Empowering Smart Water Management: Q&A with B3 Insight
Kelly Bennett is CEO and co-founder of B3 Insight, the leading platform for water data and analytics in the energy and environment sectors. Kelly is passionate about making complex data actionable for high-value decision making. He has dedicated his career to breaking barriers between data and the people who need to use it and empowering smart natural resource management.
B3 Insight solves problems and enables deeper understanding of water resources across a variety of industries. What kind of data do you offer to the O&G companies, conservation communities, and service professionals?
We focus on understanding how water relates to diverse industries and the information needed to make high value decisions in each of them. From there, it is a process of identifying, collecting, cleaning, and integrating the data needed to support decision making and ensuring that we deliver it to our customers the way they need it. This can be through software, data feeds, written reports, or even integrations with proprietary or third-party data. Practically speaking, B3’s datasets encompass water rights, groundwater development, land ownership and use, water management and disposal, seismicity, legal data, and a host of administrative and environmental dataset. Whether it is the nexus of land and water, water resources and water rights, or the value chain of water in oil fields, we have a keen focus on removing the complexity from data.
You view your clients as your Innovation Partners. How has this approach helped you build your H2O Platform? What new products are you releasing due to this?
We take pride in partnering with clients to understand their challenges and see the market through their eyes. This is critical to how we arm them with data and tools to be successful. We have served a diverse group of customers since day one and it has forced us to look at challenges in water resources. When we first launched our oilfield products, we were fortunate to have stakeholders in both water midstream startups and established oil and gas producers really embrace our technology, approach to data, and way of doing business. They voted with their dollars and committed to work with us from the beginning to build the data and tools they needed - and thus our OilfieldH2O Platform was built. From there, partnerships with customers have culminated in new data delivery systems, launch of our Oklahoma platform, a custom alert system, and many other products and features.
What is the source of your data?
Our data comes from hundreds of sources. A lot of data is available in the public domain, but it is typically very siloed, in challenging formats, and far from comprehensive. The B3 Texas Groundwater Database, for example, is a single dataset available in our products, but is an integration of over 60 different sources, some of which have multiple data collections themselves. We have others that are comprised of data extracted from images of regulatory findings which is then integrated into other related datasets we collect. Identifying and collecting raw data is only the first of many steps that we take to create the curated data that our clients leverage. Our team analyzes the data and threads the needle, so to speak, through the patchwork of relatable information to create one complete, coherent database that is interoperable with other data. To do this well, we invest a lot of resources into ongoing management of quality control processes and adapting to ever-changing data.
Water touches so many different industries. When thinking about impact investing or renewables, how can companies benefit from B3 Insight?
We support several impact investing programs and some market-based conservation projects in several states. These partnerships are exciting ways to help innovative investors identify value in a relatively young market. Our core datasets and map layers provide a powerful way to understand the relationships between land, water resources, and other environmental concerns that are otherwise incredibly difficult and time consuming to form. Whether it is impact investing or renewable development, water will likely fall under the category of risk or opportunity and B3 arms customers in these arenas with the data and analysis they need to make decisions with confidence.
The importance of making real data-driven decisions in such a dynamic market is ever growing, but many are unaware of what data is actually available to them or don’t know how to interpret it. Tell us how B3 Insight flips the script to help its customers make better decisions.
Empowering smart water management goes beyond just providing access to good data. We consider it our responsibility to turn customers into data experts in their own markets and build as much institutional knowledge of water into our products and services. We achieve this through a multi-faceted approach that includes our team, partnership with customers, partnership with third parties, and commitment to innovation.
We have built an incredible bench of experts in B3 to support our users as their trusted information partner. We have experts in hydrology and hydrogeology; water rights; data management; economics; reservoir systems; environmental management; civil, chemical, petroleum and mechanical engineering; and of course, software development.
Given the fragmented and disparate nature of data, it is not uncommon for us to hear during a demo that some of the data we provide is the first time a customer or prospect has been exposed to it. There is an incredible missionary role we play to connect our data with under-served demand for it. Our onboarding process centers around custom training focused on outcomes most important to the client. We provide on demand, bespoke training and are constantly at work with our customers to better understand their markets, needs, and industry trends.
You have a unique team committed to knowledge. Can you share with us your hiring process around core values?
I’m incredibly proud of the team we have built at B3. I have had the privilege of working with some of them for upwards of 15 years (a few for my entire career!), and I think you can really sense the family feeling. It’s a family of high performers who really support each other and grow together. Our core values underscore a collective passion to create significant change in resource management with a clear ethic: Get the Right Stuff Done, Find A Way, Own It, and Be Professional and Humble. These are non-negotiables adhered to by our team every day and are truly at the core of our hiring and people management.
In our hiring process, once we have a sense of aptitude, hard skills, and a candidate’s goals, it is all about the values. Experience has taught us that people who personify these things are naturally obsessed with creating value and are deeply committed to learning and asking questions. Alignment with our most important principles provides freedom to work in an environment of diverse backgrounds, education, and perspectives and sets B3 apart in an incredible way. As different as we are from each other, these values unify us. It makes jumping feet first as a team into the addictive world that is water both incredibly fun and rewarding.
Follow Kelly Bennett and B3 Insight on LinkedIn.
To learn more, please contact Michelle Dutemple at [email protected]. Her areas of expertise include oil & gas, produced water management, and renewable energy.
You can also fill out our contact form, and a consultant will be in touch to learn more about your needs.
