Why IoT Is Godsend For The Oil And Gas Industry?

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The Oil and Gas industry is unique in number of ways. First, it involves extraction of resources from some of the most remote areas of the world. As global demand for oil and gas expands, companies in the sector are increasingly looking for oil reserves in remote and often dangerous environments. Given the complex, resource heavy and expensive operations involved, there is considerable scope for IT to help improve efficiency and productivity and output.

According to Cisco report from April 2015, in a survey of oil and gas leaders, respondents named “operational efficiency of existing projects” and “maintenance of assets and infrastructure” as the top two areas of increased investment over the next 24 months. An important aspect of maximizing operational efficiency in the oil and gas sector is that companies must harness the large volume of data generated to draw useful insights and improve decision making. And IoT adoption is an important step in this direction.

Given the impact that Oil and Gas prices have on global economy, Oxford Economics predicts that IoE adoption by the Oil and Gas industry has the potential to increase global GDP by up to 0.8 percent—or $816 billion—by 2025.

Some companies, such as Rockwell Automation, are already leading the way when it comes to effective adoption of IoT in the Oil and Gas sector. Using the power of IoT and Microsoft Azure platform, HARMAN Connected Services helped Rockwell Automation to achieve the following objectives

Real-time insight, predictive analytics and preventive maintenance
A series of smart sensors are used to relay data to a command center through a control gateway and Microsoft Azure platform. These sensors provide real-time information on the equipment’s performance and health — pressure, temperature, flow rates and multitudes of other variables, which helps identify and fix problems in real time.

Seamless Supply Chain
Lease Automatic Custody Transfer solutions with sensors using Microsoft Azure help in predictive maintenance of the equipment and ensure that the product being transferred is validated and immediate electronic invoicing is commenced.

Smart Fuel Delivery
As part of the solution, we connected large trucks which run on Liquid Natural Gas and cloud-enabled the new pumps across America. The real-time data from hundreds of sensors is collected and stored, thereby allowing stakeholders across the supply chain to perform their function more efficiently.

As the number of connected devices increases, the scope for collecting relevant data that translates to useful insights for the Oil and Gas industry is also set to increase. This article in Rigzone says that the number of devices with cellular or satellite connectivity deployed in oil and gas applications around the world was 423,000 at the end of 2013, and will rise by 21.4 percent to 1.12 million by 2018, according to Berg insight, an analyst firm focused on the M2M market.