With a growing number of companies under scrutiny from investors and the community, the oil and gas industry has been one of the leading sectors to implement measures that aim to improve and increase transparency of operations.
Oil and gas operators have a significant amount of critical equipment which needs to be monitored and analysed to comply with regulatory requirements, and to identify problems that could risk the safety of workers, cause damage to the environment, result in loss of product, and as a result, lead to unplanned downtime.
In recent times, advanced sensor technologies have assisted the industry to monitor various parameters such as the temperature, pressure and flow of critical equipment in real-time.
This has enabled operators to quickly gain insight into equipment performance to identify and rectify issues before they worsen and cause major consequences. Furthermore, technologies are also assisting business decision-makers to reveal and predict trends to improve current and future operations.
Sensors are placed at different locations to measure and gather data about plant performance and the operational environment. Sensors can differ by type (e.g. gas sensor, temperature sensor, ultrasonic sensor, pressure sensor, flow sensor, level sensor) and by connectivity (e.g. wired or wireless), among other things.
Many oil and gas operators have already used sensors for many years, but the application of sensors and associated technologies is predicted to grow in the coming years. According to a report by Mordor Intelligence, the use of sensors in the oil and gas industry is forecast to increase by 6.54 per cent annually between 2020 and 2025.
The oil and gas sector is renowned for being at the forefront of technology employment, but there are some companies that are leading the pack in applying monitoring, analysis and other technologies to advance their oil and gas operations.
ExxonMobil tests new monitoring technologies
In April 2020, ExxonMobil commenced field trials of eight emerging technologies at nearly 1,000 sites in Texas and New Mexico with the aim to further reduce the company’s methane emissions.
The field tests will evaluate the effectiveness and scalability of a range of next-generation monitoring, measuring and detection technologies that in addition to satellites, use drones, planes, helicopters, ground-based mobile and fixed-position sensors.
All technologies and deployment methods will be used to detect leaks and identify potential solutions that can be shared with other oil and gas operators.
The technologies will be validated by a combination of field observations, optical gas imaging cameras and portable methane detection instruments.
ExxonMobil is also comparing measurements to downwind emissions observations using technology that enables an all-inclusive measurement of site emissions.
Staale Gjervik, senior vice president of unconventional at ExxonMobil said the company is already seeing the benefits of some of these technologies.
“Through the trials, we have discovered methane sources that would otherwise not have been detected as efficiently or quickly under the current methods prescribed by regulations. The company is committed to immediately investigating and fixing methane emissions that are detected during the trial.”
The field trials build upon ExxonMobil’s previously announced emission reduction initiatives. As of year-end 2019, the company has reduced emissions by nearly 20 per cent in its U.S. unconventional operations compared to 2016 levels, and the company remains on track to meet its corporate-wide commitments to reduce methane emissions by 15 per cent and reduce flaring by 25 per cent by year-end 2020.
Woodside develops smart sensors for equipment
From the first LNG plant in the southern hemisphere, to the world’s largest not-normally crewed offshore platform, Woodside is advancing the company’s use of technology.
During his speech at the 2018 APPEA Conference in Adelaide, CEO and Managing Director of Woodside, Peter Coleman, highlighted that the company’s facilities will continue to be designed and developed to allow for the capture, transmission and analysis of data.
“We are not giving our plants a mere facelift – we intend to install a whole new data-driven nerve system,” Mr Coleman said at the time.
He detailed that Woodside’s smart sensors (12 cm x 7 cm magnetic devices), can sense and transmit data about how equipment is performing.
“The smart sensors started as a tech project, exploring the potential for wireless data-streaming, but the team very quickly went out to our facilities to ask what problem needed solving. The answer came back that we wanted to improve monitoring of machine health,” Mr Coleman said.
“The sensors can detect and identify problems with a machine’s performance by a change in vibrations and temperature. That data can be updated continually. With the right algorithms, we can analyse it and improve how our facilities operate,” he detailed.
The development of the sensors builds on previous work with the CSIRO on wireless technology. In a speech at the American Chamber of Commerce in Australia in July 2019, Meg O’Neill, Woodside’s Chief Operations Officer revealed that the company had deployed 120 of the smart sensors to a trial site, namely the Pluto facility, to constantly monitor and relay real-time data concerning the plant’s performance.
She shared that the smart sensors provide a wealth of data that have not previously been available at such a high frequency and fidelity.
“In fact, there is so much data that operators are not physically able to review it all, so we are drawing on analytics from data science to process and understand it,” she commented.
Furthermore, Woodside also needed a tool to visualise the data, which led to the creation of a 4D ‘digital twin’ of the site.
“It’s a spatially referenced virtual replica of our facilities with embedded real-time data analytics related to conditions and performance.”
Sources: Sensors in Oil and Gas Market – Growth, Trends, and Forecast (2020 – 2025), Mordor Intelligence; Oil and Gas Process Monitoring through Wireless Sensor Networks: A Survey, Achonu Adejo et al.
