Energy technology heads offshore

The recent proliferation of mobile devices such as smartphones and hand-held computers has brought about the implementation of wireless technology in the industrial arena.

Leif Eriksen, director of the energy and utilities industry solutions group at Symbol Technologies, a company recently acquired by Motorola, suggests wireless is "one of the culminating phases of the IT revolution."

"It is about enabling a field force - enabling people who work in the field," says Eriksen. "In no other industry do you have more people working in the field, away from their desks, than in oil and gas.

"What wireless mobility does is give those people access to the same information that people have sitting at their desks. In the context of applications, it allows you to do a better job of managing and tracking your assets. It also improves the performance of those assets by ensuring the people on the assets have the right information at the right time."

With a traditional paper-based process there is always a risk of human-error, either when data is recorded or when it is entered into the system. "With mobile technology, you know that the data you are recording is always going to be the right data, time-stamped with the right time, associated with the right asset, so that helps to reduce errors," explains Eriksen.

He foresees not only Wi-Fi and wireless LAN being used on rigs in future but also wireless sensor networks for collecting condition-based information in the field, and RFID (radio frequency identification) to tag and identify assets.

"RFID can be applied to anything from a laptop to a compressor, to a large crane moving around the facility. It is really the successor to the barcode, only much more powerful. Barcodes can only store a limited amount of information, whereas an RFID can store more and you can seal an RFID tag for use in a dirty environment, like in oil and gas."

Though penetration of wireless in the global oil and gas industry today is less than 10%, Eriksen is confident it will soon take off, as the financial case for wireless technology becomes stronger. He acknowledges that people still have some reservations about going for wireless but says it is worthwhile on a number of levels: cost, security and even employee safety.

"They have concerns about security and reliability, as well as cost," Eriksen continues, "but with all of those things we are light-years ahead of where we were even three years ago. From a cost point of view, as with all IT, it continues to come down and become more cost-effective. Wireless security is as good or better than wired security today.

"Safety is becoming an increasingly important issue in the oil and gas industry and other industrial spaces. If there is an emergency in a plant, there is no really good way today of knowing whether everybody got out, or if there is a man down.

"With wireless technology, you could use a wireless tag and track where people are. In an emergency you would know if they got out, or, if they did not get out, you would know where they are so if a rescue needs to be done you can locate and reach them."

With this in mind, it seems wireless technology could soon become as ubiquitous as the computer chip before it.

Print | Email | Discuss this article |

USER COMMENTS (0 COMMENTS)

POST A COMMENT

CLICK HERE TO POST A COMMENT

Add your Comment All posts are sent to the administrator for review and are published only after approval. ArabianBusiness.com reserves the right to remove any comment at any time for any reason. Please keep your responses appropriate and on topic.
Name *
Remember me on this computer
Email *	(Your email address will not be published)
City
Country
Subject *
Comment *
Notify me of further comments
Security Code *
Please click post only once - your comment will not be published immediately.