The roll-out of wireless technology solutions for the upstream industry is gathering pace, with remote field and well monitoring solutions driving an upturn in the Middle East.
Drilling for oil and gas is a risky job as the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico attests. Although there are few shortcuts to the labour-intensive task of drilling for hydrocarbons, the associated risks to life can be limited somewhat by the use of intelligent technology. One of the major issues faced by the oil and gas industry is monitoring assets safely, remotely and efficiently.
Wireless technology solutions such as GPS and wireless mesh networks that relay information and data from remote, hard-to-reach and/or dangerous areas have in recent years been deployed in various parts of the industry from refineries right through to remote onshore and offshore exploration and production facilities.
The Middle East has traditionally not been tech-savvy in the past and has viewed new time, effort and life-saving industrial technology solutions with a certain degree of suspicion. This is changing with many operators eventually selecting system-wide overhauls and rollouts.
Oil & Gas Middle East talks to specialists from wireless solutions providers Oxford Monitoring Solutions of the UK, Germany’s R. Stahl and America’s Honeywell to assess the region’s oil and gas industry’s current appetite for their products and services.
Scott Weatherill, regional director for Oxford Monitoring Solutions, a wireless monitoring and automation systems provider for oilfield sites, says that: “As technology develops people want to use remote monitoring, smart fields, minimum visits and HSE becomes a requirement.”
Weatherill says that the wireless monitoring business has a much more beneficial part to play in terms of remote monitoring at the wellhead, integrating it with production surveillance and production monitoring tools. “A lot of the push for wireless has been in the downstream business – refineries, tank farms and plants,” he observes.
But, he says, that overall, control systems wireless or otherwise need to be smart. Shifting beyond data collection and getting the most out of the technology is paramount to a successful program. “It is not a case of just sending messages back, it is a case of the control system being intelligent enough to say ‘how do you want to control this well?’”
he says.
Adoption drivers
Whilst wireless technology has definite benefits for the safe and efficient monitoring of oil and gas equipment, the deployment of this technology has some less apparent drivers, so says Andreas Kaufmann, managing director of R. Stahl Middle East, the German engineering firm which specialises in operating and monitoring systems both for standard industrial application and for use in hazardous classified areas specifically Zones 1 and 2.
“We provide systems solutions but if you do systems solutions you need to talk to the customer on a regular basis, you need to know their application, it’s not only the environment, it is the space and weight requirements,” he says.
“If one goes offshore, every kilogram that you put out is a cost for the operator that is why it is very important to know the application and the environment.”
Energy efficiency is increasingly becoming important for oil and gas companies and operators due to their intrinsic environmental and economic benefits.
Kaufmann says that: “If you go offshore, you have to imagine there is no power out there, you need to be energy efficient, it is pure economics.”
“A trend which we are seeing as well is to be energy autonomous, for example relay stations, CCTV cameras or signaling devices based on solar power, so there is no electrical connection to the system it is solely solar power,” he adds.
Kaufmann says that this energy independent solution is especially important for unmanned or satellite platforms which are out in the desert or sea where power infrastructure is non-existent.
New Technology
Kaufmann admits that wireless solutions are a new area both for the company and in the industry adding that there are still product trials taking place in Germany for industrial wireless technology.
Diedrik Mols who is Honeywell’s Process Solutions business manager for the EMEA region says that: “These industrial wireless solutions are relatively new and there is still much unknown about the value these potentially could bring to your operations.”
He believes that awareness building through seminars and support to site staff helps to address this shortcoming of the technology.
“Thanks to the end user driven ISA100 Industry Standard today’s industrial wireless technology is mature,” Mols says. He adds that: “The industry is looking for solutions that are more flexible and perform better than wired.” Oxford Monitoring Solution’s Weatherill believes that in the Middle East, the lukewarm response to wireless technology has structural roots
in addition to the more wide-spread reticence.
“People see the Middle East as a market that tends to like to try technology, I wouldn’t say that they see it as a market that likes to deploy technology enmasse. I would say in certain places like the North Sea, the Gulf of Mexico, offshore Canada and Petrobras, they deploy more technology at differing levels,” he says.
But he is hopeful about future uptake of wireless technology in the oil and gas sector and says that: “The mindset and the interest in exploring different things is changing and you see that in the technical conferences that we do now have a much stronger drive in technology from NOCs locals and nationals than they did 10 years ago.”
“Right now we see the strongest demand for intelligent fields and monitoring, to some extent that is driven by corporate initiatives in places like Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, UAE and Oman, we see a demand in terms of the ability for remote surveillance and getting production data quickly where there is no infrastructure in places like Yemen, Indonesia or India,” Weatherill concludes.
