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Comment by ramary | Hacker News Reader

Hi, Andium here. Definitely understand the skepticism about our work with the oil and gas industry and its impact on climate change. The high level is that the world doesn't know whether society has reached peak oil. Even if it has, oil consumption will continue to be a major contributor to planet warming gases (CO2 and CO2 equivalents) for decades to come. While regulation plays catch up and alternative energy usage continues to ramp up over the coming decades (something we support fully), we're working to reduce the carbon footprint of the oil and gas industry today. Our flare monitoring product in particular (https://andium.com/products/andium-flare-tracking) addresses the venting of methane at upstream wells, an issue that is gaining increasing regulatory traction in the US.

- https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/biden-admins-me...

- https://nmpoliticalreport.com/2021/03/26/environmental-advoc...

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Appreciate you posting. I would say that the adverse opinions from most people on the board stem from the fact that O&G has been intentionally gaslighting public discourse since the 80s and be helping oil and gas through cost efficiencies you are enabling them to maintain power and continue to pollute.

You might have a benefit to lowering the CI of each barrel minutely but really at the end of the day you are hurting the other industries that are trying to get a footing. That's why you are getting some negative feedback. Either through lack of knowledge of the history of the industry or intentionally painting a climate tech friendly perspective due to the new found interest at large of the general population / investing population.

Well, you couldn't expect any other industry to supply gas lighting.

ba dum ba dum ting! Nice one.

To be honest, your homepage doesn't exactly give the impression you're a "saving the environment" company but rather you seem to be targeting businesses who wants to save costs. Here are some excerpts from your landing page (https://andium.com/):

- "At Andium, we’re saving companies millions of dollars annually, while increasing safety"

- "we offer an ecosystem of automated products and services that provide the next generation of remote monitoring capabilities"

- "Increasing site visibility while reducing onsite time, manual labor, and human error equates to major cost savings, and saving our clients’ time and money is in our DNA"

- "We've spent countless hours developing our technology and created the first-ever thermal imaging solution for safe, cost-effective tank-level management that has saved our clients millions at scale"

If you're truly in the same bucket as "problems like climate change and food insecurity" problems, you probably want to update your core messaging across your website

I think realistically they are in the business of making O&G cheaper to extract through efficiencies that gain some climate merit (but very little). It's more like the limited climate benefit is an add-on to core business.

The challenge in selling to O&G companies is they don't really care about climate initiatives. They do have concerns but its not their bread and butter there fore you have to package your sell in other ways such as cost efficiency.

> I think realistically they are in the business of making O&G cheaper to extract through efficiencies that gain some climate merit (but very little). It's more like the limited climate benefit is an add-on to core business.

Respectfully, this is not the business we are in, but I understand how our current messaging could convey it that way. That being said, there is a strong incentive to build products that both address climate pollution and reduce costs. It's a fine line and one that we think about constantly at the company.

True my apologies for incorrect statement. The business you are in is IOT for O&G. Ensuring that flaring/leaks are monitored. That said that has some beneficial climate impacts but is mostly a worker safety issue and a regulatory infraction problem. A balancing act for sure (good products / reducing costs)!

Very late to this discussion, but O&G absolutely cares about sustainability and climate change ... because there are a ton of activist investors who care about it.

So they have to "put on their Sunday best" or they get shellacked in socially responsible index fund investor calls and press.

Thanks for the direct and detailed feedback, much appreciated. We're planning a website revamp post our Series A which closed a few weeks ago - will definitely relay this feedback to our team.

To be fair though, if you're targeting a business with marketing (e. g. a website) you probably want to speak to the first-order problems the business is having (e. g. cost savings, safety) not to second-order problems that those outside the business are most concerned with (e. g. climate change, food insecurity), even if your company is _also_ invested in reducing second-order problems.

speaking frankly, you shouldn't advertise your company on a job board for "problems like climate change and food insecurity" if those problems are just problems you wanna fix on the side instead of the main problems you're working on solving.

Thanks for the reply!

Honest question, but doesn't enabling the Oil & Gas industries to reach peak effectiveness have the opposite effect?

What I mean by this, O&G right now is highly ineffective and to fit into regulatory limit they need to downscale operations just to have a "reserve". By allowing them, for example, to monitor the Flare and other things, don't you actually allow them to increase the production because now they have the data and means how to squeeze effectively into the limits?

Of course, thanks for your thoughtful question!

The short answer is that nobody knows for sure ... yet. Regulatory bodies, NGOs, and ESG-focused activist and impact investors are actively developing frameworks and methodologies for total life cycle GHG accounting. [1] and [2] are a couple of examples in the US from around the time the Paris Climate Agreement was signed. This area is evolving quickly as momentum has built over the last few years for a global approach to getting to net-zero emissions. We keep a close eye on this and continuously evaluate the latest developments in the context of product development ideation.

[1] from 2016: https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2016-03/documents...

[2] from 2015: https://www.eia.gov/conference/2015/pdf/presentations/skone....

Cool product, I think limiting flaring is one of the more important ESG mandates in the oilfield right now.

Andium looks somewhat similar to Rebellion Photonics (recently sold to Honeywell), although the use case is different. Not sure if you’re familiar with their product.

Your company may not be actively bad, and maybe it's having a slightly positive effect, but it doesn't sound like it belongs in a list of companies trying to solve problems like climate change.

Thanks for offering your perspective on this. Solving climate change is first about getting to net-zero GHG emissions, or as close as possible. There are many companies working to reduce the release of CO2 and CO2 equivalents across different segments of the economy, from ag to construction to transportation. Many are focusing on developing and deploying alternative energies and capture technologies, which are great and needed. Our approach is to reduce the CO2 and equivalent emissions produced by O&G today. This is different from the mainstream viewpoint for sure, but especially in areas like methane venting (see links in my other comments) there is a large opportunity for immediate impact.

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