Q&A: Wireless Power

I had the good fortune to join Motorola when the first cellular systems were being developed long before anyone knew what a cell phone was I was involved in that project and I was fortunate enough to be there for 15 years to see all the innovation that happened from the first phone call to where we are today.

RPME: What are some of the applications of wireless technologies in downstream oil and gas?

Rittler: Wireless technology is being deployed by our customers predominantly for machine-to-machine data communications. Within ABB’s portfolio, our goal is to [provide] any wireless technology that they would need as part of their automation systems along with other components, be that measurement products or process automation and control systems, in an oil field, pipeline or in a refinery.

If you look at any one of these environments – upstream, midstream or downstream – it is difficult to pull wires. To have communications you need either wireless, fibre or copper. In these challenging environments, due to temperature, vibrations, etc. having wires or fibre in place usually is not a viable option, so wireless has a pretty wide use right now in the industry.

RPME: A number of inherent restrictions in wireless methods of communication or data transmission have made the technology unappealing to customers in the past. Are these limitations serious enough to discourage investment in wireless technologies?

Rittler: Wireless is a unique medium and there’s physics at play on any transmission be it wire, fibre or wireless. Wireless technology, though, has advanced quite a bit. It has plenty of bandwidth for the applications that are being used in these industries. In fact, most customers move from copper-based communication (kind of like old phone lines) to either wireless or fibre because both now exceed the capabilities of copper.

Your highest bandwidth is going to come from fibre but fibre also runs risk of fibre cuts and overall has some physical reliability challenges. Whereas, if you use wireless, you can overcome those. For instance, a truck doesn’t run over anything wireless, but if a truck digs up a fibre, it will cut the fibre.

Furthermore, wireless systems can be built more reliably than fibre or copper systems especially in these harsh environments. Fibre laid out in long distance can start losing signal – for every metre of fibre you are losing signal – so you have to put more equipment to repeat the signal. Wireless, on the other hand, is going to manage it in a completely different manner.

The reason why we see more people using wireless is because with the right type of technology you can, in addition to just moving the data from point A to point B, you can also provide worker coverage for hand-held devices. If you have a plant that doesn’t have any wireless you will have a worker walking up to a station to take a reading from a metre, or to visually take a reading. If now that same environment has wireless, the worker can be mobile – much like we are with our smart devices – and check that metre without having to physically look at it.

I think it is often overlooked that, when you look at a communication system in an industrial application, it typically is about machine to machine and it’s not about human to machine, so you are just trying to move data around.

When you put a wireless network in, if you put the right type of network in, you are now going to be able to get a machine to machine, human to machine, and even human to human interaction over that network.

RPME: Wireless has significant benefits but also raises a number of security concerns. How do you address those?

Rittler: You build a product that is built on security as compared to adding security to your product. Modern wireless products today are built from day one with security on them. In ABB’s portfolio of products security is always the first building block. That’s actually a design decision that you have to make early in the process. In the world that we live in today I would say that that’s on the top of the mind of many manufacturers.

The challenge that [the oil and gas] industry has is one that the manufacturers of wireless equipment are relying on ‘over technology’. So they are now trying to figure out how to add security on older technology that was built kind of predating this whole cyber security threat. We’ve built the product from day one with security as its foundation and we have many deployments across many industries, where cyber security has to be there – police and fire departments, electric grids are some of them.

I can actually argue that wireless system is more secure than a fibre or a copper system to breach because it’s difficult to breach a wireless system that has security as compared to attacking physical media.

How does the Middle East compare to the West in terms of successfully adopting and deploying modern wireless technology?

Rittler: My opinion of this region is that it is following the United States and I would say more of the North Sea. If you look at those regions, there has been a lot of new infrastructure deployments.

In the US, that is because there has been an increased fracking activity by the producers there that has led to new requirements in the production and therefore you have had new technology put in which is driving the demand for wireless.

Here, in the Middle East, there is more of a conventional oil production, and not to say that there is no investment there, it just hasn’t put such big demand for it and there hasn’t been a lot of new technology and innovation from my perspective.

Now that the price of oil is changing drastically, we are seeing customer enquiries from this region, very similarly to the other regions, that are looking for more modern technology to drive more automation, efficiency, safety and reliability.

RPME: Are you expecting industrial use of wireless to increase over time?

Rittler: I think we are seeing this in a number of industries already. I think what we’ve seen in process automation in oil and gas – casting kind of a white net over it, is already happening. If you look at the process automation that’s happening in unconventional production in the United States, it is impressive and ABB is a part of it.

This integration of many technologies and putting them all together as a system is a revolution for industry verticals. To me it is somewhat ironic that in these industry verticals like oil and gas you have such a large investment in technology but the workers are kind of shot in the hand, when they are probably using all this wireless communication to be more efficient in their daily life.

But when they walk into the plant, they have to step back in time to almost the 1980s – clipboards and physically having to sit down – all of these things can be automated.

It’s an app now. It’s not a control system in a control room. It’s an app that the worker can walk around with. We have this as consumers and we want to bring that to the workforce in a refinery or in the oil field as well.

We see the same thing on the smart grid. The smart grid is kind of a catch phrase but the reality is – what’s a smart grid?

It’s about reliability, workforce efficiency and driving cost down in electric utilisation. ABB is all over that right now. It’s a very similar approach when it comes to smart devices, communication and automation.

However, state of the art for industry verticals is kind of a couple of decades behind state of the art for consumer usage. And shouldn’t it be kind of advanced relative to consumer technology, or be at least as good? It’s the other way around right now.

So we are making a lot of investments to get industry verticals to state of the art similar to consumer. It may sound simple but it takes real work and real knowledge of the customer to do it the right way.

RPME: And finally, ABB is famous for its work and investment in robotics. Do you think artificial intelligence could find a place in the refining and petrochemical industries one day?

Cravedi: Everything can be integrated into robotics really. My personal dream for the future, and I sometimes push this to ABB to consider, is to have our robots deployed in downstream operations.

And we have a fantastic robot, his name is Yumi. He is a little guy with two hands and a synthetic brain. In refineries, where we have hazardous areas and we don’t want to have people there, we can use these guys.

We need to try to be visionary and not dreamers. And for me this is a dream but it might become a vision.