If any manufacturing sector could be expected to eagerly embrace the new breed of industrial wireless networking devices now coming to market, it would be oil and gas producers and manufacturers. After all, these companies must monitor and maintain equipment in remote, often hazardous locations. Using wireless technology — specifically wireless sensor networks (WSNs) — would seem to be a perfect alternative to the cost of running wires or monitoring equipment manually.
Yet, although applications abound where WSNs could help the industry lower costs and improve productivity, oil and gas manufacturers have been surprisingly slow to deploy the new generation of wireless technology, experts say. That reluctance is expected to abate over time, but not before vendors can prove the reliability of the new wireless networking technologies and finalize WSN technology standards.
"As of today, wireless technology does not really have a market in the oil and gas industry," says Stefan Bakenhus, oil and gas product line leader for GE Energy's Bently Nevada Asset Condition Monitoring product line. "There is a guarded attitude among oil and gas companies toward wireless network technology. We are talking about applying this technology in very dangerous, hazardous environments. While oil and gas companies are wary about adopting wireless-enabled technology, everyone understands that it has huge potential."
Indeed, some oil and gas manufacturers are beginning to appreciate the potential of wireless. At Chevron, for instance, where wireless has been used in process monitoring and control for decades, the emergence of the new breed of industrially hardened wireless sensor network devices and systems being introduced by industry leaders such as Invensys, Emerson Process Management, Honeywell Process Solutions, and GE has the oil giant exploring new ways to apply wireless technology to its upstream and extraction-related processes.
"The meaning of wireless is changing," says Greg LaFramboise, staff engineer at Chevron, the second-largest integrated energy company in the world. "A decade ago, wireless sensors appeared on the market with mixed results. Those devices did not perform as anticipated and were subsequently abandoned. We attribute some of this failure to a lack of standards for these types of devices. Today, the meaning of wireless within the context of the oil and gas industry's process control applications is wireless sensors."
WSNs promise to make it easier for Chevron to take measurements and gather data in remote locations, LaFramboise says. Specifically, he sees wireless sensors being applied in challenging and costly applications, such as monitoring heat exchangers. He also sees WSNs' potential use in video imaging for recording intrusion detection within land-based facilities and offshore production and processing platforms.
While Chevron has its eye on many new WSN applications, the company currently deploys only a few. WSNs are in use in temporary installations to monitor equipment performance, thereby replacing the cumbersome chore of collecting data manually. Chevron also uses WSNs to monitor the physical location of personnel in hazardous areas and during hazardous operations, according to LaFramboise. Additionally, WSNs are helping to monitor vibration and temperature on rotating equipment.
The company, however, will likely deploy more WSNs after the much-anticipated ISA 100 Wireless Standard is released later this year. (For more on ISA100, see sidebar.)
"Chevron is developing uses for wireless technology that are difficult to conceive of at this point," LaFramboise says. "Many types of measurement applications are currently overlooked due to the difficulty of installing wired devices. Wireless sensors offer the possibility of completing an installation in a fraction of the time and with fewer people. The application of wireless sensor network technology will likely snowball, especially once wireless sensor network standards are well-established."
Application Gusher
LaFramboise isn't the only one who expects oil and gas companies to embrace WSNs eventually. "The advent of wireless LANs and wireless technology that functions at speeds often 100 times faster than dial-up creates new possibilities for oil and gas companies to do something new, innovative, and different, while encouraging lower cost and increased safety," says Dick Caro, CEO for CMC Associates, a consulting firm that plans wired and wireless networks for data communications.
In fact, potential wireless applications in the oil and gas industry are many, and include monitoring wellheads, machine health, and pipeline integrity, experts say.
"In the U.S., where there are nearly half a million low-producing 'stripper wells,' it is important to maximize the output of a well before closing it down," says Mareca Hatler, director of research/senior market analyst for ON World, a firm specializing in emerging wireless research. "Oil companies have a much better chance of extending a well's life and optimizing its output by monitoring the wellhead for things such as pressure, flow, and temperature." Wired solutions are often too expensive to install and, therefore, are not widely used in these cases, Hatler says, adding that pipeline integrity monitoring is often done manually.
"Instead, WSNs are being used to monitor these wells continuously. Machine health monitoring, for instance, improves the management of such assets as pumps and motors, and enables these companies to replace equipment before it fails, which helps prevent unplanned equipment downtime," she says.
Hatler also envisions oil companies using WSNs in seismic surveys. "Again, this replaces the expensive and cumbersome wires and enables geologists to install more sensing points more easily, which increases the resolution of their survey and, thus, its effectiveness," she says.
There are more potentially significant applications. For instance, Hesh Kagan, strategic technology director at Invensys Process Systems, expects oil and gas companies to use wireless solutions for their mobile workforces, providing employees in the field with secure roaming access to real-time control systems.
Another potentially huge application for wireless technology in the oil and gas industry is in personnel safety, according to Kagan. "WSNs provide practical and cost-effective means to accurately identify the physical location of personnel in real time, notify first responders of safety shower activation, provide 'man-down' notification for emergency services, and perform remote evacuation alarming to help safeguard employees and visitors and ease compliance and regulatory requirements," he says.
Jeff Becker, director of global wireless business for Honeywell Process Solutions, sees wireless applications falling into three primary categories: safety, equipment reliability, and efficiency. "Oil and gas customers also have expressed interest in using wireless devices as a mechanism for monitoring existing safety systems, such as eyewash stations and safety showers," he says.
The monitoring of eyewash stations and safety showers is a perennial problem for oil and gas companies — something many WSN suppliers have latched onto as a "gateway" application for their wireless solutions. CMC's Caro explains, "WSNs are able to closely monitor when a safety shower is used. In the past, in the event of an oil spill, the person using the safety shower was supposed to report its usage. The problem was that its use was often not reported. They washed off the oil and said, 'That's good enough.' Today, using wireless sensors, oil companies can monitor the occurrence and, before the person can get out of the safety shower area, the use of the equipment has been reported."
Lingering Doubts
Yet, even as safety showers and eyewash stations are readily fitted with WSNs, there is still work to be done before the oil and gas industry will fully embrace wireless. One obstacle that remains is lingering questions about data reliability.
"There have been innovations to improve data reliability, such as a wireless mesh network that gets rid of the single point of failure," ON World's Hatler says. "The challenge for wireless mesh systems is that these can get complex. Because they need to send and receive data, they consume more power, and because these are often battery-powered devices, the battery life can suffer. The latter is not usually an issue for the types of applications WSNs are targeting because WSN devices do not need to send and receive data very often, and therefore, they conserve power."
Upcoming standards such as ISA100 cover data reliability. But until data reliability is fully addressed and the standard fully implemented, it's likely that many oil and gas manufacturers will hold off on aggressively embracing WSNs, experts say. But that day is not far off, wireless suppliers say, particularly with industrial wireless standards on the way.
"We are sort of at this tipping point now," says Robert Shear, director of market development for Dust Networks, a leader in standards-based intelligent wireless sensor networks. "Certain oil and gas companies are pushing forward aggressively, while others are holding back."