AIR & WATER

MONITORING NEWSLETTER  

March 2013
No. 401

Wireless Sensor Networks Enhance Remote Condition Monitoring

The challenge of condition monitoring is complex when one considers that oil exploration interests tend to move to harsh areas, such as the deep water fields off West African coasts or the prolific fields in Angola and Nigeria. How to collect and transport data coming from these remote and even hazardous environments? Gianni Minetti, writing in Pipeline & Gas Journal analyzed the advantages of wireless sensor networks.

In many cases, wired infrastructures are already in place, and companies are unlikely to upgrade the network or add new data points because of their expensive costs. In a typical oil or gas facility, thousands of sensors and data points are needed to ensure a proper asset monitoring, with hundreds of kilometers of cables used to connect these devices — if one calculates that a new offshore platform has approximately 800 km of wiring and that cable costs alone may vary from US$120 to 6000 per meter, it is easy to understand why oil and gas companies are eager to protect their past investments and are not open to possible alternatives.

Wired process and sensor networks may prevent companies from successfully facing emerging challenges such as market demands or regulatory changes which require more performance and efficiency by increasing data collection frequency or installing additional data points (i.e., to monitor emissions or new security parameters).

Wireless sensor networks offer oil and gas companies immediate and measurable benefits, including improved performance, greater flexibility and reduced costs for installation and on-going maintenance. Wireless data acquisition and transmission allow companies to have deeper, more granular and accurate information from production assets, therefore enabling effective plant monitoring and supporting real-time decisions thanks to the possibility to feed all data directly into corporate ICT systems.

A wireless technology project can cost up to 50-70 percent less than the wired option — considering hardware/material costs, engineering, installation and global administration and management; in addition, several benefits are interesting to highlight:  increased operational reliability and system uptime, increased operator and engineer productivity, improved asset utilization, personnel safety and many others.

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