Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: CleanConnect CEO David Conley (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Technologists are very good at finding solutions and looking for problems.

David Conley: I see that a lot. To find a problem, solve it, and find a customer who’ll pay for it. That’s what we did. Luke was a part of Energy Strong, which is a media company for energy. They had just put a campaign together for another law called Proposition 112, which was regulating oil & gas in the state of Colorado. The state passed it. Engineers started talking about how they’re going to solve this problem. They come into our offices.

We’re selling meter and automation equipment. I had gotten a contact at FLIR who’s the camera company that most of the industry uses to find gas. We interviewed him. He was the guy who sold the cameras. He taught us all about gas detection and how they do it today. It’s very manual. One of my unique abilities is solving problems and piecing things together quickly. I spent most of my time with CleanConnect on the product side.

Sramana Mitra: Founder-led companies often come from the product side.

David Conley: Absolutely.

Sramana Mitra: Tell me a bit about the use cases that you solve. Dive down into details.

David Conley: At the heart of CleanConnect, we’re an automation company really. We automate things using novel solutions. For example, we put together a very crude proof of concept for gas detection based on image data that we got at a facility. FLIR lent us a camera to use, so we didn’t have to pay for a camera. We paid a development firm to put together a deck for us that said we can do this.

We did a webinar with FLIR. They allowed us to use their list and garner some interest in what we were doing in automating Lead Detection And Repair (LDAR). These energy producers will have to send an LDAR crew out to the facilities annually, quarterly, or monthly. The unique thing with Colorado is that it’s continuous.

During the first six months of production, you have to set an emissions baseline. We’ve done some additional LDAR modeling and we have a wonderful emission reduction program within CleanConnect. We put that webinar together. One of our first customers came to us and said, “That was really cool. We like what you guys did. We actually have this other problem we need you to solve.” We went from slideware to having a paying customer who has a problem.

Sramana Mitra: It wasn’t the same problem.

David Conley: It was different.

Sramana Mitra: What was the new problem?

David Conley: It was non-invasive tank level monitoring. Whenever you’re storing oil, these tanks are measured with a radar. The radar gets dirty. It has paraffin build up and they have to open the tank to pull the radar out and clean in. They have to do that twice a year. If they continue to do that, each hatch opening is estimated to release two tonnes of methane per tank. They want a redundancy system using non-invasive measures to measure the levels in their tanks.

We took an off-the-shelf thermal camera from FLIR. We put it on the tanks and pulled the feed out of it. We’re just using 8-bit data. It’s lightweight to ingest. We wrote a machine learning algorithm that produces a number that represents your tank level. A couple of things we’ve added to that since then is tank identification and tank tagging. Each tank has a tag specific to it. Now we can send that data to the regular systems just as if it was the radar. We’re just solving problems that have existed forever. We like using cameras. You can see. You can hear.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: CleanConnect CEO David Conley
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