The Reality of RFID

At the drilling sites, Nabors' field workers use handheld interrogators that connect to a back-end server via satellite communications.

The tags are encased in protective plastic.

Drilling Companies and RFID

The successful land-drilling product and services provider, Nabors Canada is going to install passive high-frequency tags on its oil rigs, to help it track equipment and manage inspection and certification procedures.

The Nabors Canada is employing RFID technology to help it maintain and manage the equipment on its drill rigs, located at oil and gas wells across Canada. With this technology Nabors Canada's management can know where its assets are at any particular time, as well as whether they have been maintained and inspected, and when.

The system resolves a labor-intensive problem of tracking the locations, conditions and histories of hundreds of assets at remote sites. Most items, such as generators, pumps and motors installed on oil-drilling rigs, are tracked through paperwork filled out by crews at the drilling site, then manually transferred into Nabors' database at its office. Management is typically then provided with weekly or daily reports regarding the assets, based on the paper-based records. That system would give his company electronic records pertaining to the location, inspection and certification history of each piece of equipment, in real time. So the transparency inside the company will be ensured and the security will be increased.

A typical oil rig has an average of a hundred items that need to be maintained and handled. Tracking all of those assets on each of 86 different drilling rigs across Canada is a difficult task for all oil companies. Assets can be moved from rig to rig, from a rig to a different part of the drill yard, or from one drill yard to another. The assets regularly end up missing, a result of their being misplaced or stolen, and are eventually written off and replaced. In addition, the equipment often needs to be inspected, and sometimes certified which require some recording. In this part, the RFID can help a lot by increasing the efficiency inside the company.

Resource: http://www.rfidjournal.com/article/print/5002

Gas, oil and chemical companies move towards RFID

Oil, gas and chemical companies are trying to to develop a common approach and standards for deploying RFID across the industries. The technology proves a huge efficiency and safety, even more transparency for the companies.

Hundreds of offshore rigs situated in the Gulf of Mexico, the North Sea, the Persian Gulf and other bodies of water to keep the world supplied with energy. The rigs are like industrial towns at sea that house the workers and the myriad items they need to live there, as well as the tools and equipment required to drill wells in the ocean floor, extract oil or natural gas, and transport the product back to shore. It can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars per day to operate each rig. If one essential part breaks or is misplaced and no replacement arrives in the next regularly scheduled ferry container shipment, a rig can be forced to halt production.

As a result, companies sometimes have to hire helicopters to transport just one item out to a rig, at a cost of several thousand dollars per trip.

The rigs operating 24 hours a day is one reason many leading-edge drill and exploration companies are deploying RFID to track products from their distribution centers in Louisiana seaports, which service 90 percent of the Gulf of Mexico's oil production, to various deep-sea and inland oil platforms. RFID can ensure that the right containers stocked with the correct supplies—from toilet paper and soap to pumps and tools—are sent to the designated rigs. In addition, the U.S. government requires a manifest be created for each shipment and container delivered to these platforms, something RFID technology can generate automatically.

Source: http://www.rfidjournal.com/article/purchase/7236