any more serious. How how, excited I am about our visit today, Sean.
Sean Donegan [00:38:19] I mean, well, it’s a pleasure to you. We’ll send you some Satelytics, paraphernalia. So, you know, you can wear the hat, go out with the umbrella. We’ve got, you know. Are you a volleyball player?
Stuart Turley [00:38:31] No.
Sean Donegan [00:38:32] Okay, so I won’t send you the speed I got. Satellites is the greatest software company on your backside. Okay. Probably not a good idea to go out in public with those either, but we’ll send you some paraphernalia.
Stuart Turley [00:38:43] I swam AAU competition for 13 years. So. Yes, I used to wear Speedo.
Sean Donegan [00:38:49] Oh, there we go. Maybe we could get you to Bob out of the water every 30s. So they could have the satellite’s name on TV, you know?
Stuart Turley [00:38:57] Butterfly was my stroke, so.
Sean Donegan [00:38:59] There we go. I mean, what more can I say? You’re a perfect candidate.
Stuart Turley [00:39:02] I know now my, would not work, but with that, a signing off. How do people find you, Sean?
Sean Donegan [00:39:11] Well, we obviously Satelytics.com. They can send me a message directly. Sdonegan@satelytics.com and my cell phone if anybody wants to pick up. Because I’m a CEO that’s out with customers every day. Always love to hear from people in their feedback. (440) 725-6135.
Stuart Turley [00:39:33] Wow. A CEO that gives out his number. I’m.
Sean Donegan [00:39:38] Absolutely.
Stuart Turley [00:39:39] Impressed.
Sean Donegan [00:39:41] Don’t get to be the CEO without making sure you listen and work with customers directly.
Stuart Turley [00:39:46] Wow. I cannot wait to get you some customers.
Sean Donegan [00:39:50] Thank you. Stu. An absolute pleasure, sir. You are such a pro. I really, really enjoyed it. Well, I hope next time I’m there, we can go out for dinner and laugh more about some of the crazy Donegan family stories. I’ll tell you about the day my mother. My father, ran over my mother’s false teeth when she took them out.
Stuart Turley [00:40:09] I cannot wait. With that. Thank you everybody so much.
Sean Donegan [00:40:15] All right. Great pleasure.
